I Can’t Wait to Be Released From Love Island USA
On Sunday, by the grace of whatever higher power exists, I will be liberated from my misery. When the credits roll and Peacock attempts to bamboozle me into watching Next Gen NYC via autoplay one last time, I will transcend willingly, gladly, into a blissful nirvana. If heaven is real, there will be rivers of wine and honey flowing and green, lush gardens and string quartets making the cosmos vibrate, but there will certainly, under no circumstances, be Love Island USA.
Love Island has broken my brain and I can’t wait to be released from its greedy mitts. As a Love Island mini-veteran who has watched two seasons prior to this, I have never been so consumed by the show as I have been during season seven. My evening routine revolves around watching (you’ve never known joy until you’ve taken an everything shower and ordered sushi to arrive exactly when Love Island starts), and even when I go out with friends, I’ll try to watch that evening’s stream the minute I get home. During each episode, I’m texting via invisible ink (to avoid spoilers) in multiple group chats, and afterward, I find myself scrolling on TikTok for far too long into the night to compare notes with fellow viewers. I wake up thinking about whatever drama transpired the night before.
What has happened to me? I used to be a girl who liked to read before bed, and for the past six weeks my bookmark has made very little progress in my copy of The Bell Jar (not all of us got to have a moody literary phase at 16). Now I spend that time doing thumb aerobics, switching between apps to see what reality-TV analysts are going on about while mentally arguing with fans who seem to forget how much production can manipulate a moment/conversation/entire person and silently defending the women who are misconstrued and misunderstood. I feel like I’ve been in a fistfight for six weeks.
Perhaps the all-consuming weight of the season has to do with the fact that I have also never seen such fervent, borderline feral, wide-reaching fan reactions to the show. Viewers have allegedly been calling government agencies, like ICE and CPS, on former and current contestants this season and leaving comments filled with vitriol and racism on much of their social-media pages, to the point at which Peacock had to step in and issue an anti-bullying statement (that’s rich coming from the network doing some of the bullying). This new viewership would not last a day watching Love Island U.K.
I’m certain our timeline was yoinked off its tracks when Yulissa, one of the contestants whose internet presence was littered with some racist incidents, was rightfully pulled from the show. The producers were counting on her to be the drama, but instead it seems like they had to resort to inflicting emotional warfare on the rest of the cast living inside the villa, turning this mansion in Fiji from a place where horny individuals once went to party into a slow-moving conveyor belt filled with broken toys. And, as hard as it has been to watch, I can’t look away. It’s as if a zombie apocalypse hit the land of the Lotus Eaters — we all know it’s deplorable, but we can’t quite pull ourselves away from the mystery, or perhaps misery, of it all.
But on Sunday night, after the 35th and final episode of the season rattles to its conclusion, I will turn my TV off. I will set my phone on Do Not Disturb and go to bed with a sense of forced closure. I will wake up in the morning, the birds will be chirping and the sun will be shining, and I will finally, for the first time in almost two months, experience peace.
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