Kelly Meharg experiences life on the other side of the story as she watches her husband on The Traitors NZ
I’ve been reality-telly adjacent for a long time. In my time as a writer at a weekly magazine I wrote about them all – The Bachelor, MasterChef, My Kitchen Rules, Dancing with the Stars, The X Factor, New Zealand’s Got Talent. It was all about the ‘ordinary’ people achieving the extraordinary, and I loved it. The characters! The underdogs! The slightly hokey Kiwi versions produced on shoestring budgets compared to the international versions!
The Bachelor was great – it was the heady days of Art and Matilda where all was right with the world and love managed to triumph over format. These were also the days when magazines had money, and I somehow found myself on a yacht in the Whitsundays with these two glorious specimens, embarrassed to be seen in my bikini next to them, diving into turquoise waters and lounging on white beaches for a stunning cover shoot.
But I’ve also seen the dark side of reality television. I’ve seen contestants have full-blown meltdowns over their portrayals on telly, annoyed that certain things didn’t make the final product, annoyed that things did and using the classic line ‘it was taken out of context!’, forgetting that they signed up for, well, reality television.
I’ve had to deal with diva ‘celebrities’ who thought they were far better than the format they were judging (one such judge on X Factor refused to participate in a photoshoot until a full-length mirror was sourced on our location so he could see his whole outfit – the three-quarter mirror in the bathroom didn’t suffice- and I had to do an emergency Warehouse run before he was satisfied.)
Reality telly is brutal if you don’t fully understand what you’re signing up for. You’re there as a pawn for producers to shape, manipulate and use to get the best narrative and storyline. Sure, what they show in the final edit might be ‘real’ and ‘the truth’, but what isn’t shown is how they get to said truth.
So when my husband Mike told me he was keen to apply to be on the latest season of The Traitors New Zealand, I was excited and so, so jazzed for him – but I admit I was a little apprehensive.
How would he be portrayed? What if he got the villain edit? What if he said something stupid, or did something stupid? Could we handle the inevitable social media trolls? Would this harm his career?
But all of that gave way pretty quick to excitement. One of the best parts of having your person is the absolute joy their happiness brings you, and your own feelings are meaningless compared to their dreams.
The Traitors is our favourite show – we’ve watched all the English-speaking versions and we’re absolutely hooked every time.
I mean, me personally? I couldn’t imagine anything worse than going on telly. There’s a reason I chose print journalism! Sure I can be quite extroverted, but drawing unnecessary attention to myself – especially the kind I can’t control – scares the bejesus out of me. (Why yes, I am type A and a Virgo, thanks for asking).
Mike, on the other hand, lives to be the centre of attention. The man has rizz, and he’s incredibly comfortable being ‘that guy’ in a room – put it this way, I had to very firmly put my foot down when he decided he wanted to MC his own wedding.
I knew he’d do well as a foil against the reality tv machine – nothing much fazes him, he’s incapable of being anyone but himself and, to borrow one of the most grating phrases from the genre, he was ‘in it for the right reasons’, rather than to grow his Instagram following.
But I still caught myself, horribly, sizing him up the way a producer or a journalist would. Is he castable? What role will he fill? Hero or wildcard, nutcase or stable everyman? There’s a lot of casting to type – you can’t have a cast of all the same people, and as Lewis Thurlow, executive producer of The Traitors UK, put it: “There’s a lot of careful manipulation of the truth right from the word go” – meaning the huge pre-process of the casting and psychological screening.
Mike was eventually set up as “the family man”, much to his mum’s pride, and quite an achievement since we don’t have any children but hey, I’ll take it. The producers loved that he is a businessman – he’s the general manager of a bakery company in Auckland – so his pre-approved outfits for his publicity photos were blazers, which made him look very overdressed compared to everyone else but hey, why not (I must admit I have a soft spot for his profile photo, he is very handsome in it).
But sending him off to filming in Timaru with his little suitcase stuffed with all new clothes we’d bought on a last-minute mall dash, more snacks than he’d ever eat because I was worried there wouldn’t be enough food, and notebooks of strategy and ideas was strangely heartbreaking.
“Remember, this isn’t a game, it’s a reality show,” I drilled into him on the way to the airport, prepping him against every trick in the journalistic book – my usual weapons. “Don’t let your guard down. You’re there to be entertainment, not a contestant. Don’t fill silences left by interviewers. Assume all cameras are always filming. The diary room isn’t therapy; it’s a confession box with an agenda!”
“I know, I know!” he replied, and with a kiss, he was off into the reality abyss (otherwise known as the Auckland Airport regional domestic terminal).
And then, I didn’t hear from him for a week. As is par for the course on a reality show, he wasn’t allowed to have any contact with the outside world. No phone, no internet, no newspapers – Mike wasn’t even allowed to know the time. He was kept in hotel rooms that constantly changed to keep the contestants on edge. Everything is designed to keep them on edge and psychologically strung out – it makes for better telly (hence the shocking number of meltdowns and tears you see).
It might seem silly because it was only a week, but Jeeeeesus, I struggled. We’ve been away from each other longer than that, sure, but this was NO contact – it was like he was plucked off the face of the earth. It’s not normal to not hear from your partner at all for such a long period of time, and I missed him desperately.
I’m not very good at not knowing things – I love spoilers, I’ll look up plots of books and movies before I see them because I like to see how the plot gets there – and I hated not knowing what was going on. Was he doing well? Had he made friends? Was he already psychologically damaged?
That last question was answered when he arrived home – yes, he was. Exhausted, strung out and mentally and physically drained, he was a bit of a wreck, and it took a few days to regulate back into the real world outside the Traitors manor. Although he had planned to keep me in the dark, wanting me to experience the show with him when it aired, he eventually revealed all, and listening to him explain what happened was like a sucker punch to the gut.
(A note here though – the producers and production of the show were wonderful with their care during and after!).
For those of you who watched the show, Mike drew a bloody short straw – he didn’t make it through the gates on the first episode, losing a paper-scissors-rock battle, but winning $5000. However, it meant he was out of the game.
Said gates
But a few days later, after being kept alone in a hotel room for two and a half days with only a few old DVDs to keep him occupied, he re-entered the game after appearing as a ghoul at a challenge, buying his way back in by forfeiting the $5000, plus the $2500 he won in the challenge.
He was then unceremoniously murdered by the traitors two days later. Yes, he gave up $7500 to play the game for two days.
The question I’ve been asked the most is ‘what did you think about losing the money!?’. Weirdly, for someone who loves spending it as much as I do, money was never in my or Mike’s thinking. Mike’s attitude was that he simply wanted to be part of his favourite show, play an awesome game and live his Traitors fantasy.
Did he do that? Yeah! Do we feel a bit robbed that his turn on the show played out the way it did? Also yeah! But hey, it’s the name of the game.
Still, he was on-screen enough for it to be weird – watching my husband bounce around a warehouse wearing a ghoul mask yelling ‘you’re found!’ at the top of his lungs wasn’t on my bingo card for 2026.
I was on the lookout for all of the reality telly foibles, such as ‘Frankenbiting’ where audio or footage from different days/ moments is spliced together, to build a reaction that might not have happened in that way. And of course, there’s always going to be selective editing because you simply cannot show everything that happened in one episode.
When it’s revealed Mike is back – I have genuinely never seen him happier, which is both lovely and slightly alarming
It was fascinating, in some ways – I had a real-time narration of what actually happened, what didn’t make the edit, what went on behind the scenes.
But watching my husband turned into content was always going to be a strange experience. It didn’t feel real a lot of the time. His portrayal was fine, but it wasn’t the Mike I know and love – perhaps it’s because he wasn’t there for very long, but he seemed far more serious and sterner than he is in real life. He’s very quick with a joke and has no qualms about making himself the butt of one, but Traitors Mike was quiet and slightly brooding… I mean a bit of that isn’t a bad thing, there were some Heathcliff vibes in there for a split second?!
(He’s also received a lot of flack from his mates for his opening quotes – “I’m no marine biologist, but I know that in this game, you want to be in the middle of the pack of fish”. He might be a sharp thinker at gameplay but he evidently forgot that it’s schools of fish, not packs… the irony being we were in Fiji at a friend’s wedding when we were watching it and we were fresh off a snorkelling trip).
The biggest aspect of it all was that, for once, I didn’t have control of the narrative – and neither did he. I’ve managed the divas, I’ve peeked behind the curtain and seen how the sausage was made. I write the stories, but this time, I just had to let the story play out in front of me, with the person I love the most in the world front and centre, and yes, it was harder than I expected.
While nothing is personal on Traitors and, as we say at home, it’s just a silly little game (show), when fellow contestant Aroha described Mike as ‘a bit annoying’, there was something primal in me that wanted to jump into the TV and have at her (but to be fair Mike did call her ‘the queen of the traitors’ and ‘the head of the snake’, so you know, probably fair).
Then there have been Reddit posts, media coverage and endless podcasts that dissect literally every element of every episode, both domestically and internationally. Everyone has an opinion and most of it is water off a duck’s back, but some of it is just fucked up and mean – one contestant from a previous Kiwi series told a podcast that he wanted to “put a bullet” in Mike for leaving, coming back and leaving again, which I found immensely distasteful.
Essentially, this experience has been a lot for the both of us. A wild, WILD experience that’s thrown up a lot of weird moments, sure, but also plenty of wonderful ones.
I got to see my husband live out a dream. Sure, I had to see it via national telly, and although sometimes I was watching it through my fingers slightly buzzed on a gin and soda, the world got to see a little sliver of this incredible man that I love.
Mike did the thing. SO many people only ever talk about the dreams or their ideas, but Mike has always been the guy to give things a go. He doesn’t fear failure, he doesn’t care if it doesn’t work out. He just cares that he tried, and for me that’s a deeply, deeply attractive quality.
I couldn’t be more proud.
