AND’ The Traitors mania. Literally. The Prime-branded reality show captivated the public, thanks to a fascinating, compelling and explosive package. A unanimous approval, capable of traveling on the wings of a collective enthusiasm that often leads to hasty conclusions. Like the one according to which “The Traitors”, if broadcast on a generalist channel, would have been a sure and obvious success.

A sensational lie.

It’s the fault of hasty judgments transformed into qualified theses, which however leak on all sides. For the simple fact that between a television subject to a schedule organization and a platform there is an abyss, like day and night.

Not that “The Triators” isn’t the right path to take. Like “Money Road” and even before it “Beijing Express”, it redesigned the rules of the genre, archiving live broadcasts in the studio and moldy procedures such as surprises, emotional clips and interventions by family and friends.

The program conducted admirably by Alessia Marcuzzi (who thus redeems her last unsuccessful outings, including the one in Sanremo) must therefore be considered an achievement, an objective for those who have the ambition to excel in quality. But the plans should not be mixed up and confused.

Linear TV is subject to set times and a predefined chronology, while on-demand enjoys the concept of total anarchy, based on the idea of ​​a product to be devoured as you want and whenever you want.

You said nothing.

On on-demand there is no prime time, prime or late evening access. There is no obligation for the collective ritual, supplanted by the autonomous modality, generated by the individual will of the spectator, sovereign of himself.

“Big Brother” and “L’Isola”, however boiled they may appear, are called to cover prime time and extend into the night, because they are slaves to a ‘monster’ called Auditel. This implies grafts and spills that, in different situations, would willingly be set aside and to which “The Traitors” did not have to undergo.

How The Traitors would have fared on generalist TV

Let’s imagine the format available on Amazon on a hypothetical generalist. Let’s give it maximum brightness and place it on a flagship network. First of all: when would it start? Today around 10pm and, calculating a 50-60 minute episode with advertising breaks excluded, the shutters would have already been lowered at 11.15pm.

At that point the most instinctive solution would be that of a double appointment, thus breaking one of the characteristics of the platform, namely the limited duration.

Last year “La Talpa”, dusted off after years and courageously directed towards an innovative narrative, stumbled over precisely these obstacles, reaching the point of needlessly diluting episodes which, with difficulty, passed midnight.

In that case the start was set at 9.45pm, with “Striscia la notizia” at 14% as the driving force and not “La Ruota della Fortuna” at 25. In these conditions, how would our beloved “The Traitors” have behaved? Canale 5 would have found itself with a product that was the victim of a very weak ‘push’ with the deadline already set at 11pm.

Then there is solution number two, the most credible one, that is, the reality show broadcast on a secondary broadcaster, such as Rai 2 or Italia 1. With a ‘start’ at 9.30pm, “The Traitors” would impact head-on against “Ruota” and “Affari Tuoi”, with the obligatory trick of separating the first 20-25 minutes under the heading ‘preview’ to avoid damaging the average audience. However, little would change, because a large number of people would still be asked to tune in to the program only after the game show was over, with the result of having missed almost half of the episode. By doing so, who would stay tuned to a proposal that is already moving towards its epilogue?

Generalist TV only conceives the thesis of the ‘here and now’. There are no ‘recoveries’. The share judges you for what you give on the first release and the future of the entire project depends on that performance. Paradoxically, a “GF” that brings together 1.8 million curious people all together and at the same time is (rightly) labeled as a flop. On the contrary, a ‘title’ released on the platform can afford the luxury of accumulating this amount in weeks or months. Always as long as he reaches her.

In short, we are analyzing two different championships with the aim of using the same yardstick. The truth, unfortunately, is that “The Traitors”, broadcast on a free-to-air channel, would fail miserably. And more than due to the public’s responsibility, it would founder due to the thousand summary trials triggered by those who now praise it, but who basically wait at 10 in the morning just for a small number to send a broadcast to heaven or hell.

Finally, a further truth, as sacrosanct as the previous one: working on an invention for the generalist reality is much more difficult than doing it for a platform. You don’t just have to look for the right intuition, you also have to make it functional to the environment around you. And on-demand, in this sense, presents you with a prairie.