The Traitors Creator Shares Surprising Inspiration For The Hit Show

The Traitors is undoubtedly the watercooler show of the 2020s.

Very few, if any, TV series have united the nation like the turret backstabbing, explosive roundtables and chaotic missions that The Traitors has delivered over the last four seasons.

While it’s now a hit around the world, The Traitors was originally masterminded by the Dutch TV executive Marc Pos, who explained the show’s surprising origins in a new interview with The Telegraph.

He revealed that he was initially inspired to create the show after reading about Batavia, an infamous 1628 Dutch ship that wrecked off Australia, leading to a brutal mutiny.

The real-life maritime horror saw the crew split into rival factions after the ship crashed, with the crew turning on each other after tensions grew.

“It raised a lot of questions. [Like] who can you still trust? And how?” he said.

He noted that the Batavia story was characterised by “fear and betrayal and the need for certainty”, a universal feeling that has now resonated with many viewers around the world.

Inspired by this slice of Dutch history, Pos originally envisaged the show as a series called The Mutineers. He thought the show would be filmed on a ship rather than a castle, where the eliminated would be pushed overboard.

Getting his idea off the ground was not easy for Pos, who revealed that Dutch broadcasters rejected it “30 or 40 times” before he finally got a yes.

Ultimately, the show made its way to Dutch TV in 2021, a year before it debuted in the UK, in the format we know and love.

“Maybe I was too early in 2015 about treason and who you can trust,” he remarked. “[The events of] 2020 and Covid helped. I think a format about trust and treason was in the zeitgeist, and that gave us the wind at our back.”

Pos is still heavily involved in the international versions of The Traitors. He wrote a “bible” explaining how to execute a perfect game.

“As a creative, you have to give the freedom to other producers to do it in their own way, still in the bounds of what the bible said, but there was quite some room to create your own Traitors,” he explained.

The key to The Traitors’ success, Pos has claimed, is that the contestants are fully sealed off from the outside world. “It’s not a game. It’s a carefully created bubble, a concentrated version of the world we live in today, with peer pressure, framing, moral doubt,” Pos said.

“And the question: who do you let in and who do you exclude? The bubble shows us something, not only about others, I always say, but especially about ourselves,” he added.

The Traitors is clearly a winning format for the BBC, with a peak of 9.6 million people tuning in to the recent season four finale.

If you’re already missing your nightly fix, The Traitors Ireland is currently airing on the BBC with a second series of The Celebrity Traitors coming later in the year.