The BBC’s hit game show “The Traitors” returned to British screens last week, with a new cast of contestants and some tweaks to the format that the show’s producers hope will keep audiences interested for a second season.

The first series of the game show was “spectacularly successful”, said the i news site, winning a National Television Award and two Baftas, and was watched more than 34 million times on iPlayer. 

It is the “best reality show on TV”, the newspaper said, but with new contestants now “wise to the game”, the show “has an uphill battle on its hands”.

‘A glorified game of wink murder’

The first series of “The Traitors” was a “word-of-mouth hit” that “sounded ropey on paper”, said The Telegraph. Effectively it is a glorified game of “wink murder”, where “faithful” contestants aim to vote out the unknown “traitors” in their midst before they themselves are murdered, all in the hope of taking home a cash prize at the end.

The format proved to be “insanely entertaining”, the newspaper said – so much so that even its host Claudia Winkleman had told the BBC, “Let’s not do another,” because series one was, in her view, so perfect.

At its heart, this is merely a “child’s game”, said the New Statesman, “and yet ‘The Traitors’ is good – so good – full of betrayal, revelation and bitchiness, despite such low stakes”.

As to why it is so addictive, “perhaps” it is “because the viewer is given smug omniscience – we know who the Traitors are, and we watch, god-like, popcorn in hand, as chaos blooms in their wake”, the magazine said.

For The Guardian, the show is “superlative TV”, which has “single-handedly given the increasingly cynical and tired reality genre a new lease of life”. It is “so thrilling it will make you gasp and yelp”.

‘Truly great reality TV’

In 2022, the nation became “gripped” by what amounted to an “illuminating experiment in the psychology of fear, group delusion, suggestion, confirmation bias, self-preservation and duplicity”, said Rolling Stone.

Consequently, “The Traitors” series 2 has “a lot to live up to”, said Digital Spy. But “with anticipation comes the potential for disappointment.”

Despite this, the reviews so far are good and the BBC seems to have got things right, the site added. “From the casting of even more genuinely interesting people… to Claudia Winkleman’s wit and rollneck jumpers, season two’s premiere felt comfortingly familiar for fans of the series”.

Yet producers have been smart enough to make some changes to the original format.

“You think you know how this game works,” Winkleman tells the season two line-up in the first episode. “You don’t.”

Changes this time around include more “immunity” shields being offered in each of the show’s elaborate challenges, which give players protection from being murdered. 

There are also other tweaks, such as Faithfuls not knowing how many traitors are in their midst and the recruitment of a fourth traitor on the very first night, whose identity is kept secret from the audience.

The subsequent suspense is “so well engineered”, The Guardian said, that when the episode ends just as the fourth traitor is about to lift their hood, “I let out an involuntary yelp of frustration”.

The list of achievements of season 2 is so great, the paper concluded, that it “heralds a new entry in the canon of truly great reality TV”.