Alan Cumming isn’t simply hosting The Traitors, he’s constructing it — castle, cloaks, and all.
In a recent interview with InStyle, Cumming laid out his approach to the Peacock reality competition: theatricality as infrastructure, fashion as storytelling, camp as competitive advantage. He doesn’t see himself as a moderator moving contestants through eliminations. He sees himself as an architect of a world viewers want to inhabit.
That distinction matters.
“Traitors came along at a time when, in our society, queer people are being persecuted and legislated against,” he said. “The show is so queer in its sensibility and its aesthetic and has a lot of queer people in it… People need to make more of a connection: all the things you love about this show are queer — gay, gay, gay in spirit.”
Reality television is littered with competent hosts who keep things moving, but what Cumming delivers is something rarer: a tonal signature so specific it becomes the brand itself. The Scottish brogue, the tartan looks, the gleeful menace; it all just comes together when contestants spiral into paranoia.
These aren’t flourishes.
They’re the reason people tune in live instead of waiting for clips.
The tea is, this strategy is working.
The Traitors has become one of Peacock’s flagship unscripted properties, generating the kind of social media engagement and cultural conversation that streaming platforms desperately chase.
Cumming’s presence has made the show event television in an era when that category barely exists.
What’s instructive here isn’t just Cumming’s talent—it’s how queer creative sensibility, deployed with full authority, can extend a show’s commercial lifespan. Camp isn’t decoration in this context. It’s differentiation.
The show’s aesthetic cohesion, its commitment to drama as spectacle, its refusal to play things straight—these are business decisions as much as creative ones.
Hollywood has spent years treating queer talent as a diversity line item.
Cumming’s Traitors run demonstrates something more valuable: queer vision as competitive edge. The show doesn’t succeed despite its theatricality. It succeeds because Cumming was given room to build something unmistakably his.
All seasons of The Traitors are streaming now on PEACOCK.
