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Euan Cherry/NBC SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for the two-hour series premiere of NBC’s “The Traitors: New Blood,” now streaming on Peacock.
“The Traitors” castle isn’t just for the rich and famous anymore. Peacock’s Emmy-winning franchise has arrived on NBC, with “The Traitors: New Blood,” a new season composed entirely of civilian players in the game of murder, mayhem and more money than ever before.
In the show’s two-hour series premiere, host Alan Cumming welcomed 22 appropriately bloodthirsty competitors to his Scottish castle and immediately threw them into the deep end of the loch. Because of the show’s international popularity, the players walked into the castle knowing exactly where to go and what to investigate. Feeling right at home with the game is exactly what the creative team wanted.
“To have a sense of familiarity meant they felt comfortable in their surroundings and they played hard straight away,” executive producer Sam Rees-Jones tells Variety of the premiere.
At the first roundtable, with a sly tap on the shoulder, Cumming chose Tomica Adams (a pilot from Boston, MA) and Joe Vanella (a funeral director from Wantagh, New York) as his first Traitors of the season. But during their midnight confab in the turret, he informed them a third Traitor was incoming, and that they had to pick the person. In addition to their first murder (RIP faux college basketball coach and real lawyer Kim Daily), the Traitors chose two “accomplices” to audition to become their fellow chaos agent.
Courtesy of Euan Cherry/NBC Katie Fites (a marketing manager from Jacksonville, Florida, and the youngest player at 23) and Xavier Scruggs (former MLB player turned analyst) got to work scheming and stirring the pot against each other to claw their way to the turret. But the ultimate test came in the second hour when they were directed to deceive the Faithfuls in plain sight by stealing a cleverly titled book on crime and punishment and delivering it to the Traitors. The premiere leaves audiences hanging on whether they manage to smuggle the book out without the Faithful seeing it..
What is for sure is that the blood of the Faithfuls has already been spilled. In addition to Daily’s murder, a tense first roundtable saw Mississippi realtor Kriste Lewis go for the jugular on San Diego construction manager Madeline Kostopulos over a throwaway comment she believed proved she was one of the cloaked killers. Caught in the crossfire was Kostopulos’ ally and resident eye candy, New York business executive Victor Vollbrechthausen, who took heat for immediately snagging a shield of protection in the first challenge. The pair nearly split the vote evenly.
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