TV’s The Celebrity Traitors Finale: Spellbound by Lies

Spoiler Free Reflections on our Global Captivation with Deception and “Murder”

I’ve recently become obsessed with The Traitors, a TV show about suspicion, deception, betrayal, the “murder” of the faithful, and the unmasking of traitors. But beneath the entertainment lies something far deeper: a mirror to the human heart. Why do we love watching others lie? And what if the ultimate traitor isn’t in the castle at all, but within us?

UPDATE:  The January 2026 UK civilian series ended in an emotional climax which teaches us about how we make difficult choices. Watch or read Adrian talking about what we can learn:

The Traitors Season 4 UK Finale and Moral Reasoning

The Traitors Season 4 UK Finale and Moral Reasoning

Both the British and American versions of the show both take place in a Scottish castle heightening the sense of intrigue.But this is not just a highly entertaining TV game, it is prime-time moral theatre, exposing the nature of the human heart.

A massive 1 in 4 adults in the UK (14 million people) are currently watching The Celebrity Traitors, starring 19 UK celebrities some of whom are global treasures: Alan Carr, Stephen Fry, Charlotte Church, Celia Imrie, David Olusoga, Joe Marler, Joe Wilkinson, Jonathan Ross, Kate Garraway, Nick Mohammed, Niko Omilana, Paloma Faith, Clare Balding, Tameka Empson, Tom Daley, Ruth Codd, Mark Bonnar, Lucy Beaumont, and Cat Burns.

A nation eagerly awaits the season finale this Thursday. In an age where national TV events are rare, this is extraordinary.  Ratings have eclipsed even shows like I’m a Celebrity Get me Out of Here, and Strictly Come Dancing. Some viewers  overseas are so desperate to watch that they are ironically resorting to a minor act deception themselves, cloaking their IP address with a VPN to pretend they live in the UK. Fitting, perhaps, for a show built on lies.

Traitors has truly become a remarkable global cultural phenomenon which all started with the Dutch program, De Verraders. In the USA The Traitors is also taking off dramatically. The season 3 debut (January 2025) achieved almost 500 million minutes watched on Peacock in the week of January 6-12, making it the most-watched unscripted series in the U.S. that week. One reddit user says, “you should definitely watch as many versions as you can. I love this show! I’ve watched all the American ones, Australia, New Zealand, UK, and I’m now getting through Canada” They are even thinking of watching the non-English versions with subtitles!

As for me, I have only recently discovered this show.  I was so fascinated by watching the Celebrity version that I have now also watched all three previous British seasons.  I am probably going to watch the USA one next. I am even considering joining the condensed 2 hour version, Triators Live, in Covent Garden, London.

What is all the fuss about?

Accusations fly around and friends betray each other. Groupthink takes over, and almost unanimous votes sometimes occur on the flimsiest of “evidence”. Contestants are crushed to realize they were wrong yet again and have banished another faithful, and done the traitors work for them.  When they finally succeed in unmasking a traitor the joy is just as intense.

What fascinates me is how quickly contestants — traitors and faithful alike — forget it’s only a game. Although traitors are chosen almost randomly, players convince themselves that some are too nice to deceive while others “just can’t be trusted.” They make moral judgements of one another and fight passionately to persuade the group. The castle becomes a moral battlefield because, instinctively, the heart views all deception as evil.

The emotional reactions of the contestants are extreme. It is reassuring to hear they have access to private meetings with a psychologist whilst filming. They react positively in terms of loving the experience and bonding with other contestants, particularly in the daily “tasks” where they aim to win money as a team for the winnings pot. Some say it has been the best thing they have done in their whole lives.

But come the evening and the round table banishment discussion friends turn on each other in seconds. When some players come under scrutiny they react very strongly to not being trusted by their fellow players.

Tiny shreds of “evidence” are jumped on and often group think takes over and a player who to the viewers at home is obviously a faithful (it helps that we know already!) is verbally attacked by a mob.

Despite presumably watching previous shows in preparation every new contestant seems to believe they will be easily able to identify deceit in others and so be able to spot a traitor. Multiple studies since the 1950s have shown that most people can only detect a lie about 50% of the time, meaning they are no better at this than tossing a coin. Some become very upset when they discover how bad they are at spotting traitors. Often, I have found myself yelling at the screen “Its just a game!” Yet I can’t stop watching.

The Celebrity Traitors Trailer

“I can’t trust anyone here!”

Some players arrive determined not to be a traitor believing themselves to be by nature a true faithful. Others practically beg the hosts in the opening private interviews to pick them as they long for the permission to “be naughty” as one contestant put it.

Some traitors really struggle with the idea of lying to and “murdering” their fellow contestants at first. But most, given time, find they love it possibly a little too much. Some say certain “murders” leave a “sweet taste” in their mouths! One even seemed concerned about just how much they enjoyed the power to send people home and said “I’m a psychopath!”

It all has subtle hints of the Stanford Prison Experiment, but fortunately the game rules and forcing players into teamwork during the day prevents the hostility from getting truly awful.

I hope none of this has put you off as actually it all make for fascinating watching. Normally I don’t like reality TV or game shows but this has me hooked! No doubt it’s partly the psychiatrist that is still in me! That and my fascination with the human heart.

There’s something fascinating about being able to each people’s reactions and the varied ways that they deceive each other! As a viewer there’s real joy in picking your favorites that you root for and those, traitor or faithful that you want to go home.

As emotions flare on the screen, viewers at home often feel their own pulse quicken.  We are captivated by deceit because it also reflects something deeper in ourselves.

We love watching people lie because it feels safe.  It lets us project the darkness outward while staying comfortable on the sofa.  We think, I could spot that in a second.  But deception fascinates us precisely because it is familiar.

What The Traitors Reveals about the Human Heart

There is a thrill in trying to read other people’s motives.  The division the game makes between the faithful and traitors echoes our age-old tendency to “other” certain people. We imagine that humans are divided between nice and nasty,  loyal and treacherous, victim and oppressor, abused and abuser, holy and sinner.

Often we like to point the finger at an individual or group of people that we think are worse than us. Such biases whether unconscious or conscious are the root of tribalism, racism, sexism, and even war.  The Christian “just war” theory assumes that we are of course only fighting from pure motives to vanquish the oppressors who have no valid justification for war.  But the reality is rarely so black and white.

We are “hardwired” for suspicion and identifying those we think are deceiving us.  Watching The Traitors unfold from the safety of our sofa insulates us from the trauma whilst we get to enjoy the drama.  Because the viewers know who the traitors are we think “I could spot that instantly!” This risks us convincing ourselves even more that we are great at spotting lies in others.

One reasons for our fascination with this program is that our hearts have a secret yearning towards deception. Like the players we really don’t like being lied to and will often see that as the greatest form of betrayal. This is so clear in the reactions of some players to finding out someone they trusted as one of their “100% faithfuls” was a traitor.

Despite how much we hate being lied to, secretly we enjoy telling lies ourselves. Especially if it is only a game.

The Traitors is just a game. But it is a game that echoes a deep-seated reality in the human heart. We all love to think we are good faithfuls. But the truth is deep within even the most outwardly nice person lies the dark and deceitful heart of a traitor.

The Human Heart as the Ultimate Traitor

Our fascination with The Traitors shows that we still crave moral clarity.  We want to believe truth still matters.  Yet the show also reminds us that our intuition, emotion, and group loyalties fail us.  It is not simply that the world is full of liars; it is that the heart itself is a liar.

The greatest plot twist of the Bible is that the greatest traitor in the room is every human heart, yours and mine included.

In the last week a Bible verse that’s very relevant to this topic has come to my attention twice.

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9, ESV).

First I saw a Tweet which challenges our modern obsession with being “true to ourselves” It said “years and years of telling people to “follow their hearts” has produced a society that’s “desperately sick.”

Years and years of telling people to “follow their hearts” has produced a society that’s “desperately sick.”

Jeremiah 17:9
[9] The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?

— ���� ℂ��� �️ (@sola_chad) October 26, 2025

Then, in a John Newton letter I was updating, he skillfully dissected the meaning of this verse. He stated that the only route to true spiritual maturity is learning to recognize the full extent of the evil that is in our own human hearts.

“It is not necessary to commit obvious outward sin to learn what lies hidden in our hearts” John Newton

Jesus corrected his hearers concern about ritual contamination and shared his own diagnosis of the human heart:

“What comes out of a person is what defiles them. For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come — sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person” (Mark 7:20-23).

According to Jesus deceit is not an external contaminant but an internal sickness which every heart carries. The truth is we are all traitors. Traitors to each other but more than that to the God who made us. We fail to follow our makers instructions and as a result become more and more twisted. We deceive others because we have first believed the lie that we are pure.

There was only ever one true faithful human – Jesus Christ and yet he was betrayed not only by his traitorous disciple Judas but by the crowds who just one week before had been crying out “hosanna to the son of David” and waving palm branches as He entered Jerusalem. Now they cried out for Jesus’ blood. It wasn’t for a game of pretend murder or even for a sanitized “humane” execution but for the most gruesome, prolonged and painful way of torturing someone to death known to man. It’s no surprise the Romans were willing to do this to Jesus. But when the religious leaders of his own people turned traitor to Him it’s no wonder he wept over Jerusalem.

Jesus mission is to recruit traitors like you and me to become faithfuls. And he calls us to try and recruit others too. Meanwhile this treacherous world finds a ready echo in our treacherous hearts  as it tries to recruit us to be traitors or as one contestant put it “join the dark side”

Even as we grow in Christ each of us still harbors an inner Traitor whispering self-serving rationalizations.

Our biggest problem is deception.  I will examine the nature of our deceitful hearts in more detail in future posts. But for now I will end with how the Traitors demonstrates that lies affect us in four domains: our bodies, our minds, our relationships, and our spirits.

How Deception manifests itself in The Traitors – a Biopsychosocial-spiritual perspective

Biological In The Traitors, the body often betrays the heart.  Contestants are sometimes seen to physically sweat, tremble, and struggle to sleep.  It isn’t just the traitors this happens to, but sometimes a physical reaction or a fleeting emotion displayed on the face do betray them. Adrenaline dumps can also be misread as intuition, deceiving themselves.  Under stress, the nervous system becomes the first liar.  Science calls it the fight-or-flight response.

Psychological  Contestant’s  feelings and intuition disguises itself as truth.  A trembling voice or fleeting glance feels like proof.  Cleaver reasoning why a certain person must be a traitor is frequently revealed to be folly. Much of what we think is reasoning is actually just intuition, a “gut feeling” and it is very unreliable.

Social In this show, as in life, groupthink reigns.  One person makes an accusation and sparks a mob reaction.  At the round table belonging matters more than truth and often almost the whole group votes against the same innocent faithful. In the 1950’s a foundational social psychology experiment by Asch demonstrated,  75 percent of participants went along with an obviously false group view at least once. But in the daily tasks and going through this experience together creates deep emotional friendships among the contestants.

Spiritual Each player assumes a form of divine omniscience: I can read hearts. I know who’s guilty.  Yet only God sees truly what is inside our hearts.  Even we do not understand our own hearts.  The deepest deceit is self-deification — the illusion that we are our own judges.  The gospel invites us to the opposite position: confession, not accusation.

In that sense, The Traitors is more than entertainment; it’s a case study in the human condition.  The game exposes, in four dimensions, what grace must heal in all of us. In The Traitors, the story ends when deceivers are exposed.  In the gospel, the story begins when we recognize that we are traitors. Grace rewards honesty. The Traitors gold prize goes to the last one standing. The kingdom’s reward goes only to those who kneel. We win by losing, admitting the traitor within and trusting the One who was betrayed and yet always remains faithful.

King David prayed, “Create in me a clean heart, O God” (Psalm 51:10). He didn’t ask for better instincts but a new heart, one capable of truth.  We must echo his prayer.  And the next time you watch a traitor in the game urge a faithful to “trust me” remember that in life Christ is calling us to trust Him, as the Way the Truth and the Life.

 As Newton says of the mature Christian,

When, after a long experience of their own deceitful hearts, after repeated proofs of their weakness, willfulness, ingratitude, and unkindness, they find that none of these things can separate them from the love of God in Christ, Jesus becomes more and more precious to their souls

Newton, J., Richard Cecil (1824) The works of the John Newton. London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., pp. 450–451.

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