I finished Season 1 of The Anonymous (USA/Peacock), a social strategy game from the same production company that does the US and UK versions of The Traitors.
The premise is interesting. People live together (like they do on Big Brother) and build relationships. Then they go into a lair with individual rooms, adopt handles, and engage in an anonymous chat, where they talk sh!t about each other and lobby for people to be booted. Then each player (only their handle is revealed) votes to put someone up for elimination. Then they leave the lair to chat IRL and strategize. Each player then returns to the lair to take a test to try to match each handle with the person behind it. Whoever was most successful at hiding their real identity becomes The Anonymous and decides which of the nominated players goes home. Every so often the handles are refreshed so that you’ve never “figured it out” for good.
There are challenges to build the prize pot, and some of them also enable one or more players to win safety from being put up for elimination.
I liked the deception that comes with having to act differently online vs IRL, the visuals (it was shot in a gorgeous region of Spain on a property with wild architecture) and the cast, which included a Big Brother winner, the daughter of a two-time Survivor winner and Andy King from the infamous Fyre Festival fiasco.
I did not like how much screen time they gave to a Yankee Swap-style game that was used in many episodes to determine safety and played a huge role in the finale. While it served a purpose to showcase how good the players were at deception, it made for boring TV.
Would watch again, but I might fast forward through the Yankee Swap stuff.