Rapaport, by virtue of being a deeply tough hang, is a textbook chaos agent.
Photo: Euan Cherry/Peacock
The fourth season of The Traitors is here and, with it, a few guarantees: fabulous outfits for Alan Cumming and his beloved companion Lala, a cold Continental breakfast for the contestants, and one guy who’s dividing the house and the series’s audience. Last year, that was Tom Sandoval, who came into Alan’s Scottish castle on a wave of bad vibes thanks to the ongoing fallout of his national-news-generating breakup with Ariana Madix — but who eventually won people over with his puppylike enthusiasm at being on the show. The man and his outsize reactions were stealing scenes left and right! This season, the closest equivalent to Sandoval, who entered the show with no natural allies from either the Housewives or gamers groups, isn’t another reality star but an equally alienating actor: Michael Rapaport.
Some viewers will know Rapaport from his decadeslong acting career but also that one very irritating season of Justified; others will know him for his anti-Palestinian rants and hatred of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. Some may not know him at all and find themselves wondering how this loudmouth who seems to have no aptitude for the game made it into the castle and how long it’ll be until his castmates kick him out of it. So after season four’s three-episode premiere, Vulture critics Roxana Hadadi and Nicholas Quah have gathered in an attempt to determine if Rapaport is a good or bad addition to The Traitors.
Spoilers through episode three, “Show Me Your Faces,” lie ahead.
Nicholas Quah: Let me be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not here to defend Michael Rapaport specifically. Like just about everyone else in the castle, and probably everyone watching the show, I find him aggressively annoying and a terrible player. And if he ever follows through on his dumb threat to run against Mamdani for New York City mayor in 2029, he’ll almost certainly be annoying and terrible at that, too. What I am defending is his presence on the cast. I’m a firm believer in chaos agents, if only to disrupt the otherwise predictable rhythms and clique-building that can set in on a show now four seasons deep. And Rapaport, by virtue of being a deeply tough hang, is a textbook chaos agent. I take it you don’t agree.
Roxana Hadadi: Yeah, we’re not here to litigate Rapaport as a person outside the show because we’d basically be here all day just nodding at each other as we trade various iterations of “God, he’s the worst.”
NQ: No, no. Please do.
RH: We’re specifically discussing what he’s bringing to the show, so let’s zoom out a bit and talk about the season overall.
As is now the norm, the cast is divided into rough thirds: the Housewives, who have a natural alliance; the gamers, from shows like Survivor and Big Brother, who have a natural alliance; and a third group of recognizable celebrities who don’t have natural factions, like Donna Kelce, Top Chef’s Kristen Kish, comedian Ron Funches, and Rapaport. It’s always tricky to enter the Traitors castle as one of the last group, because those players don’t have the same immediate bonds with other contestants in their cohort and they have an uphill battle trying to gain trust from other competitors and perhaps join an existing group. So I sympathize with the fact that Rapaport is coming into this game knowing that he’s an outlier and also knowing that he needs to befriend some people to stick around.
Sandoval had the same challenge last year. But it felt last year that Sandoval was entering the game knowing he had to eat some crow and battle whatever public perception of him there was to both stick around in the game and actually prove himself as a strategist and an athlete. Part of Sandoval’s image rehabilitation has been on these competition shows, like Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test, and he’s steadily chipped away at people’s negative opinions of him through that. But we are not here to talk about Tom! We are here to talk about Rapaport. I say all this just to contextualize: I don’t get the game Rapaport is playing, and I don’t think his chaos-agent antics are entertaining. I think they’re just loud, disruptive, and attention-grabbing in a really annoying way. In what ways am I wrong, Nick?
NQ: I don’t think loud, annoying disruptions, or elements that make a show briefly unpleasant, are necessarily a bad thing, especially given that the structure of this game all but guarantees those disruptions will be ameliorated in due time. The unpleasantness ultimately sharpens the eventual pleasantness, you know? I mean, does anyone really think Rapaport is going to make it deep into the game?
Sandoval is naturally the obvious comparison given the initial heel identity, but I see Rapaport less as another Sandoval than as a corrective to past casting choices around people like John Bercow, the former Speaker of the House of Commons, or Lord Ivar Mountbatten, two very quiet guys who ultimately contributed very little to their seasons. Bercow was basically red-shirt cannon fodder, and while Ivar ended up being a co-winner last season — did you forget that? I totally did — as a viewer, his run mostly registered as being ignored all the way to the finish. (Which, I suppose, is its own legitimate strategy.) Rapaport is more cannon-fodder material but of a different kind. His loudness and obnoxiousness are personal liabilities that can become functional assets for the rest of the cast. If you’re a Traitor, he provides cover fire. If you’re a Faithful, voting him out at the Roundtable may not expose a Traitor, but it does offer a kind of spiritual release. This is not nothing!
RH: Oh yes, two men who I did not remember exist. (Ivar really rode Gabby Windey and Dylan Efron’s coattails to that win, didn’t he?) That’s interesting, Nick, but I do still think we have a number of other dudes who are going to end up as sacrificial lambs — I can’t see Mark Ballas lasting too long, or Eric Nam, because, again, they are members of this third group of contestants. I think there will always be some more seemingly introverted guys who just linger around for a while until the other contestants remember, “Wait, why are you here?”
So it’s less for me that Rapaport feels useless and more that he just doesn’t seem very good at being a Faithful. He tried to ingratiate himself with the Housewives by saying he’s “practically another” one, but then he couldn’t defend himself when Porsha confronted him with Candiace’s lie in the car about Michael gunning for them. He takes things too personally and lets that defensiveness guide his decision-making, like how he switched so impulsively to thinking that Yam Yam must be a Traitor, just because they don’t get along. His “If you’re a Traitor and you know it, clap your hands” song at the roundtable … I can’t. I don’t think he was particularly helpful in either of the challenges so far. My thinking is, Fine, be a jerk, if you can pull your weight and if you can actually contribute to either the function of the game or you can be entertaining in other ways. I’m just not seeing it.
NQ: For what it’s worth, I find his entertainment value less in what he’s doing than in how everyone else reacts to him. There’s a fun pleasure in feeling solidarity with the rest of the cast and even in watching otherwise warring factions briefly unite around a shared disdain for a greater loser. That, to me, is good television. The Tiffany arc, where she’s keeping him close as a kind of meat shield, is funny, too, and a genuinely smart play.
But — and okay, I know this is me stepping into galaxy-brain territory — now I’m less convinced that he’s actually playing the game badly, or that there’s a clearly “correct” way to play at this stage at all, when everything is still governed by vibes. If his approach were truly that wrong, he would have been murdered or voted out by now. Instead, there’s a perverse delight in watching an accidental strategy emerge, where his sheer noxiousness is so confusing that it keeps him around longer than anyone expects. He’s already outlasted two gamers precisely because he’s not perceived as a tactical threat. Is this a niche way of watching the show? Probably. But America is a beautiful, diverse tapestry, you know?
I do wonder what it would’ve been like if Alan tapped him as a Traitor, though. I don’t think that would’ve been terribly fun, because he doesn’t seem like a person who plays well with others, but again, maybe the chaos would’ve yielded interesting things. What do you think?
RH: You know, I almost think he would have been a great Traitor? Even the Traitors thought he might be their anonymous fourth member, when he didn’t make it onto the secret Traitors’ murder shortlists, because he’s acting such a mess. Our known Traitors group is two Housewives, with Candiace and Lisa Rinna (which I think is too many), and the Love Island guy Rob Rausch (who, narcing on my colleagues here, many are finding to be surprisingly hot), and our surprise Traitor was Donna Kelce. And it was fascinating to me that people quite quickly clocked Donna as a Traitor because she would be such an unexpected choice from Alan; more than one person in the castle called her “America’s mom” and brought up how mad the Swifties would be if she were eliminated quickly, and well … here we are. I align with the remaining three Traitors in thinking that Rapaport might have been a great Traitor for the opposite reason: He’s generating so much heat, but in such a nonsensical way, that people can’t figure out what he’s actually trying to achieve. I think that confusion is useful when your role is meant to be confusion but not when you’re supposed to be a Faithful creating bonds with other Faithfuls who can trust your judgment.
NQ: Dang, you’re talking me into thinking he might actually win this thing.
RH: Nick, we have very different tastes in television.
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