Let’s kick things off today with a belated congratulations to Monday night’s winners of the third annual Gotham TV Awards. Much like its film-awards sibling does for Oscar season, the ceremony serves as a very early starting gun for the Emmy race. With the nominees and the winners selected by two different, very small juries, there’s no reason to expect correlation between what these voters liked and what the vast Emmy voting body will go for in July. But as a boost in the crucial last few weeks before Emmy nominations voting actually begins, the Gotham TV Awards are hard to beat.
Which is particularly good news for HBO Max’s DTF: St. Louis, winner of outstanding limited or anthology series as well as an acting prize for David Harbour. The darkly comic series, also starring Jason Bateman and Linda Cardellini, has felt like a bit of an also-ran alongside HBO’s juggernauts Hacks and The Pitt — not to mention the network’s other big limited series, Half Man — but with the limited series race pretty wide open, maybe HBO will now feel emboldened by the possibility of securing two nominations in the main field.
With additional wins for breakthrough comedy series I Love LA and outstanding lead performance for Tim Robinson of The Chair Company, HBO was undeniably the big platform winner of the night. But personally I was most excited to see recognition for Chase Infiniti, whose compelling work in Hulu’s The Testaments is evidence that One Battle After Another was no fluke. (If you know me at all, you’ll know I was also pleased to see recognition for Michael Shannon’s against-type performance in Death by Lightning, the Netflix limited series I simply will not shut up about.)
How will these Gotham TV winners seize whatever momentum they’ve gathered here? The FYC events will be thick on the ground between now and when nominations voting opens a week from today, so if you want to shake any of their hands in Los Angeles this weekend, you can probably find them somewhere. I’ll be in L.A. as well, moderating a very exciting YouTube FYC event on Friday night, and I’ll have all the details in Monday’s newsletter — stay tuned!
For today, though, I’m thrilled to be bringing back what’s become an annual Prestige Junkie tradition, talking to the key behind-the-scenes players of Peacock’s smash hit reality series The Traitors. In the past we’ve gone deep on a fake funeral and the logistical nightmare of a physical challenge on a lake. But today I’m digging into one of the most dramatic scenes in Traitors history, which involved just two people in a room. Well, two people plus host Alan Cumming, who says he was briefly worried he’d have to break up a fight.
Sticking the Landing
“It was everything we could have hoped for.”
That’s how Traitors executive producer Rosie Franks describes the stunning finale of this year’s season, the fourth for the U.S. version of the reality show and by far the most-watched.
After playing a ruthlessly perfect game the entire year, Alabaman snake wrangler Rob Rausch had made it to the moment of truth, when he’d have to reveal to his steadfast ally Maura Higgins that he was, in fact, a traitor, and would be walking away with all of the prize money for himself.
Viewers at home already knew Rob was a traitor, as did the entire production staff watching the scene play out in the Scottish castle where the show is filmed. But nobody knew what would happen when Maura finally found out. “We put the cameras in position, and we hope for the best,” says Siggi Rosen-Rawlings, the show’s director of photography, who estimates he had four or five cameras pointed at Maura in that moment. We don’t know if she’s gonna storm out, if she’s gonna faint or hit him or do something completely different. So we’ve just got to be prepared.”
What Maura did was not quite that dramatic but still made for exceptional television — and quite a moment to witness in person, too.
“I’m trying to make sure I’m not in the way, and also bracing myself for violence or despair,” says Cumming, who as the host was the only other person on camera for Rob’s big reveal. “There are some moments in the show that are very, very tense to be in the room for — the picking of the traitors, even that’s a tense moment. And this, obviously, we knew this car crash was going to happen.”
Making a moment like this as dramatic as an actual car crash, though, only happens after weeks of careful buildup — both from Rob and Maura’s gameplay and the work happening behind the scenes to make sure not a single crucial moment is missed.
“I am very, very proud of creating that environment where we don’t miss anything,” says Ben Archard, the director for both the U.S. and U.K. Traitors. “We have the 47 cameras, the Robocams around the castle at certain angles, and then in the control room we are calling in those units left, right and center just to drift into those conversations. It isn’t luck that we get what we get. It’s a lot of planning and a lot of hard work from lots of teams and departments.”
Sorting through all of that footage is, of course, another gargantuan task, one that falls to editor James Seddon-Brown. “It’s a big balancing act with so much going on,” Seddon-Brown says. “Really all the work we’re doing is getting that perfect balance of all the stories, treating everybody fairly.”
Well, maybe not exactly fairly — Cumming alludes to contestants whose real-life personas don’t quite match what we saw onscreen. “Some people really owe you a fuck of a lot, because you make them look so much better than they actually were,” Cumming says to Seddon-Brown during our conversation. “We all know who I’m talking about.” (I don’t, but I have a guess!)
For other season-long stories, though, Seddon-Brown and the team are simply taking the lead from the contestants themselves. Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir, former Olympians and famous best friends, are shown arriving at the castle and pretending not to know each other, revealing in interviews that it’s part of their long-term game strategy. “It did play out exactly like that,” says Franks. “We would never tell anyone how to play their game, but we were a bit like, ‘Surely people are gonna know that you know each other!’ But it kind of seemed to work for them.”
Tara and Johnny’s friendship winds up being a crucial part of the series endgame, as they start to suspect Rob and Eric Nam (correctly) as the traitors and try to lure Maura over to their side. Franks describes it as “a little bit like a high school drama — you’ve got the pretty girl, and she loves the pretty boy, but can her best friend convince her that he’s bad news?” Seddon-Brown admits he was rooting for Tara and Johnny to win, and, according to Archard, everyone on the production team was similarly captivated by the action.
“We talk a lot about this amongst the crew — I’ve always said you can’t direct The Traitors unless you are equally as invested in the story as you are in the technical side of directing,” Archard explains. “For every individual camera operator that’s in that room, they are all so engrossed in that story. Sometimes they’ve moved before I’ve even given them direction.”
Which brings us back to that incredibly tense finale moment between Rob and Maura, where Rosen-Rawlings says the camera operators were holding their breath along with Maura — “it’s a super tight shot on a really long lens, so seriously, if you breathe too heavily, it can wobble.” Rob’s seemingly effortless gameplay all season admittedly made for a bit of an editing challenge for Seddon-Brown. “Rob’s harder to read than, say, Maura,” Seddon-Brown says. “We had to work a bit harder on him throughout. But he’s just a cool customer, so it’s part of his kind of vibe as well.”
Cumming, the only person on camera who interacts with the traitors while they make their gameplay decisions, describes his relationship with Rob as a “wide spectrum” throughout the season. “When he started, I was like, ‘You little shit.’ He’s monosyllabic, a little bit attitude-y. And just over halfway through or two-thirds of the way through I was like, ‘You are playing a blinder, young man.’ I grew very fond of him, actually. I’ve really admired the way he has conducted himself with the whole madness of this.”
Everyone who works on The Traitors agrees that the experience of being inside the castle is incredibly immersive, which helps explain both the outsized reactions and the deep friendships that form. Filming the final moment of truth inside the roundtable room, as opposed to by an outdoor fire pit as in previous seasons, leaned right into everything they’d built all season.
“That room for them symbolizes all the intense things that have happened throughout the series, right?” says Franks. “Having it inside not only allows Ben to use all of the amazing cameras that he’s already got set up in that room; it means that they can’t see any crew because all the cameras are either remote heads or disguised in the camera run. I really feel like the reaction that we got was elevated by using that space this time.”
Cumming has seen firsthand how intense the roundtable room can be — “it’s been several times in round tables where I felt like, oh my God, I’m gonna have to break up a fight here,” he says — and also watched as Rob finally let go with his final celebration outside the castle. “I just think the fact that he howled was great,” says Cumming. “There’s so much tension in the show and so much bottled up emotion. But I mean, it was bittersweet for him. I think that’s the beauty of the game — it can be bittersweet as well.”
Everything seems to have worked out between Rob and Maura eventually, including his presenting her with a $20,000 Birkin bag on Watch What Happens Live. But from Franks’ perspective, Maura was already winning even in her moment of loss on the show.
“Her reaction was so gracious in the end,” Franks says. “I honestly thought she was going to storm out of there and shout at him. But she was just so smart.”
