The Mole

Back in the day of roughly 20 years ago, two of my favorite shows on US TV were The Amazing Race and The Mole. While The Amazing Race has continued to have tremendous success for the past two decades, The Mole was sadly cancelled after only a few seasons. So I was pleasantly surprised to see it pop up on Netflix recently after not knowing ahead of time that it would be returning.

So how did it turn out? Overall I'm happy to say that it had plenty of intrigue and fun challenges. The contestants were hit and miss in terms of entertaining to watch, but that is true of all reality and game shows. There were some nice surprises along the way as well. Of course, nothing is perfect. The identity of The Mole became undeniably clear to me with about 3 episodes to go, and there were too many obviously scripted interviews with the contestants during each episode, particularly with contestants making mole accusations. I would have liked to have seen more natural interaction among the contestants in between challenges instead.

That said, it's hard to complain too much about what we got. Even with its flaws, this is still a far superior reality show compared to much of the trash reality shows that are on modern TV. It's not quite up to The Amazing Race standards, but then again that's not a realistic expectation. It's a quality season one reboot, and I'm hoping for another season with a few adjustments in the right direction to make season two even better.

The revival doesn't hold a candle to ABC's Season 1 & 2. I feel a lot of the cast members are caricatures and the production team's edits are very suspect (such as the countdown clocks, contestant confessionals, and how the missions are structured). In contrast to earlier seasons, we really don't get a full sense of the competitors' motivations. I really can't say that I'm rooting for any particular player to bring home the prize money. The show is a way to eat up my time; I'm not as fully engaged in it as I thought I would be. This is because very few of the missions are exciting. Many of the games have ambiguous rules or just seem downright impossible. I felt lost when I tried to make sense of some of them, especially the Detonator mission and the bank heist mission.

Alex Wagner is a fair host. She has a good mixture of motherly warmth and seriousness. I can't rate her as highly as host Anderson Cooper, who incidentally also is a journalist.

The aforementioned ABC seasons were set in France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and Monaco. This season in Australia simply doesn't have that same spark.

It's just another scripted reality show. Watch at your own leisure but be prepared to be let down.

I love nearly all competition reality shows including previous versions of The Mole and I'm usually an easy audience. I also worked for years as a reality tv and game show producer. With that said, this show is disappointing to me for two main reason.

First, it's an unusually unlikable cast. I'm struggling to find anyone to root for. The only person I like is the host.

Second, nearly all commentary throughout the show are just contestants accusing each other of being the mole for any reason. This would be fine if it felt sincere, but it doesn't. It's like the producers decided that constant, empty, accusations without substance would be an easy way to produce the show. It's exceptionally hollow...even by reality show standards.

I REALLY wanted to like this.

The second season of this show is undeniably better than the first. I hated the way the mole played in that one but this one was genius!!! I really hope they keep changing the location. I find that to be a really enjoyable part of the show!

The cast is awesome and everyone is deceitful and selfish which makes it incredibly hard but fun to guess who the Mole is! Your guess will probably change after every episode with the way these challenges go 🤣

What a fun show. I'm so happy that Netflix did a reboot of this. I never knew how much I missed this until I saw it on Netflix! Can't wait till the next season to see where they play next!

No one saying "Who is...the Mole?"

It's okay. But missing some of the elements that made the first ones so great. A better host to amp the suspense. Where are their handy dandy little notebooks they were always writing in?! I remember them always writing notes in their little notebooks. Also the phones instead of a big screen is a bad choice. The huge screen was fun to see turn color.

Overall I am glad it is back. But don't ditch the things that made it so good the first time.

I really miss Anderson Cooper, though I get her has other things to do. But the host could really do a better job of saying things to build suspense, etc.