A sprawling mansion, full of look-at-me reality contestants trying to win money by playing a parlour game based on manipulation and persuasion? It’s either a new season of The Traitors, or a clone trying to steal some of The Traitors’ addictive, gossip-worthy magic. Welcome to The Inheritance, a clone that has clearly been carefully worked on, but which has still come out a bit wonky.
Thirteen players – spanning the usual reality-TV spectrum of age and class, from a student/influencer and a debt-ridden scaffolder to a flawlessly styled socialite and a wily pensioner – convene at a country pile, the rich owner of which has supposedly died. The contestants are the would-be beneficiaries of the estate and are given a new group task each week. But, instead of this cash being added to a shared fund, the group must nominate one player to receive all of it.
It’s fiendishly simple! Except that, no it isn’t because there are many, many conditions to apply. Players who think they deserve the money put themselves forward as a “claimant”, ie a candidate standing for election. The claimants are not in the room when the rest of the group – the “jury” – decide who wins. Then the winner can either keep all the money, or choose to gift some back to members of the group, divided in whichever way they wish – with the proviso that they cannot give money to other claimants. Being a claimant, therefore, means running the risk of ending the round with nothing. Which would be bad, because at some point, the player with the least money will be eliminated. Oh, and the weekly winner divvies up the money (or keeps it all) in secret, so they can lie about how much they bestowed on others. Although, when the poorest player is booted out, presumably this will enable players to deduce who lied about sharing their cash. If this sounds confusing, rest assured that when you watch The Inheritance for yourself, it is confusing.
A flawed format is not a dealbreaker in this genre: after all, the aim of the game in The Traitors is meant to be voting out all the traitors, which can’t be allowed to happen because it would end the show, so swathes of that show’s early action have to be a sham. But The Inheritance is an overcomplicated hotch-potch, the obvious issue being that there are only likely to be one or two plausible candidates for the winner of each task, which leaves everyone else scrabbling for a purpose since there’s no weekly elimination.
The players deal with this by reverting to their base reality-telly instincts. They build alliances, form cliques, then berate other people for forming cliques and building alliances and cry about being excluded. The main motivation for making friends is meant to be to ensure that if you don’t win a task, the person who does may decide to share some money with you. But, since you don’t know if they’ve actually done that, it’s all a bit hypothetical – and it’s hard to care who’s side anyone is on.
In any case, the main showdown in each episode is about who should win the task, and that’s just a debate about observable reality: people make claims about their contribution, which others can dispute because they were there. There’s no equivalent to those delicious moments in The Traitors where players face instant death if they can’t deflect baseless conspiracy theories hurled at them by the mob. Nobody can brazenly bluff it.
Players arguing about the tasks brings up another problem: we have to care about the tasks. You may even feel obliged to actually watch them, instead of skipping to the bit where everyone has a massive barney. But they’re pure reality slop, the tedious spectacle of fools failing at contrived projects – bottling wine in the opening instalment, herding farm animals in episode two – constantly interrupted by clips from contestants’ post-task interviews, where they chirpily tell us things we’ve just observed perfectly well ourselves.
Overseeing all this are our hosts (plural, because it takes more than one person to try to replace the godlike Traitors presenter Claudia Winkleman). Officiating from moment to moment is Rob Rinder, who doesn’t have much to do beyond reading the rules off a sheet. He appears to be aiming for an air of sophisticated indifference, but just looks bored to death. The big hire is Elizabeth Hurley as the deceased stately homeowner, but even her camp video messages (“Hello, darlings! I’M DEAD!”) soon lose their lustre and become superfluous. The Inheritance could turn out to be playing a cunning long game, but there are enough reasons here to vote it off in week one.