From the whodunnit premise to the non-voting eliminations to the quiz challenges, and more, discover how The Mole was ahead of the reality TV curve.
Often hailed as one of the most cutting edge reality television shows, The Mole combined a cerebral whodunit premise with extreme physical competition, allowing various contestants to compete for a $1 million prize while attempting to discover a secret saboteur among the cast. The ABC show ran for four seasons from 2001 to 2004, with the fifth season added in 2008.
Now that The Mole has been added to Netflix for a whole new audience to discover, it's worth highlighting the various ways that made the show far ahead of its reality TV competition. From the excellent premise to the quizzes, exemptions, eliminations, tests, journal entries, and more, discover just how visionary The Mole really was.
The original premise of The Mole itself was a game-changer at the time and frankly hasn't been replicated since. According to host Anderson Cooper via ET Online, "It's kind of a cross between Mission: Impossible and an Agatha Christie murder mystery." While subsequent shows like Whodunnit? and The Amazing Race explore the two premises separately, none have combined the two in such a genuinely entertaining way.
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The premise entails contestants working together in groups to add money to a pot that only a single person will win. Among the cast is a preselected Mole designated by producers to severely sabotage every competition while remaining undetected. Therefore, the mental and physical challenges presented in the game are unlike any. The novelty of the premise is that the show does not tell the viewers who the Mole is, making them active participants in the show.
Debuting roughly five months after the first season of Survivor and eight months before The Amazing Race, The Mole was one of the very first reality TV series to have such a huge international travel component that necessitated working with the locals to solve various challenges.
In season 1, 10 contestants began in California before traveling to France, Monaco, and Spain. In season 2, Italy and Switzerland were the primary settings. Season 3 took place in Hawaii, season 4 was set in Mexico, and season 5 was held in South America after being revived after several years off the air. Not only is The Mole one of the first reality TV shows to take place in a different country each season and feature extensive travel throughout, but in many cases, certain challenges abroad forced the players to interact with locals and navigate language barriers to succeed.
One of the most forward-thinking elements of the highly underrated 2000s reality TV show was the Missions, aka Tests, as some of them are never fully explained to all of the contestants before they begin. Most challenges combine mental and physical activity, with clear goals set out from the onset. Others, however, are deliberately obfuscated in order to keep players off balance and to prevent the Mole from being exposed.
In 2001, it was not commonplace for reality TV competitions to trick the contestants and viewers as deceptively as The Mole did. During some missions, only certain players would be given the full rules and goals in mind, while others were told to do entirely different missions altogether. Even secret missions took place that featured just one contestant, something hardly ever seen at the time.
While such challenges would become commonplace on later shows like The Amazing Race, the extreme activities featured in The Mole were quite advanced. Bungee jumping, tightrope walking, rappelling, and the like were a huge component of the competition, grueling physical activities that lead to such extreme athletics by the fourth season of The Challenge.
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Aside from the extreme challenges, the division of the award prizes on The Mole was also something rarely seen before. Sometimes, challenges required every team member to complete their goal to earn money for the whole team to share. Other challenges awarded prize money to single players, forcing teams to strategize and divide players into leaders and followers.
Another element of the highly rewatchable reality TV show rarely seen before includes the morality tests various players would be randomly subject to. The morality tests are secret missions in which a player is unwittingly approached by a local who asks them for personal assistance (changing a tire, giving someone a ride, etc.). Depending on how well a player helps the locals, they will be informed if they won or lost the secret mission.
The morality tests go a long way in judging the character of the players, which helps determine who is coy and calculating enough to be the mole. Failing to complete a morality test could result in a cash deduction from the group pot, another rule rarely seen in a reality game show.
While there have been many quiz shows over the years, none combine trivia with high-stakes physical challenges in the way The Mole did in 2001. Each episode of the show ends with players taking a quiz to determine who the mole is. Quizzes usually consist of 10-20 multiple choice questions, many of which have up to 15 answer options.
Sometimes taking a true-false format, the information asked in the quizzes often comes from social and physical activities shared by the players, such as dinner table conversations and reflections on the extreme competition. After dinner, players take a quiz in private on a computer and wait to see who will be eliminated, or "executed," from the competition for scoring the lowest. Most reality shows at the time eliminate players for failed physical challenges, but The Mole forced players to really use their brains.
Since players get "executed" based on their quiz results, The Mole is one of the first and still one of the best reality competition shows to do away with elimination voting altogether. So often nowadays, reality TV contestants are sent packing once viewers and/or fellow players vote them off. The Mole went the opposite route.
By avoiding elimination voting, the show was less about the promotion of popular personalities and more about the game itself, something reality TV has moved away from quite a bit in the last 20 years.
The penalties for players breaking rules on The Mole were also pretty progressive at the time. If players transgress in certain ways like breaking curfew or broaching a taboo topic, rather than being eliminated personally, money from their team till will be deducted. Moreover, failing to complete a morality test can result in a cash penalty.
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By financially docking entire teams for a single person's errors, the show puts an added emphasis on the importance of compliant teamwork. While reality TV shows before it have resulted in cash penalties, few hold an entire team accountable for a single player's actions.
At the beginning of each season, players are given a black duffel bag with their names on it. They are also given journals, each with its own number, as the only means of recording information about who they think the mole is. Nothing like this has really ever been seen before or since.
By using the information in the journals, players can either form groups called coalitions and work together or work independently to identify who the mole is among them. If players choose to take the latter route, they will often pretend to be the Mole in order to trick others and force them to fail the quizzes and become eliminated from the show. Very few reality TV shows before or since allow for solo or team options with the same end goal in mind for each.
Another reality TV show rarity at the time, The Mole offered players Exemptions, which are essentially free passes to avoid elimination regardless of their quiz score. Sometimes single players would be given exemption based on winning missions. Other times groups would intentionally and unintentionally elect which player to exempt.
However, the biggest wrinkle included exemptions for deliberately failing missions, making it impossible to know who's lying and who's telling the truth. Even crazier, sometimes the exemptions were given to players in secret, and in season 2, the Neutralizer was introduced, a designation that prevented a player from becoming exempt.
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