Most popular reality TV is made for passive viewing and social media. That's why we have a million shows about the dumbest people you've ever seen trying to get dates with equally dumb and terrible people. It's no surprise, then, that shows like Netflix's The Mole are hard to come by. Not only is the production value of this show something to marvel at, but even the low budget ABC, Australian, and UK versions of the early 2000s made for excellent rewatchable television that followed ten or twelve completely ordinary people trying to complete cool or hilarious missions together while sussing out which of their teammates was a secret saboteur. This is why you should watch The Mole.
So many people growing up have at least contemplated what it might like to be a secret agent, but this is the first and only show to make that dream come true for your average Joes and Janes. This show is a reminder that reality TV is supposed to be about real people, not some Instagram models who want more followers to help them start making money off sponsorships.
Unfortunately, most consumers and producers of reality content don't care about the potential of reality TV. All they want is some cheap, easy content that doesn't make you think or care and that can be easily replaced with a new cast year in, year out. But just because I'm not in the mood to watch scripted programming, it doesn't mean I want something shallow and vapid. There's so much potential in the world of unscripted television, and yet we keep getting stuck with these ridiculous dating based shows that claim to be social experiments but are really just giving toxic and trashy people a platform to start their careers.
I'm not a person who enjoys watching incredibly insufferable, unintelligent, melodramatic twenty-somethings with only "mean girl" or "alpha male" as their defining personalities run around half naked trying to sleep with each other or bash each other for no reason. And honestly, I think most people don't enjoy that either.
It's not that the concept of a dating show is inherently bad, which is a conversation for another day, but there's a massive community of regular people out there who don't want to waste their time with dating shows, don't care about simple episodic game shows, don't have any interest in specific competition shows like cooking or baking, and don't care for the repetitive and overly simple, easily reproducible long-runners such as Survivor or Big Brother that rely on childish drama — people who just wanna see others just like them undertaking awesome tasks and challenges to win a boat load of money.
The Mole is the perfect reality competition for people that want something smart and fun. It requires both the contestants and the viewers to have some level of intelligence to be able to not only solve puzzles and employ strategies, but also to be observant and analytic. For anyone who hasn't seen the show, the Netflix reboot is a great place to familiarize yourself with the game.
Shot in incredible locations in Australia, this version has some amazing challenges including: wilderness treasure hunt, jail break, air and water adventures, bank robbing, mountain climbing, and more. Most of the contestants on this show's so-far only season are also pretty great — sure, there were a few eyebrow raising moments, maybe some moments of stupidity, a couple self-righteous characters, and one flat-out jerk, but overall everyone's watchable which is an incredibly rare find for reality TV.
There's no one trying to create drama for the sake of drama since having a mole in their midst is drama enough, there's not really any way to backstab people, and there's no weird forced storylines or romance attempts. The only time some people were annoying was if they accused other contestants of not being team players or not having integrity just because they prioritized their standing over the money because that's literally the nature of this game.
What's really unique about this show is that the contestants must all work together while simultaneously mistrusting one another. No one knows who the mole is, except for the mole, of course. They have to help each accomplish tasks in order to increase the final money pot, but they must also be on the lookout for any suspicious activity and differentiate that activity from the mole versus people trying to place suspicion on themselves so that they can get other contestants eliminated.
How do they do this, you might ask?
At the end of each day, they take a quiz about the mole. Who they are, what their hometown is, what their birthday is, what color shirt they wore that day, and so on. This is probably the most difficult part because the contestants have to essentially survive and figure out the correct person without putting all their eggs in one basket or spreading themselves so thin that they're eliminated, because whoever scores the least on the quiz is GONE. Ultimately, it doesn't matter how much money you've personally earned because if you can get everyone else to earn the money while you simply suss out the mole and make it to the end, you played the game correctly.
As cool as the Netflix version is though, it pales in comparison to the original versions, which for some reason aren't available on any streaming platform but can all be found here on YouTube: The Mole King
Here's the Season 1 Episode 1 of The Mole (US), hosted by Anderson Cooper, to get you started. You'll notice that in these versions, the mole is a lot less obvious than the Netflix version, where the mole was extremely clear since probably episode 3 or 4. And the actual contestants in these seasons are generally a lot smarter, too, and more importantly, don't take gameplay personally unless, of course, they're faking it.
Of course, these versions are technically based on a Belgian show, but I haven't seen that and therefore can't comment. I've seen seasons 1 and 2 of the US version (3 and 4 are celeb editions which I don't care for), seasons 1 through 4 of the Australia version hosted by the ever-amused Grant Bowler and sporting one of the best theme songs I've ever heard, and season 1 of the UK version, which all feature similar setups of 10 to 12 extremely regular people undertaking various tasks that are either cool or hilarious to watch.
One particularly funny task is the probability task, where they use some sort of probability mechanism to assign one of two tasks (one preferable, one not so much) to a contestant. Some of these were dye your hair or shave your head, get a tattoo or get a piercing, paint a nude or be painted in the nude, and wear a cast on one leg or wear a cast on each leg. If everyone completes their task, then the group earns money for the pot.
This is one of the things I love about this show, seeing normal people do absolutely crazy stuff like this.
A lot of the seasons also open with some type of skydiving or jumping out of a plane or helicopter challenge which is super sick. Sometimes there are tasks where one or two contestants have to secretly bet on whether others will be successful in their tasks. There are also team missions like keeping bad guys out of a fort, guiding your partner in a maze in the dark while two attackers lurk, and relay races carrying super large greased up gnomes.
This is the sort of creativity I want to see in a reality competition show. I want to see super weird and random and adventurous challenges, I want to see normal people solve puzzles and figure things out, I want to see people running around a city of civilians carrying a mannequin and pretending to be a fugitive for $15,000. Like that's just so much fun, and I can't believe we have so few of these seasons.
I've been waiting for the next season of the Netflix version for well over a year now, and it's been longer since it actually came out. (And I'm definitely not gonna watch Traitors, which is just the poor man's Mole crossed with Survivor and has the stupidest premise I've ever seen.) I know production and filming of this type of show can't be easy or cheap, especially compared to many-season shows like The Circle, which are filmed entirely in one building with contestants never leaving.
Shows like this require more thought and money to produce and market than a lot of other reality shows. They're not just renting out a house or an island to stick people on for a couple weeks and telling them to flirt with or attack each other, and they can't get viewers easily just by showing people in swimsuits hooking up and crying about it. They're also not following people around with some cameras and showcasing their daily lives.
And yet, my hopes are up with this Netflix reboot. Although it has yet to capture the magic of the original, and certainly nowhere near matched the US show's $500k, $600k pots with its meager $101k, this is the exact type of competition reality TV I've been looking for my whole life.
With such a large subscriber base already in hand, all Netflix needs to do to ensure the success of this brilliant show is:
cast diverse groups of regular people (enough shows where everyone's 25), especially since the non Netflix versions had a wide variety of ages and even 70-year-olds could participate and make it as far as the finale
create and borrow/modify (from the previous editions) great challenges to become show staples and add more of them
end each episode with elimination like in the original
give the show a homepage banner whenever new episodes are out
change the show's rating to TV-14 or TV-PG since the only reason it's rated MA right now is a couple swear words in the whole show
market the show on social media in a way that creates weekly conversation
and sit back as families around the world tune in to watch a collective of cool regular people living the adventure of a lifetime.