Cue dramatic opening music, sweeping camera shots, a host appears…
I don’t watch much “live” TV. The Great British Bake Off if the exception. Becca has said she is going to watch the upcoming Celebrity Traitors (largely for the ‘water cooler’ chat at her work).
I will not be watching.
Don’t get me wrong I like the idea behind the show, and there will be some people I’ve actually heard of as well —when is a celebrity, not a celebrity?— it’s just the format of these shows I don’t enjoy.
Now, I should probably confess that I’ve never seen Traitors in any disguise, but I’ve seen enough of the trailers to guess that it’ll be similar to other such (loosely) reality based, heavily over produced, game shows lite.
The formula for these types of shows is very similar.
Host briefly introduces the weekly recap.
Snippets from the past week are shown.
Host takes us through a specific incident.
Snippet of incident is shown.
Adverts.
Host briefly recaps again (because our brains can’t handle the 3 mins of non-Traitors content?).
Snippets from the past week are shown again (we must’ve forgotten them already, right?).
And then, after a few repeats of the above, we get to the ending.
Which, no matter the show…
Is always…
Always…
Strung out to build suspense.
For far.
FAR.
Too.
Long.
Ultimately these types of shows take 15-20 mins of what could be genuinely entertaining TV and churn them through the same dull, repetitive, formula.
I am not a fan.
Apparently millions of people are though so, whenever we do venture onto live TV and have to put up with in-channel advertising for such nonsense.
If you ARE a fan of the Traitors show, or it’s milieu, then I hope you have a wonderful time. I don’t want to yuck your yum in any way.
Anyway, don’t mind me, I’ll just be over there, watching The West Wing.
What are your thoughts?