On Thursday night The Traitors ended its barnburner second season, a major television event that wouldn’t have been at all possible had Peacock treated the second season the way they did the first. The American adaptation of the hit international reality series debuted in January 2023 as a binge, and swiftly emerged as one of the first new reality hits in years. But by switching to a week-to-week release for its second season, populated entirely by reality stars from other franchises, Peacock kept a hungry horde of fans begging for more backstabbing week after week. Emerging victorious, but not unscathed or without controversy, are winners Chris “CT” Tamburello and Trishelle Cannatella.

The U.S. version of The Traitors is, yes, about gameplay, essentially a lavish version of the party game Mafia in which “the faithful” try to find “the traitors” among them. But The Traitors is also about host Alan Cumming delivering arch monologues in ornate costumes, all while having the time of his life and usurping the position of the current greatest host on television (Sorry RuPaul). Mostly, this season of The Traitors has been about strategies from other franchises going head-to-head, the contrast between the big personalities that come out swinging versus those that fly under the radar, and, well, the memes. The Traitors has been a reliable weekly meme factory to make any show on television, unscripted or otherwise, seethe with envy.

The Traitors franchise began in 2021 with the Netherlands’ version De Verraders and has since launched spinoffs around the globe. As the season finale of the UK version’s second season was boasting series high ratings, the new US season was emerging as the season’s most watched unscripted streaming series. Indeed, The Traitors is proving a much needed megahit for Peacock: the season premiere was the streamer’s most watched season premiere ever, netting a 75% growth over the previous season. But The Traitors should be more than everyone’s new favorite TV franchise–it should be the final nail in the coffin to the streaming binge drop model.

Every week, the show’s tensions mounted towards this week’s finale, an event that wouldn’t feel so seismic if not for the weekslong stream of drama it provided. After recent weeks saw the ousting of the game’s most dominant personalities, the remaining castmates were those who had been more under-the-radar–and therefore more unpredictable–throughout the season.

The final showdown was not traitors-versus-faithfuls, but between trusted faithfuls. After Below Deck’s Kate Chastain was the final ousted traitor, the season’s most unbreakable alliance between The Real World-ers CT and Trishelle  was dramatically tested when the latter accused the former of traitorous behavior. They ultimately emerged victorious (and reconciled) together, but not without booting fellow faithful Shahs of Sunset Mercedes “MJ” Javid as collateral damage. With these whiplash-inducing twists, this constant reversal of control of the game to the most unexpected of its players is a quintessential example of what has led to The Traitors becoming the weekly appointment watch of the moment.

Half of the fun of The Traitors is talking about it. The players’ strategies invite immediate debate, particularly when they apply tactics from their previous competition show appearances, like Sandra Diaz-Twine’s stealthy social tactics that earned her two Survivor wins. The Traitors fandom is like witnessing colliding superstorms, Bravo fans colliding with Survivor diehards converging with The Challenge devotees. Everyone got to see their favorites doing what they do best while the previously uninitiated got to fall in love with them at the same time. And the star of the season was inarguably Phaedra Parks, with viewers idolizing her endless quotability, shipping her and CT, and marveling at her ferocity in the roundtables. Even the game’s worst players–with affection, MJ and Shereé Whitfield, sorry queens–could set the memes ablaze every Thursday night. Watching The Traitors feels like a communal experience that only weekly network competition shows like Survivor and RuPaul’s Drag Race can deliver, with all of the instant memes and analysis of gameplay that comes from the most beloved of them.

The Traitors features two games of deception: the first is the traitors attempting to avoid detection, obviously, but the second is the producers of the show preventing us from predicting where the drama is heading. When Big Brother’s Janelle Pierzina was shown on the right track of a traitor’s identity in one episode, her forceful certainty surprisingly led to her banishment in the next. The show has mastered the art of manipulating audience expectations, using weekly installments to its advantage–we the audience are the faithful to the producers mischievous traitors.

Take the cliffhanger ahead of the season’s sixth episode: with the faithful vultures circling in on traitors Survivor’s Parvati Shallow and Big Brother’s infamous deceiver Dan Gheesling, fans largely anticipated a showdown between these two infamous reality competition titans. Dan and Parvati had been under an intensifying spotlight from the faithful in previous weeks, and it looked like Dan would repeat his legendary Big Brother narrow evasion (known as “Dan’s Funeral”) by turning on Parvati in order to appear like a faithful and escape impending banishment.

Plot twist: Dan targeted his other fellow traitor Phaedra, who had until then advanced without an iota of suspicion. Dan was still banished, but set in motion a more compelling and tense story for the beloved Phaedra, forced to shift her initial strategy of flying under the radar.

This kind of narrative deception wouldn’t be as effective or addictive in a binge model. If the multi-episode saga of Dan’s ousting had dropped all at once, he might have seemed like simply a poor player rather than a major driver of its overall narrative.

The blurred lines between heroes and villains that The Traitors constructs–Does Peter’s insistence on being a moral center of a silly game make you root for him less? Does Sandra make some solid points about why a faithful would want to keep a known traitor in the game?–cannot be fully digested overnight, or in one sitting. And that’s to say nothing of the showstopper scenes — John’s “duchess of deception” monologue, MJ’s awkward shuffle away from the Peter pals, “Not my Bergalicious!” — that have taken on entire lives of their own as the season has continued.

The binge model leaves less room for audiences to obsess over every single detail over how a player helps or hinders their chances at winning. Take popular competition shows like Love Is Blind or The Circle whose episodes drop in binge blocks: even if they maintain their popularity, their dominance as widely and passionately discussed shows has faded along with their novelty. A week-to-week model allows The Traitors to maintain this type of rabid fandom the likes Survivor and The Bachelor continue to feed.

As the series looks toward the future, with fans already outspoken on who should be cast (America’s Next Top Model contestants, please) and their ideas to twist or improve the show’s format, that foundation of obsession that The Traitors has laid for us every week has the makings of a global franchise built to last.