The hugely popular reality competition series has led to a string of similarly devious yet undeniably lesser copycats
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his is a punt, but Fox might have started to commission new shows via the power of online thesauruses. Take its new reality show The Snake. It’s a game of secrets and betrayal, of feigning one emotion to gain trust while you stab your new friends in the back. In other words, it’s basically The Traitors.
I don’t know whether any of you have ever searched Merriam Webster for synonyms of ‘traitor’, but ‘snake’ is literally second on the list. And this laziness is indicative of the show itself, which is such a painfully halfhearted retread of The Traitors that it ends up being exhausting to watch.
Hosted by Jim Jeffries, presenting in the style of a drunk guy shouting through his letterbox at 3am, The Snake gathers contestants from the most easily stereotyped professions – detective, ex-con, pastor, Onlyfans model – and has them connive at each other until only one remains. The runtime of the first episode is almost exclusively given over to letting these people describe exactly how unpleasant they are. Subsequent episodes involve gross-out challenges, like drinking meat smoothies or being relatively close to some insects, so in that regard a direct comparison to The Traitors is slightly unfair, because it’s actually ripping off The Traitors and Fear Factor in equal measure.
