If hearing the definition “reality show” makes you feel nauseous, then The Traitors Italy it’s – surprise! – just the reality show for you. While on other networks, the generalist ones, the focus has been on for years now Big Brothers various who have saturated the public with their dynamics (farces) always the same, Prime Video brings to Italy a product with international success that represents a novelty in the sector. And which, especially in our country, restores new dignity to a genre that seemed dead and buried forever under tons of earth and a single, hasty label: that of trashy.

How The Traitors works

The use of the gloomy metaphor is no coincidence. Set in the gothic and sinister atmosphere of a castle in Trentino, The Traitors is a part psychological reality game and a part high-voltage mystery, with enjoyable vibes of a psychological thriller and black humor, which confines 14 famous people to this corner of the world, from Paola Barale to Filippo Bisciglia, from Rocco Tanica to Aurora Ramazzotti, with the hosting of Alessia Marcuzzi. Here the mechanism is delightfully ruthless: three of them are “traitors”, while all the others in the group are “loyal”; the former have the task of eliminating the latter, and vice versa; the murders, needless to say, take place when darkness falls. And this is how a ferocious vortex of lies, strategies and psychological manipulations, in attack or defense, begins, which each person reserves for the next to save their skin dearly: no one trusts anyone anymore, but the goal is to take home the prize money. The result is that, faced with yet another lie, even the spectator ends up paranoid.

Because The Traitors is the last true reality show

And so, while on Canale 5 the various Big Brothers now desperately chase a lost authenticity, seeking it in competitors who are now very skilled in handling the worn-out “little manual of television dynamics” – between loves, quarrels and various pleasantries – here, at The Traitors, the rules are overturned and authenticity is finally rediscovered. Here, in fact, the competitors are not forcibly asked to be themselves – that damned “sexism” that has ruined this country – but rather they are asked to do the opposite, that is, to strategize: and it is – surprise! – it is precisely in the ability to lie and deceive others that the true face of each person emerges. It is precisely in the pressure dictated by the survival instinct that what is most true in us comes to light: our vulnerabilities, and at the same time, the snake that lives inside us (right, very ruthless Giuseppe Giofrè?). And then, after all, The Traitors asks the contestants to do what human beings do best, that is, what they do with the most gusto: doubting others.

An impeccable cast. Alessia Marcuzzi: “The heaviest moment? When we staged a funeral”

In addition, however, to the voyeuristic taste of finding the snake that lurks inside the characters of the show, The Traitors also has other elements that place it a step above the average (“Prime Video money?”, you might ask. Well yes, perhaps, but it is still well spent). First of all the impeccable cast – we haven’t seen one so centered since the first “Lol”, then the authorial construction which follows that of the series crimein a crescendo of kaleidoscopic tension. And yet a cinema-like scenography, including coffins, crows on the castle and hearses. “The heaviest moment? It was when we staged a funeral”, said, not surprisingly, Alessia Marcuzzi, a presenter who courageously lent herself to a type of dark humor to which, in Italy, we are not exactly accustomed. A choice, that of the Roman presenter, which proved to be correct: the experimental role of the ruthless castellan – so far from the empathetic guise with which she has always presented herself on TV – succeeded her perfectly, also giving her back that light of modernity which had always characterized her career (and which lately, among the hoary heads of Such and Which Show, he was a little lost). The Traitors, moreover, arrives after an initial experiment by Prime Video with “Roast in Peace”, the format that staged celebrity funerals: an interesting idea, but with a less successful result.