The hit show has been compared to cosy crime drama. But it also has parallels with Hilary Mantel’s historical masterpiece

Doomy towers, candlelit assignations, whispers in corridors, banishments in the dead of night and a cruel and capricious master – The Traitors has more in common with the prestige historical drama Wolf Hall than you might expect. Based on Hilary Mantel’s Booker prize-winning trilogy following the life of Thomas Cromwell, The Mirror and the Light , its final instalment came to its bloody end in December. In January, the treacherous skies over 16th-century Hampton Court shifted to storm clouds swirling over Ardross Castle in Scotland for the return of the hit reality TV show. Dark times call for dark television.

The Traitors might be a spin on the cosy crime formula (strangers in a country house, murder and amateur sleuthing), but the parallels with Mantel’s trilogy are also striking. The English Reformation divided the faithful, after all. In the politics of the Tudor court and castles, it’s all about manipulation, power and self-preservation. Everyone is jockeying for favour, watching their backs, backstabbing and trying to fill the coffers for themselves and their cronies. By the final episode, most of the main characters end up with their heads on the block. All of which makes Claudia Winkleman Henry VIII, but with better hair and knitwear.

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As the third season of the glorious reality TV series reaches its climax, here are its finest parts. Brace for dodgy accents, feuding sisters and acting so bad it sets your teeth on edge

It started with 25 people being asked to leap off a train. Along the way we were treated to premature burials, marauding clowns and the genuinely dangerous moment Alexander chased a shuttlecock into a hedge. And now we are down to just five people – only one of whom is a traitor. Will the contestants realise Charlotte has been lying – and not just about coming from a market town in Monmouthshire? Frankie certainly will, as her new power as the Seer sets things up for an explosive finale. But before that it’s time to grab your Welsh phrase books and look back on the 10 most treacherous – OK, plain daft – moments of the 2025 season …

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In this week’s newsletter: As the series reaches its finale we ponder who is going to win, who deserves to win – and if anyone really listens to ‘Traitor pop’

January is almost over, but regrettably that means that so too is The Traitors. Watching the Beeb’s televised take on wink murder has become a bright spot in this gloomy portion of the year for many, but at 8.30pm tonight it all ends with a tantalisingly setup finale. You can follow along with our liveblog on the Guardian, where there’s also plenty more Traitors content, including pieces on how it has revolutionised reality TV , and why it’s so ruddy middle class . Here on the Guide, we’re trying to answer some of the most pressing – and, OK, not so pressing – questions about tonight’s finale and series three as a whole. Spoilers ahoy, so of you’re not up to speed with this series, perhaps wait until you are before reading on.

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The broadcaster’s new documentary sees presenter Vicky Pattison create an AI-generated explicit film of herself – against wishes of campaign organisations

Channel 4 has been accused of ignoring the wishes of campaign organisations representing those whose images have been digitally turned into pornography and shared online against their will.

The broadcaster’s new documentary, Vicky Pattison: My Deepfake Sex Tape, saw it consult groups representing survivors of online image abuse, before having its reality star presenter create and release an AI-generated explicit film of herself – despite groups saying they specifically advised it against doing so.

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Sundance film festival: James Sweeney’s tightrope-mastering mix of genres and tones is an incredibly effective feat, veering from funny to creepy to devastatingly sad

Before the start of Twinless, a classic Sundance curio with very little known about what it was or where it came from, the writer, director and star James Sweeney was unusually withholding. The creator of 2019’s micro-budget comedy Straight Up wanted us to experience it without a detailed introduction, avoiding an earnest ramble about his intentions or hopes. It was surprisingly self-effacing but it also revealed a deeper motive: he didn’t want us to know that what we were about to see was almost certainly not what anyone was expecting.

One of the joys of a world-first festival premiere is that you may well be the only audience to ever see a certain film almost entirely blind and given the twisty, often jaw-droppingly unexpected nature of Twinless, it’ll be a hard one to keep fully under wraps until release. It’s doubly hard given how hugely impressive the film is as well, something you desperately want to talk about even though you know you probably shouldn’t. It’s therefore rather impossible to write about it without the slightest of spoilers but I’ll try to keep them to a bare minimum.

Twinless is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

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A little-known writer who works in a bookshop, keeps pet snails and makes psychedelic music as Berlin Horse is the surprise winner of this year’s fiction prize. He reveals the story behind his ‘hazy, hypnotic’ folk horror

A little while ago, Adam S Leslie was in Blackwell’s in Oxford, where he works, when a customer came in, picked up a copy of Lost in the Garden, and started telling his friends how good it was. “Actually, I’m the author,” Leslie eventually admitted, to the customer’s delight. That’s when it sank in for the 50-year-old bookseller: the novel he had written in his bedroom was “actually a real book out there in the world”.

And now that real book has won a real literary prize: last week, Lost in the Garden was named winner of the Nero book award for fiction . “It’s a little bit of an out of body experience,” Leslie tells me. “I’m looking at all the stuff online and going, ‘This person with my name is having a great time!’”

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Bookshops staged late-night parties – with fancy dress, quizzes and cakes – to launch the third instalment of novelist’s Empyrean series, Onyx Storm

Rebecca Yarros couldn’t sell her first novel. No publisher would take it. But this week, 14 years later, legions of her devoted readers turned up to more than a thousand midnight-release parties held to celebrate the publication of her latest book.

In the UK alone, more than 180,000 copies of Onyx Storm, the third instalment of Yarros’s blockbuster Empyrean series, sold on day one of publication on Tuesday. Nearly 60 Waterstones branches held late-night parties or opened early on Tuesday morning to mark the occasion. And after some TikTok users posted videos showing that they had managed to buy the book in Asda ahead of its official release, other fans filmed themselves scouring their local branches trying to get their hands on early copies too.

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Why not make a day (or week) of it?

• See more of Fiona Katauskas’s cartoons here

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The first season of Mo, comedian Mo Amer’s Netflix show, was a funny, moving look at life as a Palestinian immigrant in the US – then 7 October turned everything on its head. He talks about ceasefire hopes and why he can’t stop crying

Moments before I’m due to talk to Mo Amer, a notification pings on my phone. After 15 months of unthinkable violence, Israel and Hamas have agreed on terms for a ceasefire. As his Zoom window clicks online, I’m parsing the news for details. As a man who has found himself becoming one of the most prominent Palestinian voices on Earth, so is he.

“I just got a flurry of text messages about it as I came to my computer,” he says, holding his phone to the screen. “It’s literally teed up and ready to go.” Presumably, I say, the gut reaction to the news is a good one.

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