Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | February 2, 2026
This is how bad things are in the reality television world right now: A few weeks ago, Fox’s once hugely popular singing competition, The Masked Singer, unmasked Todd and Julie Chrisley, the Chrisley Knows Best stars making their first reality television appearance since being pardoned by the President for bank fraud. I happened to catch the reveal, if only to watch the judges, Robin Thicke, Ken Jeong, Rita Ora, and Jenny McCarthy, pretend to be excited. Only McCarthy pulled it off convincingly.
That moment felt like a perfect snapshot of where reality television has landed. The ecosystem has become a closed loop. Only a handful of franchises still create new reality stars, Survivor, The Real Housewives, and a few dating shows. Everyone else just recycles the same familiar faces from Dancing with the Stars to The Masked Singer, The Beast Games, a show called Extracted, and Traitors. Instead of discovery, we get toxic celebrity sludge.
That recycling is how we ended up four seasons into Traitors with Michael Rapaport, Colton Underwood, and a rotating roster of Housewives who have increasingly poisoned the well. For all of Alan Cumming’s campy fanfare, the show no longer feels like a playful celebrity version of Mafia. It now plays like a cutthroat, deeply personal, gamified extension of Housewives politics, where grudges matter more than strategy.
What are we even doing here? Where is the joy?
Two weeks after Michael Rapaport’s meltdown led to his banishment and one week after Ron Funches was essentially bullied off the show, Survivor winner Yam Yam Arocho was “murdered” in plain sight. Before being dragged away, he tossed a grenade by insisting that Lisa Rinna had killed him by kissing him on the cheek. He was right about the murder, if not the method.
With Lisa’s days clearly numbered, Rob Rausch (Love Island), another traitor, made the smartest move available. He used Yam Yam’s dying declaration to steer the vote toward his fellow traitor. It worked, but not without enraging the third traitor, Candiace Dillard Bassett, another Housewives alum. She refused to vote for either leading candidate and instead tossed a stray vote at Rob, which felt less like a strategy and more like a warning shot.
After the banishment, Candiace all but threatened to sabotage Rob’s game, even though doing so would directly undermine the premise of Traitors. It is one thing for traitors to turn on each other when the math demands it. That happens every season. It is another to target someone out of personal animus rather than gameplay.
To be fair, Candiace may have reasons not to trust Rob. His move was smart, but given his history and the online accusations of a pattern of sexism, it is not shocking that his decision to target two female co-traitors raised eyebrows. Based on the edit, and that is all any of us have, his gameplay itself seems clean. But baggage matters. When you cast people with controversial histories, that context inevitably bleeds into how audiences read their actions. Is Candiace being petty? Is Rob being sexist? Why not both?
This is the broader problem. We now live in a culture where celebrities are not only absolved of accountability for past behavior, but are actively rewarded for it with more reality television opportunities. Messy casting is the fastest route to messy drama. If those same people then go after each other on social media between episodes, even better for engagement.
It was not that long ago that Ken Jeong walked off the stage when The Masked Singer unmasked Rudy Giuliani. Now he stands there smiling as two people who committed bank fraud, and who should still be in prison, are greeted with applause and treated like folk heroes for getting away with it. That is the trajectory. Reality television casting is devolving fast. At this rate, we are probably only a couple more seasons of Traitors away from seeing the QAnon Shaman show up in a cloak at breakfast.
