The Best TV Shows to Watch After The Traitors

The Traitors US, The Traitors NZ, The Traitors Australia… and soon, Celebrity Traitors! If it’s TV shows similar to The Traitors you’re after now that series three of the UK version has ended, you don’t need to look further than the show’s international and spinoff versions.

In addition to that, you could opt for one of the many, many reality TV series with which The Traitors shares a good amount of DNA: Netflix’s The Mole, The Trust: A Game of Greed, and Korean series The Devil’s Plan; or long-running show The Challenge on Paramount+ UK, Prime Video’s House of Villains, and US-only shows The Hustler and Snake in the Grass.

Those are your route-one choices. For something that scratches that The Traitors itch while also standing alone as great TV, why not look further afield to the shows below?

The Jury: Murder Trial

Streaming on: Channel4.com

One for the strong-stomached. If the discomfort of watching Faithfuls seize on spurious “evidence” and use it to build cases against their fellow innocents is too much, then this might break you. If you’re fascinated by how people’s beliefs and convictions are swayed by argument, emotion, and group affiliation, then get watching.

Unlike The Traitors’ admin-based “murders”, The Jury: Murder Trial recreates a real-life case using court transcripts. It then sets two randomly assigned juries to work on the case, without either of them knowing about the other’s existence. Will they both reach the same verdict, or will they come to different conclusions and thereby explode our faith in the UK legal system? This four-part documentary series was a deserved ratings hit for Channel 4 that won critical acclaim and Best Docu-Series at the 2024 National Reality TV Awards, and it’s already been recommissioned for a second run.  

Derren Brown: The Experiments

Stream on: Pluto.tv

If the suggestibility of the human mind is what fascinates you about The Traitors, then you can get the same kick (and even more insight) from any of mentalist and illusionist Derren Brown’s specials – many of which are streaming on Channel4.com in the UK.

The Experiments was a 2011 four-part series in which Brown set up scenarios to answer lurid ‘what if?’ questions such as ‘can somebody be hypnotised into committing (a fake) murder?’; how do people behave when anonymous in a group?; can somebody be made to confess to a murder they didn’t commit?; and how far a community can be manipulated using superstition. Whatever conclusions are drawn, each hour makes for captivating viewing that gives you pause over whether any of us should be allowed our own bank accounts and the power to vote.

Heist

Stream on: Netflix

The moral quandaries of The Traitors contestants are some of its most fascinating viewing. How each player tries to justify their decisions, or qualify their backstabbing, paints a complex picture of human guilt, ego and conscience. This six-part Netflix documentary series, which revisits three real-life, big news heists and interviews the people who committed them, has all that and more.

With two episodes devoted to each of the three major thefts, their planning, execution and aftermath, Heist is a rounded look at why people transgress and the lengths to which they’ll go to end up on top. Read our review here.

Race Across the World

Stream on: BBC iPlayer

This one’s made by the same production company as The Traitors, which means it has the same excellent casting – better even, because with less than half as many contestants most of whom will make it to the finale, everybody has to carry more individual screentime. (There’s also a celebrity spinoff.)

The premise is simple: like The Amazing Race, teams of two have to navigate to various checkpoints around the globe, without phones, the internet or credit cards. Unlike The Amazing Race, the pairs aren’t allowed to travel by air. They have to choose their routes, diversions, where to stay, how to eat, and plan time out of travelling to work and earn money, all of which puts their relationships under an exposing amount of pressure. As well as the international backdrops and glimpses into different cultures, the relationships are what really works about this show. Just like The Traitors, it’s all about how their bonds are affected by gameplay.

Jury Duty

Stream on: Amazon Freevee (Prime Video)

This comedy-reality hybrid was one of 2023’s most entertaining and under-the-radar TV shows. Its premise – in which everybody apart from one person involved in making the show is in on a joke – may sounds exploitative, but it’s all done in such a good-natured, light-hearted way that it gets a pass.

From the producers of The Office US, and with a comedy cast that befits that show’s documentary styling, here’s the set-up: one guy thinks he’s on a real jury that’s being filmed for an educational documentary, everybody around him from his fellow jurors to the judge and legal teams, are actors improvising their way through some very silly scenarios. It’s sweet, it’s fun and it runs on The Traitors-style tongue-in-cheek humour. Read our review here.

Squid Game: The Challenge

Stream on: Netflix

Hands up who thought this was the worst, most obtuse commissioning decision ever taken? Squid Game is an anti-capitalist satire about the exploitation of the poor at the hands of the callous rich, in which contestants in a series of sick games are killed for real and pitted against each other until there’s one winner. Hey, thought a Netflix exec – let’s do that for real. (Well, not really for real seeing as nobody dies in the gameshow version of the South Korean streaming phenomenon, though judging from the lawsuit that followed, nobody had a good time making it.)

Squid Game: The Challenge was indeed a callous and obtuse commissioning move, as well as being one of total genius. As entertainment, it works, and nowhere better is The Traitors’ work-together-but-stab-each-other-in-the-back money-building mission dynamic better replicated on TV.

And If It’s Fiction You’re After…

Anatomy of a Fall – Guilt, remorse, lies and conscience all come under the microscope in this excellent Oscar-nominated film featuring courtroom scenes more gripping than The Traitors’ roundtables. Stream it on Prime Video.

Conclave – A sequestered group of cardinals must vote in rounds to elect one of their number as a new pope in this Oscar-nominated film, but is each of the candidates playing a fair game? Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Lawrence goes detective to find out. In cinemas now.

Mindhunter – David Fincher’s acclaimed Netflix series follows the FBI’s behavioural science unit trying to decipher what makes serial killers tick.

Showtrial – But did they do it? That’s the question these two standalone BBC series asks about accused murderers Talitha and Justin, whose interviews with their counsel gradually tell the real story. Stream on BBC iPlayer.

The Traitors series 3 is streaming now on BBC iPlayer in the UK.

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