‘The Traitors: New Blood’ Trades Celebrity Chaos For Everyday Backstabbers
Reality competition television thrives on reinvention, and few franchises have leaned into that idea as aggressively as ‘The Traitors.’ Alan Cumming’s Scottish castle has hosted reality stars, Olympians, and Real Housewives across four seasons of backstabbing and betrayal, turning the show into appointment viewing built on familiar faces sizing each other up. That formula is about to disappear entirely.
NBC has released the first trailer for ‘The Traitors: New Blood,’ offering the first look at the franchise’s all-civilian season. The show features 22 ordinary Americans entering the famed castle, each with their own strategy to win a share of a prize fund worth up to $250,000, and this time, nobody has a camera history to fall back on.
The premise is what makes this shift so striking. The appeal of ‘New Blood’ is that every player is a stranger with no previous connection to anybody else, stripping away the built-in advantage that reality veterans have always had at the Round Table. ‘The Traitors: New Blood’ puts a new spin on the Emmy-winning competition by featuring everyday Americans instead of the celebrities and reality TV stars who usually compete.
Host Alan Cumming says in the trailer, “When nobody knows who you are, you can get away with anything,” while a contestant adds, “When was the last time you were able to go into a room without anyone knowing anything about you?” Several contestants are already committed to lying, with one bluntly noting, “The name of the show is called ‘The Traitors,’ I’m going to deceive somebody.”
The cast comes from a wide range of professions, including astrophysicist Abby Lee, funeral director Joe Vanella, barrel racer Ben McDonnell, physician Jay Vinnedge, nurse Abbey Benjamin, and marketing manager Katie Fites. All 22 players were hand selected after more than 80,000 people applied, giving NBC a cast built entirely on strategy and instinct rather than pre-existing fame.
The stakes feel personal for this format, since the first U.S. season of ‘The Traitors’ proved that being a reality TV veteran gives a serious edge, with Survivor star Cirie Fields running circles around the civilian players at the time. ‘New Blood’ seems designed to correct that imbalance by making everyone equally unfamiliar.
‘The Traitors: New Blood’ premieres Thursday, September 17, with a two-hour debut of its first two episodes airing 8 to 10 p.m. ET/PT on NBC, followed by two more episodes on September 24. The series will then settle into a weekly Thursday schedule, with new episodes streaming on Peacock the following day.
With celebrity dynamics gone and every contestant starting from zero, this season is shaping up to be the franchise’s rawest test yet of who can lie best under pressure. Which of these 22 ordinary Americans do you think has what it takes to out-deceive everyone else in Alan Cumming’s castle?
