Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Get excited for The Mole, the clandestine reality competition where one contestant is secretly sabotaging their fellow players as they race to uncover who, exactly, is the traitor in their midst.
Presented by MSNBC host Alex Wagner, this revival of the 2000s broadcast hit (which featured a young Anderson Cooper) will see a group of 12 players — well, actually, 11 players and one faker who’s actually “the Mole” — compete to add money into a group pot, all while trying to discover the saboteur among them. The contestant who successfully guesses the identity of the Mole at the end of the season wins the accumulated prize.
The new season sees the group travel through the wilds of Australia — from the Daintree Rainforest in Queensland down to cosmopolitan Sydney — enduring high-stakes challenges along the way. Their goal: complete competitions, earn money. It’s simple enough, except that the strangers they’re competing against — who are also trying to earn that money by casting suspicion on or away from themselves and confusing their competitors — can’t all be trusted.
Wagner, who recently took over Rachel Maddow’s primetime slot with Alex Wagner Tonight, follows in Anderson Cooper’s footsteps as host. She also co-hosts political series The Circus on Showtime and has contributed to CBS News and The Atlantic.
They’re students, pilots, warehouse workers and firefighters — oh, and one of them is a mole. Check out the list of players here along with their game strategy and vital stats.
A version of The Mole ran for five seasons beginning in 2001. It’s based on the still-running Belgian series, De Mol, which debuted in 1998 and has inspired numerous international versions since.
“The original Mole was a sort of seismic event in American television. It broke the mold,” host Wagner tells Tudum. “There’s every reason to watch the reboot, because I think the concept of the show is ever more resonant today. We have refreshed a lot of the elements to make them even more compelling than the original — and that was pretty damn compelling.”
The 12 players compete in mental and physical challenges in an attempt to win money to add to a prize pot. These challenges include tasks as varied as working together to escape from a prison cell or following a map to find hidden treasure... or even just deciding to NOT do something that could give them an edge over their competition. If the players complete their challenge, they win the full prize pot. However, one of them is a mole planted by producers to sabotage the rest of the group, chipping away at that prize money one challenge at a time.
After each set of challenges, the players take a quiz that tests whether they know the identity of the Mole. The person who answers the fewest questions correctly gets eliminated. One at a time, each player is randomly sent their results individually via text message. If the screen on their phone goes green, they’re safe. But if it’s red, they’re immediately eliminated from the game.
The player who safely avoids elimination and correctly identifies the Mole in the finale by answering the most quiz questions accurately wins the prize pot. The Mole can never win.
The three-week event will be released in three batches. The first batch of five episodes will debut Oct. 7. The second batch of three episodes will debut Oct. 14, and the final batch — including the finale — will debut Oct. 21.
