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This blog contains spoilers for the first six episodes of series 4 of The Traitors.
BBC Scotland’s The Traitors presents itself as a game about truth: who is lying, who is faithful, who can be trusted. In reality, however, truth is largely incidental. What matters most is storytelling. At the roundtable, the best story wins – not the most accurate one, but the one delivered with the most confidence and authority. Far from being mere entertainment, the show can offer an uncomfortable insight into how we – and our justice system – can mistake persuasive narrative and authority for reality.
The fourth series is now well underway, and alongside the usual intrigue and drama, the show can shine a light on our society, on who we do and do not trust. Much has been written about what the repeated banishment of contestants of colour reveals about unconscious bias and racism. But the show also holds up a mirror to another feature of our society: how unquestioningly we trust the authority of our justice system.
The current series has featured an unusually high number of justice professionals, including two barristers and two former police officers. Most prominent among them was Amanda, a retired senior detective with the Metropolitan Police, whose career included specialisms in interrogation and covert operations. She chose to keep her profession secret from the other contestants, but was presented – by both herself and the show – as the ideal person to identify the Traitors after a lifetime, as she put it, of “tracking down baddies”.
Amanda embodied a number of qualities which popular culture would associate with the archetypal detective: steely determination, an overwhelming confidence in her own abilities and unshakeable self-righteousness. From the outset, she honed in relentlessly on her prime suspect, Jade. Amanda’s manner was decisive, authoritative and persuasive. She constructed a case and relentlessly stuck to it. She was determined to catch her baddie.
There was only one small problem. This particular TV sleuth had got it bang wrong. Jade was not a “baddie” at all – she was a Faithful.
Scotland Yard’s brightest was quite literally clueless – every call was wide of the mark. She ignored legitimate suspicions of other contestants and, despite the complete absence of evidence, honed in on catching Jade – voting for her in all four roundtables. This hot streak reached its glorious crescendo when she chose to confide her true profession to the one contestant she was certain she could trust. Little did she realise that Rachel was, in fact, the Traitor extraordinaire.
When Amanda’s true profession was revealed the remaining contestants, her previous suspicions were retrospectively granted a great deal of reverence and respect – she’s a detective, she must have been onto something!
What mattered here was not accuracy, but authority. Amanda’s suspicions were leant weight purely because of who she was – as a “real detective” she was assumed to have insight and knowledge that others lacked, that she could somehow sniff out the truth by instinct.
This dynamic is revealing because it mirrors how our justice system is often imagined to function - and how it actually does. We like to think that police officers pursue truth, prosecutors test evidence, and courts uncover objective reality. In practice, the system usually does something else - it rewards the most compelling and authoritative storytelling.
During our Amplifying Voices research project, we heard time and time again that people felt that the Scottish justice system, rather than seeking truth, is primarily set up to secure a conviction. What actually happened is less important than getting a result. As one participant told us, “All they focus on is, can we get this past a jury? That is not what justice is about. Justice should be about - did this happen? Is this true?”
The roundtable in The Traitors resembles a jury trial, and in many respects the proceedings mirror those of a court case. Just as poor Ross struggled against an overwhelming - and ultimately false - narrative, many people tell us their experience of the justice system is a space where whoever tells the best story wins. As one person’s lawyer told them, "the truth doesn't matter, it's whoever tells the best story."
There is, however, a crucial difference. In The Traitors, once a contestant is banished, the truth is revealed. They were either a Faithful or a Traitor – an objective fact that cannot be debated. Those contestants who vote off a Faithful must face the consequences of their misplaced suspicions. Amanda’s untimely exit, before she managed to bring about Jade’s banishment, robbed viewers of Amanda witnessing the fruits of her own foolishness.
Criminal trials work very differently. Rather than revealing truth, they create it. Once a verdict is reached, that verdict becomes a legal reality. The state will treat you as having committed that crime; the press can report it as fact; and the social stigma of conviction may follow you for the rest of your life. All of this holds regardless of what actually happened. Once a legal truth is created, it is extraordinarily difficult to undo.
That legal verdicts create truth rather than reveal it is increasingly hard to deny. High-profile miscarriages of justice, including the Post Office scandal and the case of Peter Sullivan, have begun to puncture public confidence, but they continue to be framed as rare failures. In our line of work, we frequently encounter people who, when we learn the cold hard facts of their case, it’s hard to fathom how they have ever been convicted.
There are many reasons for this, but a key one is that the ability to tell the full story is very often curtailed. At the Traitors roundtable, everyone is able to speak freely. In a court of law, this not the case. The cost of accessing justice, and the myriad failings of the Scottish legal aid system, leave many without adequate representation. In November, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the misapplication of “rape shield” laws by Scottish courts risked breaching defendants’ right to a fair trial by excluding important evidence. If the game is to tell the best story, the odds are often stacked against the defendant.
There is one final difference between The Traitors and the criminal justice system. An unfair banishment makes for compelling television. A conviction can destroy lives. Our research documented widespread and lasting consequences for those with convictions and their families: deteriorating mental and physical health, barriers to housing and employment, and enduring social stigma. These effects are not handed down by any court, and yet they are a sentence in themselves.
Despite this, public trust in the system remains remarkably robust. We trust the police who pursue a suspect. We trust the courts that secure a conviction. And once the conviction is in place, and the crime becomes legal reality, that trust has become self-fulfilling - the “baddie” has been caught, the system works! It is not difficult to see the circularity of this logic.
The Traitors shows us how easily confidence can be mistaken for truth, and how readily authority can shield error from challenge. In a game, this is entertaining. In a justice system, it is devastating.
