Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Euan Cherry/Peacock

When we think of the great anti-heros of television, the mind immediately goes to the likes of Tony Soprano, Walter White, and Carrie Bradshaw. After 2023, there is someone else we need to add to the list: Kate Chastain, the star of Peacock’s breakout reality show The Traitors. While it’s the ultimate reality-television cliché for a contestant to say, “I’m not here to make friends,” Kate wasn’t even pretending to be nice. Through her bickering and sabotaging, she became something better than a traitor, a faithful, and a reality star: She became our hero.

When we think about those fictional anti-heroes, we think of people who are part of a system — capitalism or heterosexual monogamous dating, for example — that they’re undermining and exploiting with their antisocial behavior. Because these are faulty constructs that drive us all toward villainy, these characters become our heroes. Kate is following this anti-hero’s journey, but the system she’s taking apart like a bad Lego model is reality television — and she does it by questioning the validity of the game. The Traitors featured ten reality stars and ten Muggles (i.e., normal people) trying to figure out who among them is a faithful and who is one of the three traitors. It’s basically the party game Mafia, if you were attending a party in a Scottish castle where Alan Cumming is running around in a series of berets. Kate agreed to participate without knowing anything about the game becaus she wanted to dress up. “To be completely honest with you, I was so desperate to be able to be on a show where I wasn’t wearing a polyester polo,” she told Vulture. “I wanted to wear my own clothes.”

Her season-long fit of pique was especially odd because Chastain is no stranger to the reality-television arts and sciences. She endured six seasons of catering to rich yahoos as a chief stewardess on Bravo’s Below Deck. She became a fan favorite for her bitchy quips in confessionals, her dismissive demeanor toward her co-workers/castmates, and showing a professional face to the guest but talking shit about them as soon as she turned the corner. She was a lovable villain; when she sculpted a blanket into a phallic “rocket ship” to annoy a rude guest, we all cheered. Even though she almost lost her job, she still played by the rules enough that she could keep using the platform of reality television for her own ends.

That all changed on The Traitors. Chastain had no interest in being on the show or keeping her negative opinions of the other cast members to herself. She detested parts of the game and those playing it so much that she was literally throwing barrels’ worth of money for the group prize pot off the side of the road because she didn’t feel like carrying them. And somehow wound up going far in the game and almost won the whole thing.

Her rampage of terror started after her only ally, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’ Brandi Glanville — who figured out the traitors within minutes — faced an early elimination. Kate was without a friend and focused her attention on something else: taking down her archnemesis, former Big Brother winner Rachel Reilly. After all, what is a Walter White without a Gus Fring? This, however, was not a rivalry of equals. While Rachel made fun of Kate’s gameplay, Kate joked that Rachel’s outfits were chosen from a community-theater costume collection. When Rachel joked about filming a scary movie, Kate asked if it was her honeymoon. Finally, it came down to a vote between Kate and Rachel. Kate said, “I don’t care if you’re a traitor; I find you offensive and you have to go.” Kate was wrong about Rachel being a traitor, but she didn’t care, and neither did we! We were too busy laughing at home and wondering how this game — how the whole genre — could contain a person like her when she held it in so much contempt.

Turns out it worked in her favor. Kate was so honest about not wanting to be there, about hating her cohorts, about sabotaging all of the challenges that it became clear that she was obviously not a traitor, which resulted in everyone refusing to waste their vote on her no matter how much she pleaded. There was one scene by the firepit where reviled former Bachelor Arie Luyendyk told Kate she was a cancer in the group. She immediately shot back, “What about the traitors who are murdering you and taking your money?” Snap!

One could look at Kate’s behavior in the game and see a reality TV villain; a villain would have behaved similarly to exploit a loophole in the format to advance their game or eliminate a foe with the sole purpose of winning. Think of the Omarosas, the New Yorks, the Lisa Rinnas, the Russell Hantzes. But a villain’s desire to conquer ultimately reveals a belief in and a furthering of the project no matter how faulty or unfair it is. In fact, they typically revel in the game’s easily exploitable inequity. One could argue this was Kate’s way on Below Deck. But on The Traitors, Kate didn’t want to win. She wanted out. “I saw the game was much more difficult than I expected — and also I saw that the other contestants were just as bad at this as I was. The realization that that prize money was probably never going to be mine settled in, and I started playing a new game, which was How can I get out of here?” Kate said.

Usually it seems like everyone wants to be on reality television, and the truth is that there are enough shows for those who want it bad enough to find a berth somewhere. But in 2023, we saw people enter the reality TV machine and short-circuit it with their refusal to participate. On the The Real Housewives of New York City reboot, fashion icon Jenna Lyons didn’t run toward the fight like anyone else in Andy Cohen’s contact list; she hid in her room and chose to work. Her fellow Housewife Mary Cosby, from the Salt Lake City outpost, would rather go through a McDonald’s drive-through in a Sprinter van than go on a group activity on a girl’s trip. If a Housewife won’t engage in drama or the activities producers have planned for them, what is the point? If women have a choice to opt out, why aren’t all of them? If they’re not a real group of friends, what should we even believe?

On Selling Sunset, Chrishell Stause refused to show up to events she didn’t want to attend and told castmates that she does not have to treat the other Realtors at the Oppenheim Group as her family. They are co-workers, that’s it, and she doesn’t want to play their petty reindeer games. (She still dressed like a Bratz doll like the rest of the crew, however.) Over in competetive reality, Hannah Rose was the first person voted off of the 45th season of Survivor after she told her tribe Survivor wasn’t for her: She wanted to go home, sleep in a bed, and smoke a cigarette. Jeff Probst is always getting people to shout about how they dreamed their whole lives about being on Survivor, and here is someone saying, “Know what? It kinda sucks.” I appreciate Hannah’s honesty, which is something that we don’t often see in a genre with “real” in the title.

But of all of these people, Kate was by far the best. She was the funniest and the most extreme. She became an audience surrogate for all of us haters, all of us nonparticipants, all of us who get suckered into going to karaoke night or the corporate retreat with trust falls and have to suppress our eye rolls. We’re more than two decades into the reality-television revolution and we’ve seen just about everything, but we have never seen someone turn down the promise of reality as full-throated as Kate. Who knew that “Get me out of here” would be the one phrase that could somehow make reality even more real.