Peacock is bringing a familiar schoolyard and campus pastime into the competition-TV arena with Assassins, a newly greenlit series based on the real-world stealth game commonly known as Assassin. Scarlett Johansson is attached as an executive producer, alongside B17 Entertainment co-founders Brien Meagher and Rhett Bachner.
The central rule is elegantly mean: every contestant receives a target, and must eliminate that person before the season ends. Yet each would-be hunter is also somebody else’s target. Peacock’s premise promises shifting alliances, deception and a contest in which the most calculating player ultimately wins.
That foundation matters because it gives the show a built-in engine for suspense without requiring a complicated fictional mythology. A player cannot simply focus on pursuing their assigned opponent. They also need to protect themselves, interpret the behavior of everyone around them, decide whom to trust and determine whether a helpful ally is actually positioning for an advantage.
What game is Peacock adapting?
Assassin is a real-life game played in many places, including among high school and college students. Players are generally assigned targets and try to remove them from the game using a harmless designated method. NERF guns and water pistols are common tools, while some versions use plastic spoons or Sharpies.
The television version is described as a game of strategy and wit, rather than as an adaptation of any one standardized rulebook. That distinction is important. “Assassin” games can vary by group: the permitted tools, safe zones, timing, verification and elimination rules may all be different. The announced series has established its broad target-based structure, but has not detailed its exact play rules.
For viewers, the essential concept is closer to a live social game than to an action drama. “Elimination” is game language for taking an opponent out of the competition under whatever production rules the show establishes. The appeal is likely to rest on information, timing and social maneuvering: who knows what, who believes whom, and whether a contestant can complete an objective without revealing too much.
Every player has a target, but every player is also being targeted.
A competition format built on overlapping objectives
The target chain creates a useful kind of strategic pressure. In a straightforward elimination contest, participants might only need to outlast rivals or win a discrete challenge. In Assassins, the target assignment adds a private objective. A contestant needs a plan to find and approach one specific person, while avoiding whatever pattern might expose their own movements or intentions.
That setup can make even ordinary interactions meaningful. A conversation can be an effort to collect information. An alliance can provide cover, access or warning. A sudden change in someone’s routine can be read as caution—or as bait. The show’s synopsis specifically points to deception and changing alliances, suggesting that the social dynamics are not incidental decoration around the game but a major part of its design.
Social deduction is the useful term here. It describes games in which participants infer hidden roles, objectives or loyalties from limited information and behavior. The goal is not merely to perform well at a visible task; it is to understand the intentions of other people before they understand yours. Peacock has already used that broad territory with The Traitors, an Emmy-winning social-deduction competition hosted by Alan Cumming and built around Mafia- or Werewolf-style deception.
Assassins appears to approach that territory from a different angle. In Mafia and Werewolf-style formats, a group often tries to identify concealed traitors or hostile roles. Here, the pressure begins with a personal assignment: one player must pursue another. That should produce a more individualized web of suspicion, where everybody has a reason to obscure at least part of what they are doing.
The difference between a target game and a game of pure secrecy
The premise also leaves room for a tension common to competitive games: acting decisively can create information that rivals can use. A player who aggressively pursues their target may succeed quickly, but could make their priorities obvious. A player who remains guarded may preserve their cover, but miss opportunities and allow other contestants to build stronger networks.
That is why alliances are potentially unstable by design. An ally might be genuinely useful in the short term—providing a distraction, sharing an observation or making a group setting feel safer. But the underlying game gives every contestant an individual win condition. Even if several players cooperate, their interests can diverge as targets and threats shift.
The announced description does not say whether contestants will know one another’s targets, whether eliminations will be public immediately, or what tools and spaces will be permitted. Those details will determine the texture of the show. Publicly known eliminations would make the game more about reacting to a changing field. Hidden or delayed information would put a greater premium on deduction and rumor. Either approach could fit the basic premise, but they would reward different styles of player.
For anyone who enjoys games where competition is as much about reading people as executing a move, the framing has obvious potential. It is the same broader appeal behind other multiplayer formats in which rivalry and cooperation coexist; even the competitive preparation discussed in this party-racing and rivalry guide reflects how much a group’s behavior can matter once opponents share a space and a goal. Assassins, however, turns that interpersonal layer into the heart of the contest.
What has been confirmed—and what has not
Peacock has confirmed the series order, the target-based competition concept and the executive producers. Johansson, Meagher and Bachner are executive producing, and B17 Entertainment is part of Sony Pictures Television.
A host has not been announced. There is also no confirmed cast, premiere date, episode count, prize information or detailed rule set in the available announcement. Those omissions are worth keeping separate from the intriguing high-level premise. A target game can be shaped in many ways for television, and the eventual format will depend heavily on how the production handles safety, elimination, information and the point at which contestants are able to confront or outmaneuver one another.
Johansson’s involvement places the show among her upcoming producing work. She was also recently announced as an executive producer on an upcoming comedy project from Colin Jost and Danny Chun. That project was made outside the traditional Hollywood studio system and financed with brand deals, though no connection between it and Assassins has been indicated.
Why the premise translates cleanly to television
At its core, Assassin already has a legible narrative structure. There is an objective, an obstacle, a changing cast of active players and a clear consequence for being caught out. The series can follow both sides of the same contest at once: a player trying to close in on a target, and that target perhaps sensing that something is wrong without knowing from whom the threat is coming.
Its stakes are also personal without needing to be abstract. The assigned target gives contestants immediate direction, while the fact that everybody is vulnerable prevents any player from becoming purely reactive. Someone can be setting a trap, walking into one, or doing both at once.
The key question for the finished series will be whether its rules preserve that elegant balance. Too much information could make the social-deduction element straightforward; too little could make viewers unable to follow the strategy. A strong version of Assassins would make each player’s choices comprehensible while retaining enough uncertainty for alliances, misdirection and surprise to matter.
For now, Peacock’s order establishes the broad proposition: a globally familiar real-world target game is being scaled into an organized competition series, with Johansson and B17 Entertainment behind it. The host and the particulars of how the game will operate remain to be revealed.
