There are some reality shows that you watch and you just know you’d be good at it and, for me, one of those is The Mole. A series that tests your ability to trust your teammates and outsmart the one secretly trying to sabotage you, The Mole was a hugely popular ABC show of the early 2000s. When it ended with season 5, fans wondered if we’ve ever see a show like it again. Well, it turns out that we’ll be seeing a new incarnation of the same premise, as a brand new season of The Mole is is now on Netflix.
The Mole was a show on ABC that ran from 2001 to 2008 and would put a group of players into high stakes situations to earn money, but there was a twist: There was a mole in their midst. The object of the mole was to get money taken away from the group or sabotage missions so that they didn’t win the full prize amount. Anderson Cooper was the first host before the series was taken over by Ahmad Rashad and then finally Jon Kelley hosted the fifth season before the original show’s end. Now, Netflix has taken over with host Alex Wagner.
The Netflix series has the same premise, but with a 14 year break between seasons, it feels so good to be back in the thick of it. On the show, we have seen a jungle adventure, an underwater mission, a bank robbery, and more, and it is just getting started.
Trust no one
The Mole teaches us all that no one should be trusted but that you all still have to work as a team. The Netflix series adds even more drama in the sense that these players absolutely refuse to play well together.
With each episode, we see those who are willing to do what it takes to win for themselves and who wants to work to make the pot as big as it possibly can be. In the original run, I remember teams working together a bit more to be successful but in the Netflix series there are so many players who don’t care about anything other than getting to the end. Is this symptomatic of a reality TV shift since the early ’00s, or just the way our world works now?
In one of the earlier episodes, Joi Schweitzer is willing to sacrifice $25,000 to make sure she’s exempt from elimination and in the most recent episode, we see another exemption on the table. The team is barely functioning together and there are so many players who could be the mole that it really is doing a great job of keeping the audience on its toes.
Who plays along?
There are players who are trying. Will Richardson constantly attempts to get the team to work together and even earned them extra money in the first episode and while you think he is someone to trust, you can never be quite sure. Maybe he is using that motivation as his way of sabotaging. We did see him run fast and far to try and get to the train station on time, forcing Avori Henderson to struggle behind and look like she was sabotaging them. Or maybe she was doing it on purpose.
That’s the point of the game: You don’t know who is doing things for what reason. And it keeps us all on the look out for who is ready to betray them all. The Mole premieres every Friday on Netflix and it is a great return to the series. Even if no one wants to actually be a team player.
(image: Julian Panetta/Netflix © 2022)
Published: Oct 12, 2022 02:22 pm