The Mole’s Producer Hopes You’ll Try to Outsmart the Show

Pranav is right there on LinkedIn, listing the complex legal papers he helped write: Does that mean he’s just pretending he can’t figure out a system for counting foreign currency? Meanwhile, it’s easy to find an old interview with Avori where she talks about being a gamer, so does that mean she’s good with strategy?

These are the questions that can transform Netflix’s reboot of The Mole from a casual weekend binge into a full-time obsession.

Just like its predecessor, the new version of the reality competition series, which premieres October 7, has a group of contestants complete challenges to win money. (Read our review.) The catch is that one of them is “the mole,” a saboteur who’s been planted in the group with the express purpose of making them fail. At the end of every episode, contestants answer questions about who the mole might be, and the person who knows the least gets sent home.

This creates a delicious amount of tension in the group, since nobody knows who to trust, and that twisted thrill extends to the audience as well. Every time someone reads a map incorrectly or even, say, mispronounces the name of a city, it’s tempting to leap up from the couch and make accusations.

This armchair sleuthing was part of the fun when the series premiered on ABC way back in 2001, but now that the show is airing in the iPhone age, there are countless ways to hunt for clues about who’s mole-ing around.

Series producer Chris Culvenor hopes we try them all. “It’s very easy to google someone and see what they've done,” he tells Primetimer. “So certainly we had to think about, ‘Okay, every one of these contestants will be googled, and what's going to show up? Is it going to reveal anything?’ And I love that. If we do this right, hopefully the entire world is collectively taking screen grabs or collectively writing their lists of clues and suspects.”

He adds that there are Easter eggs hidden throughout the series, and it’s a safe bet that someone’s going to start collecting them on Twitter or Reddit. “We want to create a whodunit that the whole world can solve together,” he says.

The trickiest part is getting the mystery right. Culvenor notes, “The challenges have to be layered enough to have opportunities for sabotage, but they can’t be so complex that the audience can’t follow what the group is trying to accomplish. Otherwise, it’s too frustrating.”

He points to the very first episode as an example of what works. The group is divided into three teams, and each team has a simple task: Find and retrieve a hidden case filled with cash. However, since everyone’s divided, they can’t all watch each other, and with three tasks to be completed, there are constant opportunities for the mole to wreak havoc.

That said, some of the most important moments aren’t even group challenges. In one early episode, for instance, the contestants enter a room by themselves, where they find a stack of dossiers about everyone else in the game. If they decide to peek at the files, they’ll learn important secrets about the other players, but if nobody peeks, then the group wins prize money. It’s a fiendish way of forcing everyone, including home viewers, to consider their own scruples. “At its heart, it's obviously an individual game, despite the group element,” Culvenor says. “So whether you're the mole or not, there are these moral dilemmas. They have to decide if they’re going to help themselves or benefit the group. It really sets the tone.”

Speaking of moral dilemmas: What about the mole? What’s in it for them? Though the mole gets paid a set fee for participating, Culvenor thinks there’s a bigger draw. “A huge amount of the appeal of being a mole is the opportunity to be the person who orchestrates all of the chaos,” he says. “They want to have fun and cause trouble. It's sort of like a badge of honor.”

And if the mole can fool the internet, even for a few weeks, then that might be the biggest reward of all.

Mark Blankenship has been writing about arts and culture for twenty years, with bylines in The New York Times, Variety, Vulture, Fortune, and many others. You can hear him on the pop music podcast Mark and Sarah Talk About Songs.