It’s been a year since the Bohunk and I left the wilderness compound on the Ridge alongside Lake Superior and returned to our roots in what is euphemistically called a manufactured home community. After spending a year in two different apartment buildings following our nuptials half a century ago, we bought a trailer house (they didn’t even call them mobile homes) in 1974. That community was alongside the soon-to-be-created Minnesota Zoo. As 20-somethings, newly parents, we decided that we didn’t mind starting life on society’s ladder as trailer trash. What goes around comes around.
After five decades of wedded bliss, and both of us sliding home to the average lifespan, our days follow a certain relaxed pattern. We may have had bucket lists, although they weren’t a thing until the movie Bucket List debuted in 2007; I don’t recall where they might be. It’s possible that if we had them, they’ve been lost about five houses ago. We’ve seen and done a fair amount over the years. These days our big goals revolve around taking care of dogs, being near to a bathroom, and sleeping in our own bed.
Our days mostly consist of a handful of dog walks, feeding them twice a day, and cleaning out the cat litter. Occasionally the Bohunk does the laundry. She makes the bed each day, and we work together to get our feed on.
Consequently, we have enough time in the day to focus on streaming the “boob tube” shows that strike our fancy.
If it’s just me in the living room, I might be watching one of the socalled news shows from what used to be cable. But most likely, it is tuned to something like “Maine Cabin Masters.” Based in Maine, of course, each episode involves a family-run work crew that updates rustic cabins on one of the many lakes dotting the Maine countryside. They do call them camps, not cabins, which at first struck me as being a bit Canadian. The trees, lakes, and rocky ground are reminiscent of our happiest place, the North Shore. I also watch it to marvel at all the work they get done with the small budget they get from the camp owners.
With both of us in the living room when our “regular” shows aren’t available, we’ll watch something from the House Hunters franchise on HGTV. With more than 2,000 episodes of It over the years, it seems likely that we’ve seen most of them. We go to it when we think Captain Nod might visit one or both of us. A good night’s sleep is elusive at our advanced age, so sometimes we act like a certain world leader and check our eyelids for leaks.
Recently, the Bohunk has turned me on to a show called “The Traitors,” which we sit and watch together. We’ve now seen Traitors UK, Traitors Australia, and Traitors New Zealand. We’re both fans of detective and true crime stories and fascinated by human behavior. Although Traitors is presented as a murder-mystery game, it’s more about human behavior and the dynamics of a relatively small group of people.
The show takes place at a remote castle or lodge in the countryside. Something around 20 people are brought into the facility. Most of the time, all are strangers at first, although sometimes two of the players are secretly related or are acquainted in the real world. At the end of the first day, the players sit around “the roundtable” to be blindfolded while the host secretly selects who the three traitors will be. The remaining players are deemed to be the faithfuls. Each of the traitors knows who their cohorts are and who the faithful are. The faithful only know their own status, not that of others.
The purpose of the game is for all the players, traitors and faithfuls alike, to work together on “missions” to add money to the prize pot. Once that’s done each day, the entire group returns to the roundtable where the faithful attempt to identify a traitor and banish that person from the game.
After a banishment, the players grab a cocktail or two and return to their secluded lodging. The Traitors meet up in hooded shrouds and decide which of the faithful should be murdered in the night. Not violently, of course; the faithful victim gets a note informing them of their demise and eviction from the game.
The faithful constantly claim they are using “intuition” or “detective skills” to find Traitors, but most ot the time they banish one of their own. Amongst their group there is almost always one or two former cops, a shrink, a crime writer, and even a psychic. But with little hard evidence to go on, even those faithful with background and abilities end up out of the game early.
At the end of 6 or 7 episodes, the game ends. The accumulated prize pot is distributed equally among the faithfuls that are left, but if one or more of the traitors remain, they take all the money.
The show originated in the Netherlands and first aired in March 2021. Dutch producer Marc Pos came up with the show’s concept after reading about the famous 1629 mutiny aboard the shipwrecked Dutch East India Company ship Batavia, where survivors turned on one another on an island off Western Australia. Right now, at least 40 countries and territories have commissioned or produced localized versions.
The Traitors is an entertaining show about how bad we are at judging character under pressure, and how quickly civilization’s rules of fairness crumble when fear takes over, and I highly recommend it.
The faithful group is very poor at detecting deception and easily mistakes likeability or sameness for trustworthiness. Sometimes being wrong alongside your group feels much safer than standing alone with the truth, and scapegoating a single individual can be a pressure-release valve for the group’s collective anxiety.
This is politics.
