The Trust: A Game of Greed is a Frankenstein’s monster of new reality TV. It borrows parts from its contemporaries and glues them together in the latest iteration of the “social experiment”.
In this case, 10 strangers from a wide range of age groups and professions are given a prize pot of $250,000 (£196,000). “They all start as winners and they can all leave as winners … if they share,” says the presenter, Brooke Baldwin, a former CNN host. All they have to do is trust each other to split the cash, even when that trust is put to the test with a series of provocations, such as ranking each other on who is the smartest, or voting on who has been the most promiscuous.
Clearly, The Trust gives itself away with its subtitle. You can’t call yourself a game of greed and then expect viewers to wonder if the contestants will push for utopia. This is not a show filled with people sharing resources or allocating greater amounts of money to those with the greatest need. It’s a programme with a Hobbesian view of human nature built into its premise; it works only if people will betray each other when a “life-changing” amount of money is dangled in front of their eyes. Play fair? Stick to the plan? “The world doesn’t work that way,” says one contestant, grimly.
The size of the prize pot and the lengths people are asked to go to for it is very Squid Game: The Challenge. The setting is a mixture of Love Is Blind, Love Island and Survivor, as is the “trust ceremony”, in which contestants must tell Baldwin whether they will vote someone out of the house – thus increasing their share of the pot – or refuse to do so. They live together for the duration, as on Big Brother, which leads to rapid bonding and talk of how they will always love each other and will always be a family, even after a mere 24 hours together.
Of course, its closest relative is The Traitors. The Trust is like a bootleg handbag version of the hit show, where the font is the same, but the brand name is “Traytors” and the zip comes off when you touch it. They sit around a table, arguing about whether they will vote and who deserves to go. Then they head to the top of a cliff and, when they are alone, do everything they said they wouldn’t do.
Like The Traitors, The Trust proves that people are terrible at reading other people. Assumptions are made about who is trustworthy and who isn’t. They get themselves embroiled in the dead-certain logic of reality TV, which unravels when you take a second to think about it. “We can’t all make it to the end,” says one contestant, gravely. You literally can! That was explained at the outset of the show! It’s one of the fundamental rules of the game!
As with The Traitors, this is reality TV in its normcore era, where not everyone looks like a model and producers have realised the value of putting people over 35 with opinions on screen. However, this is a US production, so its brushstrokes are bigger, broader and cruder. One contestant declares himself to be “1,000% honest”, upping the percentage stakes with gusto.
But it sacrifices wit and warmth for drama. It has been cast with conflict in mind. There isn’t so much a villain edit, in which one player is singled out for the baddie treatment, as a villain sweep; it’s hard to get behind anyone. It’s a game of greed, after all.
This is a devious competition, then, in which people mostly stab each other in the back. It’s very good at conjuring up shock-horror-gasp moments of betrayal and bad behaviour. Baldwin’s presence suggests that more news reporters should be sent into the fray of reality TV. She asks smart and direct questions, taking it all more seriously than it deserves to be taken. It leaves me wondering if Emily Maitlis should be looking for her next gig at Casa Amor.
But there is an ickiness to The Trust that something like The Traitors simply doesn’t possess. People come into it with traumatic backstories that seem far too awful to be called upon in this sort of environment. Hearing about people’s genuine pain adds an unpleasantly sour note to the “life’s not fair” thrust of what is ultimately a silly TV competition.
Still, it’s gripping, if gruesomely so. The Traitors is only on three nights a week, after all.
• The Trust: A Game of Greed is on Netflix now.
