It’s Finally Good TV Season: How The Traitors Turns Television Into Social Culture

The nights are drawing in, the group chats are getting busier and suddenly everyone has an opinion about someone they've never met sitting around a round table in a Scottish castle.

It's officially good TV season.

And few programmes demonstrate the relationship between television and social media better than The Traitors.

The show's success isn't confined to the hour it spends on BBC One. Every episode creates theories, memes, TikToks, reaction videos, podcasts and conversations that continue long after the credits roll.

In 2026, Series 4 averaged 12.5 million viewers over 28 days, up 22% from Series 3. More than half of that audience - 6.6 million viewers - watched through BBC iPlayer. The launch reached 13.3 million viewers, while 3 million were aged 16-34.

Meanwhile, the BBC reported 37 million organic social views around The Traitors during January alone. That's what makes The Traitors particularly interesting to us at Pepper.

Social isn't competing with the television programme. It's making the television programme bigger. The programme ends, but the content doesn't.

The genius of The Traitors is that almost every episode leaves audiences with something to talk about.

Who's lying? Who's getting recruited? Who's about to be murdered? How has nobody noticed the extremely obvious Traitor? And why has everyone suddenly decided the most Faithful person in the castle is suspicious?

It's essentially a social content engine disguised as a television programme.

Before an episode, audiences speculate. During it, they react. Immediately afterwards, they analyse what happened. Then the memes, clips, podcasts and creator takes keep the story moving until the next episode.

The BBC itself has described the programme as creating "water-cooler moments", with social content giving viewers somewhere to share theories about the Faithfuls and Traitors.

Except the water cooler is now TikTok, WhatsApp, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube and whichever group chat is currently arguing about who should have been banished.

The Traitors gives audiences something to do

This is an important distinction for social strategy.

The most culturally relevant entertainment doesn't just give people something to consume. It gives them something to participate in.

The Traitors makes viewers amateur detectives.

Every expression, alliance, voting pattern and slightly suspicious breakfast conversation becomes evidence.

That naturally creates formats people can replicate themselves: prediction videos, evidence threads, rankings, polls, reaction memes and post-episode analysis. The BBC extends that further through Traitors: Uncloaked, giving audiences reveals, interviews and behind-the-scenes material once the main programme finishes.

Instead of the social team having to manufacture a conversation around the show, the format continually supplies audiences with reasons to create one themselves.

That's a lesson that goes far beyond television.

The best social moments aren't necessarily social-first

This is something we're particularly interested in at Pepper.

We spend a lot of time thinking about social-first content, but social-first thinking doesn't mean everything has to originate on social media.

A brilliant TV moment can become social content.

A streaming release can create a creator conversation.

A newspaper feature can become the starting point for a debate across TikTok.

A physical experience can generate hundreds of pieces of creator content.

The opportunity is in understanding what makes something travel.

With The Traitors, those ingredients are almost built into the format: dramatic reaction shots; distinctive characters; betrayals; confident accusations that turn out to be completely wrong; quotable arguments and sudden reveals.

A few seconds of television can become a meme that has almost nothing to do with The Traitors anymore.

The programme supplies the tension. Social supplies the shorthand.

That's when you've moved beyond promoting a programme and started creating culture around it.

Creators are becoming part of the TV ecosystem

We're also seeing the distinction between "TV talent" and "creator talent" disappear.

The 2026 Celebrity Traitors cast brings together broadcasters, actors, comedians, podcasters, musicians and digital creators, including YouTube creator King Kenny.

That mix matters because every person brings an existing community with them.

An actor brings one audience. A musician brings another. A podcaster brings another. A YouTube creator brings another.

Rather than thinking about casting purely in terms of celebrity recognition, it can also be viewed as audience portfolio building: bringing together people whose relevance travels through different corners of culture and media.

We've been thinking about this increasingly at Pepper too.

When we're working across creators, social, publishers, streaming and traditional media, the interesting question isn't simply "How many people does this person reach?"

It's "Which community do they give us access to, and where can we take that community next?"

Social can make appointment TV more valuable, not less

For years, social media and streaming were discussed as threats to traditional television.

The Traitors suggests a much more interesting relationship.

Its launch attracted 3 million 16-34-year-olds, while 57% of viewing for that episode came through iPlayer. Across Series 4, iPlayer represented 53% of the total 28-day audience.

People don't have to choose between social and television.

They discover a meme. See a creator talking about the programme. Catch up on iPlayer. Watch the next episode. Send a reaction to the group chat. See another clip on TikTok. Listen to Uncloaked. Come back tomorrow.

Every channel can feed another.

And crucially, social can actually give people a reason not to wait.

When everyone is talking about the same reveal, being part of the moment has value. Spoilers are everywhere. The jokes make more sense immediately. You want your theory on record before Claudia proves you spectacularly wrong.

That's something on-demand media hasn't removed: people still like experiencing culture together.

That's the opportunity we're seeing at Pepper

At Pepper, we're increasingly working at the point where social, creators and more traditional media channels meet.

For broadcasters, streaming platforms and publishers, that means looking beyond social as somewhere to distribute trailers, clips or links after the "main" content has been created.

Instead, we can think about social from the beginning.

What will people debate? What will creators want to react to? What access can we give them? Which moment could become a meme? Which talent brings an audience we don't currently reach? What happens after somebody sees the clip? Where do we want them to go next?

For brands, there's an opportunity too.

Cultural moments like The Traitors create shared behaviours and language that brands can participate in, provided there's a relevant reason for them to be there.

And for media owners, there's an even bigger opportunity: designing IP that doesn't stop at the edge of the original channel.

Make something worth talking about

The lesson from The Traitors isn't "post more clips from your TV programme".

It's that the strongest social strategies give audiences something to do.

Something to predict. Something to disagree about. Someone to support. Something to remix. Something to send to the group chat with absolutely no context.

Series 4 generated 37 million organic social views in January, while TikTok activity around #TheTraitors has reached billions of views globally. The latter isn't a measure of the BBC's UK campaign, but it demonstrates just how far the format has travelled beyond its owned channels.

That's the real relationship between social and television right now.

Social media isn't killing good TV. Good TV is giving social media something worth talking about.