The Traitors Season 2 Picked the Perfect 'Murderers'

[Note: This post contains spoilers for The Traitors Season 2 three-part premiere.]

Dan Gheesling is considered one of the most brilliant game strategists Big Brother has ever seen. Phaedra Parks is one of the funniest, kookiest, and most devious Real Housewives ever. The producers of The Traitors U.S. have seen fit to pair them both up as the first Traitors of Season 2, and it's the most brilliant idea they could have possibly had.

For its second season, The Traitors U.S. has moved to a full cast of reality veterans, which is definitely an improvement on last season's half-celeb, half-normie season. But not all reality TV veterans are created equal, and even a quick glance at the 21 contestants this season reveals a divide. On one side are the folks from social-strategy competition shows like Survivor, Big Brother, and The Challenge. These players are the ones who got the biggest reaction when the Season 2 cast was announced: Gheesling, Survivor's Parvati Shallow and Sandra Diaz-Twine, The Challenge's Johnny Bananas and CT Tamburello. They're the ones with reputations for manipulation, lies, and deceit, all qualities which fit in perfectly with The Traitors.

The other side of the Season 2 cast is made up of people from lifestyle reality shows, either explicitly on Bravo or in the Bravo vein: Real Housewives, Shahs of Sunset, Bling Empire. The Bravo contingent didn't exactly shine in Season 1 (unless you're counting Kate Chastain's performative misery, which was indeed very entertaining). And the Season 2 group, which includes Parks, Shereé Witfield, Tamra Judge, and romantic partners Larsa Pippen and Marcus Jordan, didn't seem equipped to deal with the four-dimensional chess that the likes of Dan and Parvati have gotten up to on their shows.

That's why choosing Dan and Phaedra as the first Traitors is such a master stroke. It anticipates that things might devolve into factions, so now each "side" of the house has a representative as a Traitor. If Dan's going to keep his CBS reality folks around like a shield for him, he's going to need to manipulate Phaedra into doing it. And Phaedra is the perfect antidote to Dan: she's a kook, but she's also stubborn. She knows how to play dumber than she is. And she knows how to manipulate other people to advance her agenda.

They need to work together, and through the first three episodes, that goes pretty well. They're both wickedly delighted at the prospect of playing as Traitors. When they're asked to recruit one of the Faithful to be a third Traitor, they wisely pick Parvati, who will be a good strategist while also being more readily suspected as a Traitor than Dan or Phaedra would.

The story of Season 2 seems like it's going to center on the necessity of making allies across reality TV subgenres. Dan convinced Phaedra to murder Johnny Bananas right away (a blessed development, given how determined Bananas was to be the loudest voice in the room at all times), which means CT now needs to find another ally. Dan and Parvati being traitors leaves Janelle and Sandra adrift strategically, which will force them to play better.

Keeping Dan at cross-purposes with the CBS strategists also allows the Bravo/Housewives cast members to come into their own a little bit. While they're never going to come up with maneuvers as intricate as Dan's fake Big Brother funeral or Parvati's "Black Widow Brigade," people like Larsa, Tamra, and Shahs of Sunset's MJ Javid are getting by pretty well so far by applying what they know from their shows: social ostracization and gaslighting. It sucks for Drag Race fans, but Larsa and Tamra expertly twist Peppermint's words and turn a simple slip of the tongue into a damning confession of guilt. That's classic Housewives behavior.

Peppermint finds herself caught in the middle of the CBS schemers and the Bravo liars, in a third miscellaneous group of cast members from from non-strategic competition shows (The Bachelor, Love Island, Dancing with the Stars) or real-life fame. After the first three episodes, it doesn't seem like a coincidence that these in-betweeners have either been targeted or otherwise ostracized from the group. But there are signs of hope. The Bachelor's Peter Weber seems to be a keen observer, while Love Island's Carsten "Bergie" Bergersen seems to grow up a lot between Episode 1 and Episode 3.

An all-star season of a reality TV show is only as good as the returning contestants are at mixing up their old dynamics. It was fun watching Cirie Fields stampede to victory in The Traitors Season 1, but it wasn't exactly mind-blowing to watch the Survivor and Big Brother alums stick together all season. If a Dan-Phaedra partnership (with Parvati thrown in for good measure) can flourish, The Traitors could become the Super Bowl of reality TV: the championship event that cast members on every show have their eyes on.

The first three episodes of The Traitors Season 2 are streaming on Peacock. New episodes drop Fridays at 9:00 PM ET. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.