'Fewer, Bigger, Better': How the Producers of 'Traitors' & 'Squid Game: The Challenge' Make Reality Hits
Studio Lambert's Stephen Lambert and Tim Harcourt reveal what buyers want, advice for succeeding in the genre, and why 'medium' swings no longer work
Manori Ravindran covers int’l TV from London for Series Business. She’s recently written about “blue cheap” workarounds to make premium-looking TV for less and how producers are cashing in on YouTube and AI. As a paid subscriber to Series Business, you’ll receive reports from Manori and Elaine Low for a global perspective on the TV business. This is a standalone subscription separate from The Ankler. For access to Series Business and everything The Ankler publishes, including Sean McNulty’s The Wakeup and Richard Rushfield, subscribe here.
Launching a new premium unscripted show in primetime is a hazardous road for most networks, but for U.K. broadcasters, it’s doubly challenging given a hyper-discerning (and aging) British broadcast audience. Survivor, which will soon launch its 48th season (!) on CBS, failed to impress Brits not once but twice — floundering on ITV after two seasons in 2001 and 2002, and fizzling out again on the BBC after a low-rated single season in 2023 (and an estimated production budget of £30 million, or about $40 million at the time).
But, let me tell you, when this country likes something, it really likes it. And right now, Britain is simply mad about the Mafia-style series The Traitors, where contestants — mostly “Faithfuls” with a few secretly designated as “Traitors” — complete in a series of challenges and ultimately for a large cash prize. Faithfuls can be “murdered” by Traitors or sometimes recruited to the dark side, and one cast member is “banished” each episode. The U.K. edition concluded its third season on BBC last Friday with an audience of 7.4 million viewers — up 1.6 million over last year’s finale and the show’s largest audience ever.
“[Brits] prefer to murder people than they do to survive on desert islands,” says super-producer Stephen Lambert, creator of hit formats such as Wife Swap and Undercover Boss and the founder of Studio Lambert, which produces both the BBC’s Traitors and the American edition for NBC’s Peacock. (The American edition, which won the 2024 Emmy for outstanding reality competition, launched its third season Jan. 9 — marking the biggest-ever unscripted launch on Peacock, and the most-watched unscripted series that week in the U.S. according to Nielsen.)
While the format isn’t a Studio Lambert origination (it was created by Dutch producer IDTV for Holland’s commercial broadcaster RTL4 back in 2021), you could argue that the All3Media-backed prodco — which also makes Squid Game: The Challenge and The Circle for Netflix — has turned The Traitors into a household name.
Studio Lambert famously pursues a “fewer, bigger, better” strategy with its development slate, focusing its efforts on a small set of premium unscripted ideas and — on the scripted side — returning dramas (a feat it’s finally achieved with Tubi and BBC3 co-production Boarders). It’s an ambitious strategy given the dire straits British broadcasters have weathered in the last three years. How do you convince buyers to bet on a big, expensive and untested unscripted show? And when you do find success, how do you reinvent with every season to keep antsy, second-screening audiences engaged?
Following Friday’s Traitors U.K. finale, I caught up with Lambert — known in the U.K. as the Man with the Midas Touch — and his studio’s creative director, Tim Harcourt, to talk Traitors and how they expanded on the Dutch original to launch a global success; why more broadcasters are now open to big, noisy (and expensive!) unscripted ideas; their views on the “spectacle” of Prime Video’s Beast Games; and their best advice for up-and-coming producers.
From our wide-ranging conversation, you’ll learn:
Why more is more in unscripted now, with buyers willing to bet big on “the right big show”
Two key pieces of advice for unscripted producers and execs when “an idea just isn’t enough”
How Studio Lambert is setting up the first celebrity edition of the U.K. show to be more “noisy” than Peacock’s series
Why Beast Games isn’t a smart format for unscripted producers to chase despite its numbers for Amazon
What makes a new unscripted format “a huge risk” for buyers despite lower costs than scripted
What shocked Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk about production of the reality competition spinoff