'The Mole' Is Making a Comeback on Netflix — but Will Anderson Cooper Return as Host?

In 2001, reality television was dominated by shows like The Challenge (Real World vs. Road Rules), Faking It, and Survivor. The genre was split into three sub-genres: physical challenges, mental challenges, or a combination of the two.

ABC's The Mole fell under the third category, with just a dash of trust issues and spy vibes tossed in.

The show centered around a group of contestants faced with various challenges that, when completed, would increase their winnings. There was just one catch. One of the players was a mole whose sole purpose was to trip up everyone else. The contestant to finally out the mole was the winner, and the person sailing this ship of subterfuge was host Anderson Cooper.

Netflix is reviving the popular reality game show — and fans are dying to know if Anderson Cooper is returning to host the reboot. Let's suss this out.

According to Vulture, Anderson Cooper will sadly not be the host with the most secrets for this new iteration of The Mole. It might be because he has long since moved on from a job he held nearly 20 years ago. In all likelihood, Anderson Cooper is very busy raising his two children, one of which was just born in February 2022.

We find ourselves wishing Netflix had a mole of its own so we could find out more information about the reboot. In May 2021, BuzzerBlog picked up on the fact that casting for a reality show called The Insider was underway, and it certainly sounded vaguely familiar. The show's casting notice described it as "12 people competing together, as a group to add money to a pot, that one person will win at the end of the game." There is also one person working against them called the Insider who is there to "sabotage the team as much as possible without blowing their cover."

Netflix isn't giving us anything in the way of a release date, so in the meantime we'll be streaming the original episodes on its platform. That should have been the first hint that a new version was in the works.

As far as Anderson Cooper's time on the show goes, he spoke with Entertainment Tonight ahead of the show's premiere in January 2001 and had nothing but good things to say.

"People were constantly trying to figure out who the mole was. I did not know who the mole was," he revealed to the outlet at the time. Like viewers, Anderson himself was obsessed with the game and found it to be "pretty psychologically complex." Perhaps part of the appeal was the fact that it wasn't all fun and games. The further along into the game we got, the "darker and darker" it got.

Prior to hosting The Mole, Anderson had been a journalist for eight years. Five of those years were spent at ABC News, and, in his words, he just "wanted a change." As fans of the show, we were happy to receive that change because it gave folks an opportunity to see a funnier snarky side of Anderson Cooper. Plus he got to dip into his spy wardrobe via turtlenecks and leather jackets, and we were not mad about it.