Who is traitor and who is faithful? Who can you trust and who can stab you in the back? The genre of confinement and coexistence reality shows tries to reinvent itself in order to stay alive. Traitors España, whose eight episodes premiere this Friday on HBO Max, is one of those formats that proves that not everything on television is made up. Among its participants there are more or less well-known names, there are restrictions, there is coexistence. But the rules of the game, or rather, have changed. Because these 18 participants take part in a psychological challenge in which they must measure who they can and cannot trust while forging alliances to survive eight days incarceration in a castle.
The idea of the format, which is of Dutch origin and has won the Rose D’Or award for the best reality and factual program of 2022, is simple. Participants are given a role at the beginning of the game and are divided between traitors and believers. The traitors meet every night to decide which innocents to eliminate and not come to breakfast the next day. Believers also have an opportunity to get rid of traitors when they discover who is showing double face. The game of treachery and alliances is served, with the viewer being a luxury guest of the entire double-sided show.
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The production company Gestmusic looked at and thoroughly studied the original format released in 2021 on the Dutch channel RTL4. For this, director Nia Sanjuán traveled to the Netherlands to help prepare the second edition. “We got caught it’s nothing but it takes you as a viewer to a whole different point because you have all the information and you suffer for the traitor they’re about to catch and for the poor believers they’re about to kill “explains producer Tinet Rubira. “And then we saw that everyone was playing that, in the camps they were playing the werewolves of Castronegro, players were playing Among Us and it’s an idea that everyone has in their heads, very simple to explain,” the producer continues.
The participants of ‘Traitors España’ arriving at the Castle of Sigüenza.Luis Miguel Gonzalez
Among the 18 participants are many actors (Abril Zamora, Fernando Guillén Cuervo, Rubén Ochandiano, Adrián Pino, Anna Allen, Sandra Escacena…), many athletes (Ray Zapata, Joana Pastrana, Jaime Nava, Jaime Astrain, Blanca Manchón…) and even some politicians like Cristina Cifuentes. “We were looking for people who are used to pressure. A top athlete thrives on competitiveness and concentration. Even people who might be double faced, an actor is used to stepping into someone’s shoes and you don’t know if they have character or not. And also people who at some point defended themselves with lies or half-truths, ”says Rubira about the candidates. “We gave them very little information. It was difficult to find people signing up for a reality show out of faith without knowing what they would find or who the other players were. We wanted them to be gamers and charismatic,” adds Sanjuán.
For the player, the actor Sergio Peris-Mencheta, who acts as the game’s narrator. His name was not on the original list, either as a candidate or as a moderator. But when they began to contact actors in the casting process, they repeated a question to the producers: “Didn’t you call Sergio?” Organizer and conductor, and has hosted plays with big names in Hollywood cinema in Los Angeles. The moderator casting did the casting for us,” Rubira recalls.
Jaime Nava, Anna Allen and Apolonia Lapiedra, in a moment of the game.Luis Miguel Gonzalez
The Castle of Sigüenza, Parador Nacional, hosts the Spanish edition of the game. The program also takes advantage of the scenic opportunities and locations surrounding this enclave of Guadalajara. “In the Netherlands, the game took place in a palace and the players went to sleep in a hotel at night. We wanted to carry out the production in a place where the game can be shot and where the participants and the team can sleep, infrastructure that can accommodate 80-90 people,” Rubira explains the choice of location.
To ensure the participants arrived free of Covid for the week of the game (the eight episodes were filmed in nine days), they remained isolated in separate apartments for five days before taping began, without seeing each other and without even going out to eat . . They also had several substitutes in the same confinement in case one of them tested positive. In fact, Rubira admits, there were those who stayed at the door of attendance because of Covid.
Sergio Peris-Mencheta, in the lavender fields of Brihuega (Guadalajara). Luis Miguel Gonzalez
“Reality” platform vs. generalist television
HBO wasn’t the only one interested in getting hold of this format for its broadcast in Spain. “There was a queue to buy it,” says Tinet Rubira. The platform continued, but there were two other generalist TVs interested. The fact that it was for HBO, the adaptation both in terms of budget and duration (55 minute chapters, even less than the original version of around 70), has the strict Covid protocol they had to follow , and the selection of participants conditioned . “If it had been generalist TV, we would have done a more popular casting,” admits the producer. They’ve also tried to give the program a finish more akin to fiction, as Nia Sanjuán explains: “The host in other adaptations explains the game more explicitly, speaks into the camera, and shares parts of the game. We wanted to make him sympathetic, with a narrator who comes from fiction and narrates the game from the off, he has a very aseptic role. The visual approach and sound is also more fictional, with a cinematic patina,” he explains.
Another difference is that all episodes are available to viewers at once on HBO. “We didn’t know how to start it,” admits Sanjuán. For this reason, the program is organized serially, with a concluding event in each episode that leads the viewer to see how it is solved. And perhaps the main difference of the Spanish version compared to others was the one that contributed the character of the players, where the mischievous and Latino temperament comes out and it is common for the participants to have several conversations in parallel, living the discussions intensely or even Hide information from the organization. “In other countries, players respect the rules and don’t think about going further. There are script rotations here from the start. Everything that we thought were unlikely exceptions happened,” says Rubira.
Sergio Peris-Mencheta, standing between Adrián Pino and Jaime Nava. Luis Miguel Gonzalez
In the nine days that the game lasted, they recorded about 1,000 hours, which they had to cut down to eight hours of programming. In order not to lose any details, they recorded with up to 30 cameras at the same time, especially during outdoor games, and always with at least five or six cameras at the same time. “The idea was to pull the cameras away so it’s visually different and less invasive. It’s not like Survivors where the cameras are up, here they are with an operator, it’s behind a pillar,” Sanjuán illustrates.
When they met this Wednesday to present the program, many of the participants did not yet know who had won. Who makes it to the end? Poker champion Leo Margets, an expert at cheating and hiding her game? The rapper Skone, used to destroying his cockfight rival with his words? Adult movie star Apolonia Lapiedra, used to pretending? Or the journalist and reality analyst Juan Sanguino? And who would you trust more, a politician or an actor? Prejudices and strategies come into play. Place your bets.
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