Traitors in the Workplace: Why The Celebrity Traitors Explains Workplace Culture Better Than HR Ever Could
5 min read
Watching The Celebrity Traitors (BBC, 2025) revealed that workplaces mirror a traitor economy where manipulation, suspicion, and alliances drive success, not merit. The show exposes organisational dynamics – gaslighting, betrayal, loyalty – that remain hidden behind HR gloss. It illustrates how systems reward comfort and conformity while punishing honesty and difference. This series isn't just entertainment; it’s a blueprint of real workplace behaviour, demonstrating how fragile trust, fear, and power distort culture. It urges us to recognise these unspoken rules and envision healthier, more transparent environments.
It was on a visit to my aunts that I was first introduced to The Celebrity Traitors, and like the rest of the UK population I was hooked after just one episode. Cue the obligatory binge-watch to catch up – including the Uncloaked aftershow, of course – and the desperate anticipation for the next episode. I knew I was in deep. But what was it that got me #obsessed – because Traitors as a series has been on our TV screens for the past few years, yet it never came close to being on my watchlist?
The moment the game felt familiar
Certainly, there was a fortuitous case of right time, right place. And the celebrity line up was probably the best I’ve ever seen for a reality TV show. But what thunderstruck me was that watching The Celebrity Traitors was like watching a documentary about the modern workplace! Because what the show reveals – painfully, absurdly, and even hilariously – is that most workplaces are not collaborative ecosystems. They are traitor-based economies. And The Celebrity Traitors is the most accurate team training video ever made.
The show finally made visible the social architecture many of us have been navigating our entire working lives. If you’ve ever wondered why the colleague who lied about you got promoted, or why the one who sabotaged your project received sympathy, or why HR seemed more traumatised by the bully’s tears than your complaint – The Celebrity Traitors depicts it all. Here the manipulation was televised, the gaslighting was subtitled, and the betrayals were celebrated as gameplay instead of buried under “team dynamics” and “organisational fit”.
The Celebrity Traitors as a workplace simulator
I am sure most people don’t need a reality show to tell them that workplaces can feel unpredictable, unfair, or quietly hostile. They already know it. Anyone who has ever tried to navigate office politics, manage conflicting personalities, or survive performance cultures has experienced how quickly trust erodes and how easily suspicion spreads. Modern workplaces tell us we’re part of a “team”, but most people learn, sooner or later, that the real game operating underneath it all is far more disjointed, far more broken, far more ruthless, and far less honest than the job description suggests.
Many of us are, or were, that group of people entering a system believing it will reward skill, competence, fairness, and collaboration; only to discover that the real determinants of survival are perception, personality, social interpretation, and the unwritten hierarchy of whose behaviour is considered “normal”, “credible”, or “threatening”.
The Celebrity Traitors wasn’t fictional. It was familiar. It is not a metaphor for workplace life; it is a blueprint of how many workplaces already operate. And what unfolds is a portrait of employment systems that are held together by unacknowledged dynamics.
Watching you see how quickly people gravitate toward those who feel “safe” or “familiar”; how suspicion attaches itself to difference; how social charm outranks logic; and how easily narratives are formed from single words, off-hand expressions, or the discomfort of others. You also see how intelligence creates unease, how truth rarely protects the truth-teller, and how harm is reframed as necessity when it benefits a group. The mechanics might be exaggerated for television, but the experience and effects are entirely recognisable.
HR will never explain your workplace this honestly
What the show captures – and what many workplaces obscure – is that systems often do not reward clarity, integrity, or competence. They reward comfort. They reward predictability. They reward those who fit the dominant narrative. And they punish those who disrupt it, even unintentionally.
Workplace HR is designed to maintain the illusion: the illusion of fairness. Of process. Of professionalism. Of ‘we take these matters very seriously’. But The Celebrity Traitors is the workplace – stripped of HR gloss and PowerPoints, exposing the raw truth of how people actually behave and the real rules that govern them. Those who manipulate best are rewarded. The loudest voice beats the smartest mind. Sympathy flows upward, not downward. Integrity is liability. And the system survives by collectively ignoring what everyone secretly knows. And if you might be able to see – let alone call out – the things other people benefit from pretending aren’t there – that makes you a threat. And threats must be removed early.
The Celebrity Traitors uncovers the things we are not supposed to name in real workplaces. Watching these celebrities navigate suspicion, alliances, misinterpretations, power, charisma, fragility, and fear in real time made visible what organisations usually try to hide: the unspoken systems that decide who survives and who gets sacrificed. Because in many organisations, survival hinges less on formal performance indicators and more on the informal, often unconscious ways people navigate threat, difference, authority, and ambiguity. The Celebrity Traitors openly visualises the forces that result in cultures where perception becomes evidence, alliances become truth, and people are evaluated not by what they contribute but by how their presence makes others feel.
It shows how quickly a group can turn on someone who speaks too directly or analyses too deeply. It shows how charm can override behaviour, how tears can shift moral judgment, how silence is interpreted based on who is silent, and how group decisions are frequently driven by fear rather than reason. It also shows how people justify harm when the outcome appears noble, how emotional narratives overshadow facts, and how easily collective thinking can be swayed by confidence instead of accuracy.
And this is not unique to any industry, nationality, or organisational culture. It is a human pattern: systems built on denial require certain people to become invisible, certain people to become scapegoats, and certain people to become untouchable. And unless a system is deliberately designed to counteract these patterns they will regularly surface on their own.
Why this is a series, not a single blog
This series, Traitors in the Workplace, begins here – with the recognition that what happens in the castle is not just gameplay. It is a reflection of what happens in meetings, interviews, restructures, appraisals, conflict, decision-making, and culture-building. It is a reminder that the systems we work within are not neutral and that the dynamics shaping our professional lives are often farcical long before people try to make them appear to be logical.
The purpose of this series is not to critique a television programme. It is to use the programme as a lens – a way of understanding the structures, assumptions, and hidden rules that define modern work. Through this lens, we can examine how meritocracy collapses under scrutiny, how intelligence becomes suspect, how neurodivergent people are treated unequally, how class shapes credibility, how language becomes evidence, and how organisations build cultures that depend on quiet forms of harm.
More importantly, it creates space to imagine what healthier systems could look like – environments where clarity is valued, difference is understood rather than feared, and people are not penalised for seeing or speaking the truth.
Welcome to Traitors in the Workplace. It’s time to look beneath the cloak.
