Big Brother Players Aren’t Built for The Traitors

Photo: Peacock/Euan Cherry/Peacock

One of the great joys of the U.S. version of The Traitors is watching familiar faces across the reality TV map converge in a game of strategy and deception (and, yes, mehrduhr). You’ve got your Housewives, your Bachelor-ites, your various royals, drag queens, WWE wrestlers, and whatnot. Then there are the Gamers, the alums of the social-strategy games like Survivor, Big Brother, and The Challenge, all of whom are well versed in the various schemes of voting to eliminate competition. Season one saw the triumph of Survivor legend and fan favorite Cirie Fields; season two saw the triumph of Challenge legend and favorite CT Tamburello (… and also Trishelle Cannatella). Meanwhile, the show has flooded the zone with Big Brother legends: former winners, widely acknowledged strategic masterminds, the best to have ever played the game. And over the course of three seasons, the Big Brother legends have flopped and flopped hard, both at the game generally but especially when placed in the role of a Traitor.

Cody Calafiore, Big Brother 16 runner-up and Big Brother 22 winner, made himself so obvious as a Traitor in season one that his fellow Traitors needed to turn on him and get him voted out. Dan Gheesling, Big Brother 10 winner and Big Brother 14 runner-up, could not shut up about what a Machiavellian schemer he was in season two, up until he was basically laughed out of the roundtable by Kate Chastain, of all people. This season, we’ve got Danielle Reyes, the Big Brother 3 legend who puppet-mastered her original season from start to (nearly) finish and only lost because all the players she eliminated went home, watched her talk shit about them on TV, and got all butt-hurt about it. Danielle is the reason Big Brother juries are now sequestered. Her fellow Big Brother alum and surprise Traitors entrant Derrick Levasseur called her “the best Big Brother player to never win,” a sentiment widely shared in the BB fandom. And yet Danielle is currently playing The Traitors so poorly — making big, sloppy, conspicuous moves, alienating potential allies, and fancying herself an Oscar-winning actress while displaying community-center theatrics — that even scene-stealing ignoramus Tom Sandoval has taken notice.

Why are Big Brother’s strategic masterminds so consistently bad at The Traitors? Why are they in particular flopping in the role of Traitor? The temptation is to say that Big Brother is a game for dum-dums and thus the king or queen of Dum-Dum Mountain is still a dum-dum. Any casual TV viewer who flips past Big Brother will see players dressed in unitards competing in Family Double Dare–esque physical challenges and losing their dignity on a slippery wiener. But talk to people who watch a wide swath of competitive reality shows — the real hard-core gamer dorks (complimentary) — and many will tell you that Big Brother is the best, most pure version of a social-strategy game. Strip away all the bells and whistles and Zingbots and you end up with a competition about building enough positive relationships with your fellow players to insulate you from elimination. It’s that simple and that complicated, and the players who navigate it particularly well often feel like expert chess players, thinking several moves ahead of the competition. So why does that all seem to fall apart in the Scottish Highlands?

At the risk of sounding reductive, Big Brother is a long game, while The Traitors is short. Obvious, yes, but it’s probably the explanation that makes the most sense. Big Brother is a game that plays out over the course of three real-time months. To win, a player needs to establish alliances built for the long haul and control the flow of information over long days filled with downtime. They are also able to take their time in setting up long-game maneuvers that take days or even weeks to come to fruition. Meanwhile, an entire season of The Traitors gets filmed in about three weeks. There is simply no time for the kinds of patient, elaborate strategy Big Brother players enjoy.

In the fifth episode of season three, Danielle vowed revenge on Boston Rob for his betrayal of Bob the Drag Queen, her “ride or die” ally. But she expressed in her interviews that she needs to bide her time and wait for the perfect moment to strike at Rob. “If you shoot at the bear, you better not miss,” et cetera. But rather than take up Carolyn Wiger on her (admittedly haphazardly articulated) willingness to go after Rob, Danielle instead decided to target Carolyn, on the logic that if she can get Carolyn out and replaced by a Traitor who is easier to work with, she can take that shot at Rob with more confidence. That is Big Brother logic. By the time Danielle is able to put the sus on Carolyn, manipulate this still-quite-large group of Faithfuls to vote Carolyn out, build a rapport with whatever new Traitor is chosen (if that indeed even happens), get the new Traitor onboard with targeting Rob, and then again convince this group of Faithfuls to go after Rob … honestly, the game might already be over. The Traitors doesn’t work like that. The Traitors works like Chrishell getting ten seconds of weird vibe from Nikki in the van on the way to the challenge, mentioning that weird vibe to Boston Rob in a side conversation after the challenge, and Nikki getting banished a few hours later. As messy as Boston Rob’s move to bust Bob the Drag Queen’s game was, he did it quickly and brutally. That’s how you have to play The Traitors.

At the risk of sounding like a college-football coach, Big Brother alums also haven’t had enough practice. This applies specifically in comparison to their counterparts from social-strategy games Survivor and The Challenge. On balance, Big Brother has done fewer all-star seasons than Survivor, where someone like Boston Rob has participated in six seasons: his initial season; his first all-star season, where he finished in second place to his future wife Amber; the Heroes vs. Villains season, where he was bested by impish bully Russell Hantz; a follow-up season where he and Hantz were placed among a cast of newbies who idolized Rob in particular (this was the season he won); one season where he and Sandra Diaz-Twine were cast as legendary mentors; and finally the all-winners 40th season. Cirie won the first U.S. Traitors season after competing on Survivor four times. And neither Big Brother nor Survivor is set up like The Challenge, where certain players like CT and current Traitors Faithful Wes Bergmann have returned for dozens of seasons, creating alliances, rivalries, and résumés that span decades.

What that adds up to is that Big Brother masterminds haven’t been forced to hone their games or play outside their comfort zones. Cody only played two full-length seasons of Big Brother and won the second by essentially copying the game plan of his original season’s winner, the aforementioned Derrick. Danielle similarly only played two full seasons of Big Brother, with her second appearance (2006’s Big Brother All-Stars) being a letdown precisely because her strategic maneuvers were already well known. (She came back for a mini-season a few years ago called Big Brother: Reindeer Games, where she also didn’t do very well. This was the origin point of her beef with Traitors castmate Britney Haynes.)

Dan Gheesling’s disastrous Traitors campaign happened in part because he only knows how to play one style of game: lie low to an extreme degree and when he gets in trouble, make one ostentatious move to throw his closest allies under the bus. On The Traitors, however, Dan’s extreme reticence to play the game (i.e., collaborate with his fellow cast members to throw suspicion onto other players) marked him as an obvious Traitor within just a few episodes, and because his Big Brother theatrics were well known, his last-ditch attempts to throw fellow Traitors Phaedra and Parvati under the bus looked both obvious and pathetic. Players like Wes and Boston Rob have had to modulate their games to account for different conditions and have thus far proved themselves to be more nimble on The Traitors.

It may be too late for Danielle to turn her game around. She’s already alienated Derrick (and Dolores, and Rob) with her completely nonsensical handling of the urn-smashing challenge in the latest episode. Deciding to target Carolyn at the next banishment could backfire on her spectacularly. It feels like Danielle is destined to follow the Dan Gheesling path into ignominy as a fallen mastermind. Will her fellow alums Derrick or even Britney Haynes (who’s been nearly invisible all season so far) be able to restore Big Brother’s reputation on The Traitors? History is working against them, but as Julie Chen-Moonves is wont to say, expect the unexpected.