‘The Traitors’: Why Everyone Is So Obsessed With the Greatest Reality Show on TV

What is it about the Peacock competition series The Traitors that has made the show so popular, outside of the fact that it is the greatest reality TV program that we have ever known or ever will know? After all, quality and popularity aren’t always circles that intersect on the pop culture Venn diagram. In fact, they often seem like magnets with the same charge, repelling each other in opposite decorations.

The viewership numbers for Season 2 of the series, a game of secret murder played in a Scottish castle overseen by Alan Cumming in a delectable array of befeathered fashion, speak to its increase in attention. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the season had the biggest debut of any reality TV series on Peacock, experienced a 75 percent jump in audience from Season 1, and, when Nielsen’s streaming rankings come out in the middle of the month, is expected to sit in the Top 10 alongside the platform’s other runaway hit, the TV version of Seth MacFarlane’s Ted.

Take that for what you will; these streaming numbers are always a little opaque and dubious. But I can attest to its popularity through my very scientific (not scientific at all) anecdotal research (group texts and the people I follow on Twitter) and say that every person I know is currently watching—and is absolutely obsessed with—this show. Phaedra Parks saying “Lord, not Ekin-Su,” a series of words that would have made no sense mere weeks ago, now appears on my phone more often than the previous hits of “Hello,” “How have you been?” and “You owe me money.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.