There are not many plaudits left for The Celebrity Traitors, which has delivered tension, crowd-pleasing ineptitude and the most famous fart in television history.
Yet for all the show’s achievements, one in particular – a feat that TV executives across the globe have been desperate to deliver – may stand out as the most impressive: it has got gen Z watching live TV.
There has long been fretting that viewers under the age of 25 have moved away from watching once-dominant linear television, lost to the algorithmic fix of digital platforms such as YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. Yet the treachery of the turret appears to have dragged them back to the TV.
The overnight ratings for The Celebrity Traitors – which measures the number of people watching live or later that evening on iPlayer reveal that more than half of the people aged between 16 and 24 viewing the show within that time slot watched every episode of The Celebrity Traitors as it was broadcast.
The show’s finale broke records. Its overnight average audience was more than 11 million, the biggest of the year and the biggest since the Gavin & Stacey special on Christmas Day. It was watched by 81% of the viewers aged 16-24 who were watching linear TV in that time slot, according to Digital i.
“At a time when younger audiences are increasingly turning away from live linear TV, The Traitors has grown into appointment viewing for 16- to 24-year-olds in the UK,” said Matt Ross, Digital i’s chief analytics officer. “The most recent iteration has been a major draw for younger viewers.”
The race is now on to dissect that success and see what lessons can be taken from the show – or whether its mass appeal and ability to reach younger viewers is simply an increasingly rare anomaly.
Katy Fox, executive producer at Studio Lambert, which makes the show for the BBC, said: “The idea of the whole family stopping what they’re doing and sitting round the telly to share in a hugely positive, joyous show is exactly what you hope for as producers.
“The best thing about the 16- to 24-year-olds taking to Traitors so faithfully is just the sheer amount of energy and creativity they bring to fandom – from memes to videos to Halloween costumes and everything in between – it’s fantastic.”
The show’s success is timely for the BBC after concerns were raised about its long-term appeal to gen Z. Just this week, Jordan Schwarzenberger, the manager of the hugely successful YouTube collective the Sidemen, said the corporation risked becoming culturally irrelevant to young audiences.
Industry insiders say there are plenty of lessons to be learned from The Celebrity Traitors. They point to its “always on” appeal, with the live show acting almost like a live sports event, with an official podcast, numerous clipped moments and an embrace of fan-made memes and content meaning there is always Traitors-related material to consume during the week.
Kate Phillips, the BBC’s chief content officer who first commissioned the programme, said her initial interest in the show was born out of the pandemic, when she felt the need to find shows that brought people together. Since then, she says the show, which began as a Dutch format, grew rapidly by word of mouth across the generations – a key measure for the BBC, tasked with providing content with mass appeal.
“What I want is shows that have the 3Gs at their heart,” she said. “By that, I mean shows that have three generations of people all watching together. One thing I’ve taken away is that, actually, young people really love to watch with their parents, with their grandparents. People really appreciate it.”
As for why the show had reached younger viewers, she pointed to partnerships with TikTok, linking the platform directly with iPlayer. She also says the show’s social strategy was “built with the under-35s, and particularly the under-24s, firmly in mind”. The show has been endlessly clipped, while the BBC has also been relaxed about fans jumping in and making their own viral content.
Phillips said for all the talk of linear TV’s declining importance, The Celebrity Traitors also demonstrated how the medium could still play a critical role as a “shop window” for the best content.
“Celebrity Traitors can be on linear TV, but it evolves into a cross-platform, shared experience that feels very current, very fun and very unfiltered,” she said. “The memes and the comments – it’s like a kind of second entertainment show running alongside the main show.”
Jon Willers, a media consultant who has been thinking about how to reach gen Z, said the show’s success pointed to the industry’s need to reinvent and reskill itself for the social media age. “It’s one of those few shows that bridges two different worlds,” he said. “There’s a digital world, which skews younger and it’s more about socials and less about watching traditional telly. Then you’ve got the traditional world, which is about seeing what’s on at 9pm.
“There are very few instances at the moment where a show can kind of penetrate both of those places. There needs to be more shows that have that vision and that ambition. It shows that people aren’t necessarily leaving TV. They’re leaving TV that doesn’t really speak to them.
“We’ve all been very siloed up to this point. TV producers make TV programmes. Social creators make content on socials. Broadcasters are essentially the publishers and help with marketing. TV producers are now trying to be much more multi-platform.”
In fact, The Celebrity Traitors is not the only big hit to find an audience with gen Z, as traditional broadcasters attempt to adapt to the different ways in which they find and dissect their chosen shows.
The prime example is Dancing with the Stars, the US version of Strictly Come Dancing. It was once on a par with other reality formats, but has now found itself as the dominant title in the genre. It did so by embracing online culture by using viral songs, bringing in dancers with a big social media presence and broadening the cast.
“Dancing with the stars leaned heavily into the creator ecosystem – casting creators as contestants,” said Evan Shapiro, a Hollywood producer turned leading analyst on the creator economy. “It obviously paid off,” he added.
“Celebrity Traitors collected a truly fascinating cross-section of entertainment culture in the UK and then leaned heavily into creator ethos – clipping the show ad nauseum, encouraging user-generated content.”
He said it was proof that big broadcasters and titles could adapt to changing consumption. “The mindset of successful crossover IP [from TV to social media] is ‘the show is the clip and the clip is the show – and together they are the show’. It’s all proof that when big publishers act like creators, they can be dominant creators themselves.”
For The Celebrity Traitors, its makers say casting was crucial and included the likes of Niko Omilana, who has more than 8 million subscribers on YouTube, though he left the game early on.
“We’ve always believed that The Traitors is a format that can appeal to every generation, and have always tried to reflect that in our casting,” said Fox. “Having a celebrity cast with a broad range of ages and personalities meant we were confident younger viewers would identify with cast members they already know … and maybe even get to know national treasures they didn’t! We’re delighted with the results.”
For others in the industry, the discussion about how to keep younger audiences tuned in is complicating a simple equation. In show business, the golden rule still stands – it is all about hits.
Peter Fincham, co-CEO of the production company Expectation and co-hosts the podcast Insiders TV, said: “The most powerful form of marketing is always going to be word of mouth. It’s in the conversation at home, at work, at school.
“When that happens, you get young people watching. What is maybe a little bit more unusual in the modern age is what you would call an old-fashioned, mainstream hit that gets everybody talking.
“I’m quite wary of the trend analysis. This is the simplest thing in the world. Have a great big hit and you will get a lot of people viewing it of all ages. That was true 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago.”
