On a show as high stakes as The Traitors — with some portion of $250,000 and the threat of national embarrassment on the line — missteps are inevitable. When a contestant flails through a roundtable or votes against their own interests, it’s important to remember that these are not master tacticians but reality stars (yes, even the “gamers”). Even by those standards, however, it’s hard to justify Colton Underwood’s ploy to “hold [Lisa Rinna] hostage” in the most recent episode of the Peacock series’ fourth season. “I want to win this thing with you,” he tells her in a private moment. “I will protect you at the roundtable if you protect me in the turret.”
What’s the endgame here? Unlike almost all of his hunches, Underwood is right about Rinna being a Traitor, but the rules dictate that a Faithful and a Traitor can’t win together, a fact both players are well aware of. One could argue that Underwood is making a bold, potentially self-sacrificing move to throw Rinna off her game, but that’s a generous interpretation for a player who has prioritized dramatics over thoughtful maneuvers. (And why would that be described as a hostage situation anyway?) The likelier explanation for Underwood’s move is that he’s more interested in triggering Rinna’s inner Housewife and making a moment than he is in winning The Traitors. To paraphrase an Oscar-snubbed wicked witch, Underwood isn’t really seeking good, just seeking attention.
When asking yourself why Underwood is doing too much, it’s worth considering that his image (much like Elphaba’s) is in dire need of a refresh. His performance on The Traitors isn’t simply an attempt to raise his profile — it’s part of a larger effort to reclaim and redefine his public persona.
In case you’ve missed his origin story from nearly every confessional he’s had on the show thus far, Underwood began his career as a professional football player. From there, he became a contestant on the Becca Kufrin season of The Bachelorette, notable mostly for his self-professed virginity. After a stint on Bachelor in Paradise, he leveled up to becoming the titular Bachelor, still a virgin (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) and an incredible athlete, if his ability to jump a very tall fence was any indication. But while he was never a favorite among Bachelor Nation, Underwood’s public image took its heaviest hit in 2020 when his ex-girlfriend and former Bachelor co-star Cassie Randolph filed a restraining order against him, accusing him of stalking her.
The allegations against Underwood, including the particularly troubling detail that Randolph claimed he had installed a tracking device on her car, have dogged him since, even after Randolph dropped the order. When he came out of the closet in 2021, a journey depicted on the Netflix show Coming Out Colton, he faced his fair share of suspicion. In a review of the docuseries, Esquire suggested the show was “calculated,” an obvious attempt for Underwood to “rehabilitate his image.” Variety was even harsher, calling Coming Out Colton a “distasteful extension of a brand that doesn’t mean much to begin with.” Even as Underwood has strived to start anew as a gay TV personality, popping up on The Masked Singer and hosting the virginity-themed dating show Are You My First?, he has struggled to escape his allegedly misogynist past. Along with a variety of wannabe Princess Diana outfits, this is the baggage he’s brought with him to the Traitors castle — and if he wants us to forget all about it, his aggressive moves toward the women in the game, not to mention his unfortunate use of the word hostage, don’t seem to be helping.
The twitchy intensity of Underwood the Traitors player is comprehensible (if not less annoying) when you examine it in the context of someone desperate for a rebrand. The problem isn’t so much that Underwood is trying to reintroduce himself to the viewing audience but that he’s muddling whatever his new image is meant to be. Over the course of the first six episodes of the season, he has tried to position himself as both a Pilot Pete–style Traitor hunter and a merciless manipulator. “I would love to be a Traitor,” he says in a season-premiere confessional. “I feel like, here, I can just hit that switch and be cold-blooded.” Fair enough that he would make gameplay adjustments once he was passed over for the turret, but he’s carried that bloodlust with him throughout the season. His pursuit of Traitors — both in whipping votes from fellow players and at the roundtable — keeps taking a turn into nastiness, most notably in his episode-five takedown of Big Brother alum Tiffany Mitchell. You can’t be consistently loud and wrong if you’re looking for a hero edit.
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That Underwood continues to assert himself as a leader of the Faithful despite multiple failures is not helping him earn the trust of the other players. (“It makes me feel like a puppet,” Olympian Johnny Weir says of Underwood’s strategy.) After promising to “wear the pie for the rest of this game” if he’s wrong about Mitchell, he admits in a confessional that he will not be changing his gameplay. But in addition to alienating his fellow Faithfuls, Underwood’s hubristic approach is not endearing him to viewers, including past cast members of The Traitors. Following Mitchell’s banishment from the castle, season-three Traitor Danielle Reyes took to X, writing, “The zero remorse, ten-toes-down attitude with no concern for collateral damage? That’s nasty work. Moving like a Traitor while hiding behind a Faithful title is wild.”
She’s certainly not alone. On Threads, the replies to Underwood’s post of screenshots from the last episode are largely negative. “Colton, might want to read the room,” one reply says. “You’re not a fan favorite.” When Peacock released a statement decrying “cyberbullying and harassment,” it was widely perceived to be a response to the heat Underwood is facing, especially after Rinna shared that online attention was “causing real problems for Colton.”
On its face, the pushback toward Underwood is irrelevant to the game itself. It ultimately doesn’t matter if the people at home think you’re being mean — this is The Traitors, not America’s Next Top Best Friend. The problem is that Underwood isn’t playing to win, which he all but admitted when he told Rinna, “I’ll take us both down just to get you out.” He’s playing for the kind of fame that would allow him a fresh start.
You can compare what he’s doing to season-two Traitor Phaedra Parks, who made her grand return to the NBCUniversal family after being fired from The Real Housewives of Atlanta in 2017 for allegedly spreading a false rumor that Kandi Burruss had tried to sexually assault Porsha Williams. Parks didn’t win The Traitors, but she was responsible for so many instantly quotable lines that most people seemed to forgive her past transgression. Bravo certainly did, inviting her first onto Married to Medicine and then back onto RHOA. But if Underwood is hoping for the same kind of redemption arc, fan-favorite status should be the goal. And as it stands, the moments he’s creating are more irksome than iconic.
In Underwood’s defense, his path forward was always going to be complicated. His most sympathetic moment on The Traitors to date was his episode-five roundtable confrontation with the loathsome blowhard Michael Rapaport, who suggested that Underwood would be especially good at deception. Underwood took the comment as an unsubtle dig at his years in the closet — as did several other players, all of whom enthusiastically voted to banish Rapaport. But even a friendly postmortem interview with Underwood in Entertainment Weekly included the “Streisand Effect” aside: “As a condition of the interview, EW was not allowed to ask any questions regarding Colton’s ex Cassie.” Realistically, there is no clean slate for Underwood, and with that in mind, his attention-grabbing strategy may not be entirely off base. If he’s not going to emerge from The Traitors as a hero, making good TV can at least be a great distraction. At some point, ideally before he gets banished, he may discover what that looks like.
