The Traitors: New Blood premiere tonight — what to expect when 60,000 applicants boil down to 22 strangers in the castle
Tonight at 8 p.m. ET, NBC hands Alan Cumming's Scottish castle over to people you have never seen on television before, and I could not be more ready.
The Traitors: New Blood is the franchise's first all-civilian American edition — no Housewives, no Survivor mercenaries, no Bachelor alumni doing damage control. Just 22 regular people, hand-picked from a pile of more than 60,000 applications, all of whom presumably told their coworkers they were "taking some PTO."
Who's walking in
The cast list reads like the world's most chaotic jury pool: an astrophysicist, a therapist, a funeral director, a nurse, an iron worker, ages 23 to 65, all competing for a prize fund of up to $250,000. That's the other big shift — for reality veterans, the money is a bonus; for a dog groomer, a quarter million is a life. Expect the roundtables to hit accordingly.
The rules haven't changed: Cumming secretly taps a few Traitors, they "murrrder" a Faithful nightly, and everyone else points fingers until the banishments start. New this year: James and Oliver Phelps — yes, the Weasley twins — as castle keepers, which is casting so good it feels illegal.
Dancing with the Stars returns tonight, and last season's winning pro is dancing 5 months pregnant
Even the host wasn't ready
Cumming has presided over four seasons of professional schemers, and the normies still knocked him sideways. "The energy is very different. I was shocked," he said, describing roundtables so rowdy he nearly fell off his platform. He's also promising a "big twist" in the premiere, which from this show could mean anything from a fake funeral to a second castle.
The civilians, meanwhile, sound ready. One cast member, a mom, summed up her strategy in the trailer:
"...step outside of my comfort zone and, um, kill a few folks."
Ma'am. Welcome.
Tonight's logistics
- Two back-to-back episodes, 8 p.m. ET/PT on NBC — titled "A New Dawn Is Rising" and "I'm a Sweaty Boy," a range
- Streaming on Peacock the next day
- Episodes 3 and 4 air as another double on September 24, then weekly Thursdays
The whole pitch of this season is that nobody arrives famous, so nobody arrives trusted — no pre-existing alliances, no "I loved you on Big Brother" armor. Sixty thousand people wanted into that castle. Twenty-two got in. By tomorrow morning, at least one of them will be dead. Television!
Previously we wrote: Taylor Frankie Paul is back filming Mormon Wives, and a castmate walked out over what she saw
