A second season of The Mole has been ordered by Netflix after the reboot of the ABC reality competition series has performed beyond expectations on the streaming service.
The premise sees twelve contestants working together in challenges, adding money to a combined pot which will be claimed by just one of them at the end. Though, adding money to the pot doesn’t come that easily, with one player being a designated ‘mole’ tasked with sabotaging the group’s efforts. To win the final game, any given player must be the last one standing, exposing the mole before they can claim the cash prize.
Based on the ABC show The Mole, which was successful for five seasons from 2001-2009 and is itself based on the 1998 Belgian series De Mol, Netflix hopes to piggyback on the fame of both shows for future series. In the UK, BBC’s The Traitors has also found success with a very similar premise, setting up a camp murder-mystery game show where a group of contestants must find the traitors amongst them.
The popularity of such shows comes following the success of the Among Us video game, which has become something of an online sensation in recent years. Set on a spaceship, where a group of players must figure out who the traitor is whilst they go about mechanical chores, the developers of the game have stated that they were inspired by the party game Mafia and John Carpenter’s science fiction horror film The Thing when creating it.
Why exactly modern audiences have an obsession with backstabbing, we’re not too sure, but maybe it’s something to do with the split personalities people display online, where their digital avatars behave far differently from the person behind the screen.
Take a look at the trailer for season one of the Netflix series below.
