If you’re one of the millions of viewers biting your nails each week waiting for each new episode of BBC’s The Traitors, you’ll be familiar with the thrilling ingredients of shields, round tables, cloaks and murders that make the show so dramatically delicious.
The show’s format has been screened in more than 25 countries, with several markets – including France, Germany, the US and the UK – already airing second seasons. But its original version is Dutch, having been piloted as De Verraders in 2021.
It’s far from the first time formats from Dutch TV have hit big internationally: the small northern European country is behind a slew of hit shows including Big Brother, Deal or No Deal, The Voice and more.
So, what’s the secret behind Dutch dominance in the reality TV arena? Jasper Hoogendoorn, creative director at IDTV, the production company that masterminded The Traitors, reveals the show began with a dream, a book, and a party game. “As a kid, I played a game called Werewolves. I remember a friend accused me of being a werewolf, but I wasn’t. I felt so powerless.”
In the social deduction game Werewolves – also known as Mafia – a moderator assigns roles to a group of people. One group, known as the werewolves, is tasked with secretly “killing” another group, the villagers. To win, the surviving villagers must identify the werewolves among them before they are hunted.
Hoogendoorn was reminded of this childhood game after The Traitors’ co-creator Marc Pos approached him with an unscripted television idea based on a book detailing the 1629 shipwreck of Dutch vessel, Batavia. Marooned on an island, heightened tensions gave way to mutiny, with one group conspiring to murder their fellow survivors overnight.
The devious tale brought Hoogendoorn back to his Werewolves elimination, “my sense of powerlessness could be like the feeling they had on that island”. Hoogendoorn and Pos took historical drama and combined it with game strategy, adding some storytelling flair to map out De Verraders.
The BBC has confirmed a season three for the UK edition, which is presented by Claudia Winkleman and hooked more than 4m viewers last week.
Despite the show’s current success, Hoogendorn reveals it was initially a hard sell: “One network wanted viewers to guess who the traitors are,” he said. “I said, ‘No! It’s a psychological reality – as viewers we want you to experience both parts of the story, the group dynamics, the manipulation.”
For IDTV’s managing director, Michel Nillesen, Dutch domination of reality television comes down to risk. “I think that’s part of us being Dutch. Sometimes you lose something, sometimes you gain something.” Hoogendoorn enthusiastically agrees. “We have a saying in the Netherlands, to stand tall above the others, sometimes you’ll risk getting your head cut off!”
Dutch television creators are no strangers to adversity and criticism. When Big Brother debuted in 1999, its success in the Netherlands sparked moral outrage from media across the world.
The Washington Post observed there was nothing “particularly Dutch” about Big Brother, but lazily alluded to Amsterdam’s red-light district windows, which “serve as a reminder that people here don’t necessarily mind being watched”, while the Independent coined the term “sleaze and cheese TV”.
Since then, more than 500 series of Big Brother have aired across 65 markets, making it one of the most successful reality television shows ever. In 2023, ITV aired the 20th season of UK’s Big Brother after a five-year break, succeeding in pulling in over 2m viewers an episode.
Balázs Boross, a media scholar at the University of Amsterdam, says it is hard to explain why the Dutch are great at creating unscripted television formats without touching on national stereotypes. “Traditionally, the civil sector in the Netherlands is quite strong,” he says, hazarding a guess. “Finding consensus talking about societal issues, finding solutions, might be an aspect.”
Justine Huffmeijer, managing director of production company SimpelZodiak, part of the Banijay Media Group that oversees Big Brother, similarly credits the Netherlands’ “strong culture of collaboration” for their media achievements.
Dutch collaborative culture may be informed by the Netherlands’ political structure, which is characterised by a multiparty system. The country has been governed by coalitions for more than a century, as any party holding seats in parliament plays a role in coalition formation. In the 2023 election, 15 parties secured seats, and the current coalition negotiations are being led by the shock far-right winner, Geert Wilders. To establish a government with other parties, Wilders will need to moderate his hard-line views and seek consensus. This process can take months; in 2021, coalition talks lasted 271 days.
Dutch billionaire and media mogul John de Mol Jr is arguably the most influential figure on the unscripted television landscape. The man behind Big Brother, Deal or No Deal, Utopia and The Voice formats, he owns significant shares in several Dutch channels.
Boross comments that De Mol’s affiliation with Dutch networks enabled his out-of-the-box ideas to bloom: “He has the luxury as a producer to experiment with things that interest him.”
In a 2014 interview, De Mol said that the Netherlands provides the perfect test audience for new formats, “When it’s a real success in Holland, 99 out of 100 times, it works internationally,” he told FastCompany. “Look at my track record: all of the big hits we created in Holland worked globally.”
For IDTV creators, thinking of a new format that works successfully outside the Netherlands is key from the initial concept. “We’re a very small country, English is not our native language, so we have to come up with smarter ideas as to what format can be sold all over the world,” says Hoogendoorn. “We try to catch something of a zeitgeist.”
Hoogendoorn and Nillesen are tight-lipped about their next world-dominating format idea, but say it seeks to address a “blindspot” in the talent show arena. “Hopefully it’ll launch end of this year, and we’ll come up with something big again,” said Hoogendoorn.
Aside from networks and producers, Dutch participants must also be given credit for being the first to sign up for such unprecedented televised realities. De Verraders season one runner-up, model Loiza Lamers, believes the Netherlands’ keeps getting TV right because of the country’s innate playful nature. Like Hoogendoorn, she played party games like Werewolves growing up, and still has regular game nights with friends. “Shows like The Traitors are very familiar for everyone at home watching, because playing games is in our culture,” she reflects.
Francis van Broekhuizen is an opera singer who reached the last episode of De Verraders debut season, alongside Lamers. For her, the answer to Dutch success simply lies in human nature. “We always tend to portray ourselves as very tolerant people, and that’s totally not the case – we now voted for [far-right politician] Geert Wilders,” she chuckles.
“We think we have a leading moral position in the world. The Netherlands is a very nice country, but actually we are also just like everyone else, and we like to fuck each other over!”
