A Hot New Bombshell Is Taking Over Reality TV
6 min read
Love Island USA, the most-streamed reality show in the country, is not difficult to understand. It’s a dating competition where an initial group of 10 or so singles arrive on an idyllic island and are split up into couples. Before long, new “bombshells” arrive to test their connections ahead of “recoupling” ceremonies that leave single islanders vulnerable to being “dumped”—that is, eliminated from the show. The reality-TV format of sticking a bunch of attractive young people in the same place and observing the ensuing chaos isn’t new, but the Love Island franchise has clicked with viewers in part because of its campy, fluorescent take on the classic setup. Every season, the islanders’ shared living quarters are outfitted with the show’s signature highlighter color scheme, giving the palatial villas an amusingly dormlike quality. Although contestants are usually in their 20s, the series incorporates games and challenges that sometimes make it feel like the passion project of an overzealous freshman-orientation leader.
These elements come directly from the original Love Island, a British dating show that premiered back in 2015. In the time since, viewers around the world have come to appreciate its playful decor and cheerful use of regional slang. The success of Love Island USA is actually part of a pattern that extends well past this one franchise: For several decades, many of America’s most popular reality-TV shows have been heavily influenced by European productions and creative sensibilities. Love Island USA wasn’t an immediate hit when it debuted in 2019, but the franchise’s cultural takeover in the U.S. aptly illustrates why American audiences find British reality series so refreshing.
In an era of global, on-demand streaming, it’s been much easier to simply watch U.K. reality shows—which, broadly speaking, offer a gentler version of competition programming befitting historical stereotypes about proper England and brash America. Upon making it overseas, The Great British Bake Off became an immensely popular comfort watch, with American audiences drawn to its lack of interpersonal turmoil. Domestic adaptations of U.K. shows tend to simplify formats and play up conflict: The American version of Bake Off, with its frenetic visual edits, abrupt music changes, and preference for sound bites over dialogue, is nowhere near as serene as the original. On the more extreme end is something like the U.S. Hell’s Kitchen, the Gordon Ramsay–fronted cooking show, where the celebrity restaurateur is best known as a yelling meme come to life. Ramsay is almost comically unpleasant for American audiences, but that on-screen aggression is far less central to his U.K. series. On YouTube and other streaming platforms, viewers who could do without the overwrought hostility but still enjoy his tell-it-like-it-is demeanor can find episodes of Ramsay’s more congenial British originals almost as quickly as they can queue up MasterChef Junior on FOX.
U.K.-based programs, and the aesthetic preferences of British creators, have also informed modern American television in more subtle ways. In a recent book, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV, the critic Emily Nussbaum chronicles the origins of Survivor and several other American works that shifted the reality-TV genre. Many of them, including shows that were not just re-creations of existing U.K. series, were co-created or developed by British producers. Others derived inspiration from the narrative principles of U.K. shows, which tend to observe from a distance. Survivor, for example, thrived because of an approach that one of its British co-creators described to Nussbaum as “‘situationalism’: building an artificial setting so self-contained that a story was forced to blossom inside it, like a bonsai tree.”
That might sound obvious now, more than three decades into the rise of modern reality TV, but the Survivor format was created just a few years after the first season of MTV’s The Real World in 1992. At the time, the idea of blending cinema verité with carefully constructed artifice had yet to take off. The Real World had established some of the most widely used tools in the genre—as Nussbaum notes, “the shared house, the deliberately diverse ensemble cast, and the ‘confessional.’”And early on, producers nudged the show’s cast members toward juicier interactions from behind the scenes, using a method that Murray’s co-creator, the longtime soap-opera producer Mary-Ellis Bunim, referred to as “throwing pebbles in the pond”—a subtler way of stirring up drama than in some contemporary shows, which occasionally play out as though producers are directly feeding storylines into cast members’ mouths.
The impact of The Real World on all reality programming can’t really be overstated; in particular, Love Island and other contemporary British reality series sometimes feel like they combine the earnestness of the initial Real World seasons with a modern commitment to chipper, maximalist aesthetics. Perhaps more than any other contemporary reality-dating series, Love Island encourages viewers to toss some glitter-coated pebbles: By downloading the (highly profitable) companion app for each spin-off, audiences can cast votes that affect real-time outcomes on the show.
For its recent seasons, Love Island USA moved to Peacock, NBCUniversal’s streaming platform, which enabled it to embrace the low-stakes raunch of its foreign counterpart. (Previous seasons aired on CBS, a broadcast network that’s subject to federal regulations on swear words and depictions of some sex acts.) Love Island U.K. introduced American viewers to British slang through voice-over narration, the islanders’ conversations, and even the villa’s aesthetic—neon signs bore slogans like eat, sleep, crack on, repeat. On Love Island USA, which included a handful of British contestants in this season’s cast, islanders sometimes speak like they’ve just emerged from an immersion course in the same slang—a comical, perhaps inadvertent habit that makes some of their disputes feel especially light-hearted. (“Can I pull you for a chat?” will always sound less ominous than “We need to talk.”) The show also hews closely to the languorous pace of the U.K. original—it airs nearly every weeknight, one of the many reasons the series racked up so many viewing minutes this summer.
These clear connections to the U.K. series help set Love Island USA apart from the cadre of American reality shows that more typically emphasize heartbreak and marriage over whimsy—and makes it way more fun to discover on social media as a new viewer. In the crowded reality-dating arena, this season of Love Island USA also offered audiences something few other shows do—a chance to watch two dark-skinned Black women actually experience romance (and have fun with a dynamic cast along the way). And last week, for the first time since Love Island launched nine years ago, the British show joined its U.S. spin-off in awarding a Black couple the season’s top spot—a coincidence that fans on either side of the pond have been celebrating online and citing as a way to draw in even more first-time viewers.
In a sense, Love Island’s popularity isn’t remarkable—it’s just the most obvious recent example of how young people latch on to cultural products that connect them to a highly engaged, diverse fandom. The franchise has brought a welcome dose of liveliness to the reality-TV landscape, deviating from the high stakes of American dating shows such as 90-Day Fiancé and The Ultimatum by undermining the reality-TV expectation that contestants will be wholly disinterested in nurturing friendships. Elimination scenes can be brutal, but they’re rarely hostile—contestants seem to find nothing more agonizing than being forced to pick which of their fellow islanders to send home. For viewers, the tension of these moments is tempered by the distinctive, aspirational backdrop, with warm and punny voice-over narration by the Scottish comedian Iain Stirling. No matter what happens, there will almost always be another episode the next evening to smooth things over, like the island tides themselves.
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