It’s not a revival. It’s a rebranding.
Reality TV in India isn’t coming back with fresh ideas, it’s returning with familiar tools, polished aesthetics, and new platforms. The Traitors proved that audiences still crave strategy, betrayal, and tension. But The Society, now trending on JioHotstar, raises a different question, is this a genuine evolution, or just an Instagram-filtered illusion of progress?
On paper, The Society sounds ambitious.
25 contestants. A caste-like class structure. A rotating hierarchy. A goal to become the “Asli Baazigar.” Add Munawar Faruqui as host and Shreya Kalra as co-host, and it feels engineered for buzz.
But dig deeper, and what you find isn’t innovation. It’s a repackaging.
The show’s “class divide” premise plays dangerously close to real-life social anxieties, but without the teeth to comment meaningfully on them. Instead, it turns inequality into a gamified spectacle, where discomfort becomes content, and status becomes strategy. It banks on discomfort, but refuses to engage with it. It imitates Squid Game tension, Bigg Boss drama, and Survivor-style competition, without adding anything of its own.
Sure, it’s bingeable. But that doesn’t change the fact that The Society feels algorithmically produced, built to trend, not to last.
Yes, The Traitors worked. But it had a clarity of purpose, gameplay and psychological warfare. The Society wants to do everything: provoke, entertain, reflect society. In trying to do it all, it ends up doing very little.
So is this really the rebirth of reality TV?
Or are we just watching old tricks with newer filters?