‘It’s Not Fun Anymore’

The season was always going to be explosive. One year earlier, Love Island USA had become the No. 1 reality TV show on streaming platforms, boasting 1 billion minutes viewed in a single week. After six years, the American spinoff had finally risen to the level of mainstream saturation it enjoyed in the U.K. since its inception in 2015; in addition to hitting its stride (which producers attributed to superb casting and its buzzy new host, Vanderpump Rules’s Ariana Madix), season six offered watercooler talk that had absolutely nothing to do with the election — or really anything more substantial than hot people with water bottles and mic packs finding love in Fiji.

But nobody was quite prepared for what a bombshell, to use the show’s parlance, season seven would turn out to be. Audiences hungry for some semblance of monoculture in a fractured attention economy and fatigued by dismal current events turned to the villa for escapism. What they got was more like a reminder of how impossible escaping actually is: Even before the season aired, fans raised concerns that one of the islanders had reposted racist, transphobic, and pro-Trump TikToks, a problematic casting choice considering nearly all of his fellow cast members were non-white. Two days into filming, another contestant was pulled from the show after sleuths found clips of her saying the N-word on a podcast.

As the episodes piled up, early fan favorites disappointed viewers with their behavior toward the other islanders or seemed like they were trying to game the Love Island system by voting off their biggest threats. Contestant Huda Mustafa, whose verbal abuse of her partner caused some to argue that production should have kicked her off the show, was saved from elimination not once but twice by the islanders. TikTok-inflected, red-pill-adjacent terminology seeped through this season, with male contestants negging women and playing overt mind games. By the Casa Amor stage of the competition, when the men and women are split up in separate villas and given a new slate of bombshells to connect with — normally used as a “test” for strong relationships — not a single couple was even exclusive to begin with. Fans wondered why the islanders themselves were given so much power to rig the stakes this year as opposed to the show’s typical mechanism, where the girls pick a boy to couple up with (or vice versa), leaving a handful of people single and in danger of being dumped. The elimination of Jeremiah Brown and Hannah Fields by their fellow islanders, for example, felt less like a fair assessment of their time in the villa and more like an opportunity to separate strong couples that might pose a threat later in the game.

Olivia Banghart, a former reality TV producer and TikToker, says that she suspects many of production’s changes are coming from a desire to replicate last year’s biggest viral moment, when the cast dumped Andrea Carmona from the island despite her strong connection with Rob Rausch, whose eye roll of devastation was memed the world over. “Very talented producers can second-guess themselves and step in more than they need to. It can make it feel quite overproduced,” Banghart says. “That pressure that they’re feeling to replicate the magic of last year has gotten quite antithetical to the premise of the show.” That “magic” was largely centered around a trio of women — Leah Kateb, JaNa Craig, and eventual winner Serena Page — whose magnetic friendship formed the heartbeat of last year’s blockbuster season and led to their own spinoff series, Beyond the Villa, which premiered after last night’s finale. Early on in this season, fans called out cast members who seemed to be “forcing” that same sisterhood, or worse, weaponizing it against other women who were interested in their partners.

Outside the villa, a loud minority of viewers formed parasocial obsessions with contestants, harassing contestants’ social-media accounts to the point where the show had to release multiple disclaimers reminding them not to send threatening messages to the islanders or their families. Then, less than a week before the finale, yet another islander was pulled for using a racist slur in an Instagram Story — an islander who was seemingly in the only “real” couple on the show. “It’s just not fun anymore,” reads the kicker on one lengthy Reddit post that feels reflective of the general sentiment online.

Many have blamed the villa’s vibe shift on the show’s casting of influencers. When Cierra Ortega, who entered the show with nearly 40,000 Instagram followers (and friendships with past islanders), claimed that she didn’t mind that one of her best friends in the house kissed her strongest connection, fans wondered whether she was being genuine or if she was more interested in seeming like a “girl’s girl” or a “cool girl” to the cameras. But avoiding influencers is increasingly difficult for casting departments that are already stretched thin. As Banghart explains, “It’s actually very hard to find hot people who are also very interesting and want to be on reality TV.” It’s even more difficult to find people who check all of those boxes and aren’t already stars of their own making on social media. For his part, Ace Greene, who arrived in the villa with more than a million followers on TikTok, told me he wasn’t just there for the clout. “​​I didn’t wanna come in with that mind-set of ‘I’m gonna entertain every second of the season, and that way, I can get more follows.’ I didn’t need that coming into here. I wanted to find my person, and it looks like I did,” he says, referring to his now-partner, Chelley Bissainthe. They, like most of the strongest couples in the villa, were dumped before the finale — except unlike the others, theirs was due to a vote by the public, which had ranked them toward the bottom in previous challenges. “For us, it didn’t feel good to be at the bottom and to see how America felt,” Bissainthe says. “But we also took into bigger consideration how our peers ranked us — and we were pretty high every single time. Those are the people who know the 24-hour version of us, not the one hour.”

One problem with casting shows full of people who have been online since childhood, even if they aren’t full-time influencers, is vetting their digital footprints. A casting producer for dating TV shows (but who has not worked on Love Island) says that the process usually begins six months before taping, which means that the cast has to remain single for the entire time leading up to filming, be able to take the time off of work, and pass background checks and medical and mental-health screenings. But, she says, “The social-media screening has overtaken all of that to be a really huge hurdle.” Shows often hire independent contractors to perform that labor, which involves looking out for “any kind of inflammatory language, anything derogatory or hateful towards any group,” plus any accusations of misconduct. Under Trump 2.0, it’s become even more difficult for casting and legal departments to differentiate the line between political affiliation and hatefulness. The casting producer says that each potential cast member gets vetted in a room of top execs, where certain social-media posts are discussed and debated: “It’ll be like, ‘Here, he wore a sombrero, but it was in 2016 and he was in Mexico with his Mexican friend. Like, was this meant to be something hateful? Is it an isolated thing, or a trend?’”

Of course, no amount of focus grouping can match the power of the entire internet, and certain posts are bound to slip through the cracks. Amid calls for the show to improve its vetting process, Love Island producers are reportedly planning to hire more staff to dig into cast members’ past for “racist, xenophobic, or sexist words or behavior.” “We absolutely cannot have another season like the one we are about to wrap up,” one source allegedly told The Sun. (The Love Island production team declined to comment for this piece.)

Whether that vetting process will allow for less insidious crimes than using slurs is unclear. How, for instance, should casting departments deal with men who follow violent misogynists like Andrew Tate, as contestant TJ Palma did, or repost racist videos, like Austin Shepard? It’s worth noting that both men seem to be receiving much warmer welcomes on social media than the women who were kicked off the show, despite Ortega’s apology video (which she delivered while wearing an “EMPATHY” sweatshirt) for a racist term she used in an Instagram Story. In it, she revealed that viewers have been sending her death threats and calling ICE on her family in the aftermath. There have always been double standards for men and women on Love Island, but particularly for women of color, who have borne the brunt of the hatred faced by contestants on social media.

For anyone who has clocked the increasing derangement through which fans consume reality television, this is a bleak but unsurprising turn. On TikTok and Instagram, comment sections about contestants’ behavior have devolved into personal attacks that mimic the nastiest of stan wars, but the contestants don’t have the money, power, or experience of a major celebrity to handle it. Instead, the targets are (mostly) normal 20-somethings, some of whom have never been in relationships at all. “I call it the ‘Am I the Asshole’–ification of TV, where everything becomes a morality play,” says Josh Lora, a writer and content creator who analyzes reality television. He points to the pandemic’s stunting of our collective social skills as one reason for the rabidity of the fans, as well as their inability to distinguish between parasocial relationships and real ones. Instead, he says, we’re viewing each person on the show as avatars for people or situations in our own lives and treating them accordingly. “The sheer amount of people that are watching the show and are like, ‘Huda needs to die,’ it’s like, whoa. Watch another show. We’ve seen way worse,” Lora says.

Eli Rallo, an author and TikToker, says she’s concerned about the heightened parasocial relationships viewers have formed with the islanders. “Based on the hour that we watch them every night, we fill in the blanks about them, their pasts, their mental illnesses, their attachment style, and then when they do something that we wouldn’t do or it doesn’t match up, people get super frustrated and emotional, and then they get super mean.” It’s gone far beyond holding contestants accountable for their behavior: “If you aren’t this perfect ‘girl’s girl’ who’s aspirational and relatable at the same time, who’s skinny but has a perfect relationship with food, who’s beautiful but has no work done, you’re getting canceled,” Rallo adds. “It is the craziest microscope of all time, and if you complain about the microscope, you’re ungrateful and you don’t deserve your platform. I can’t imagine what these women are going to experience coming out of this villa, and I feel scared for them.”

Love Island USA and its host have posted disclaimers and warnings throughout the season reminding viewers not to harass contestants (and thanks to the virality of the season, this now includes brands eager to capitalize on the moment; BuzzFeed, for instance, had to apologize for posting a meme that joked about punching a Black female contestant). Though the franchise has psychologists on-site to help guide them through the experience, two contestants and one former host of Love Island U.K. have committed suicide, while others have said they regret being part of the series.

The season has not been without its bright spots: the long simmering fanshipping of Nic Vansteenberghe and Olandria Carthen, both of whom were coupled up with other people but, through several twists of fate ended up in second place. The catchy song the girls made to cheer on anyone who graces the Hideaway. (“Eat That Kitty” song of summer?) And, of course, the rise and reign of Amaya Espinal, better known as Amaya Papaya, who mystified the men in the villa but through her charmingly wacky platitudes and misspoken phrases (“gratituily,” “Sometimes I am not the book that someone should be reading,” “I’m not going to have a sugar rush anymore from the word candy you’re feeding me”) delighted the rest of America. She won with her partner Bryan Arenales last night. Reads one viral tweet, “There is no love on that island besides the love i gained for amaya.”

The million-dollar question, however, is whether any of the backlash matters for Peacock, which can easily clock the high-octane discourse and engagement as a win. Viewership has continued to soar both on Peacock and online: By late June, it had become the second-most-watched show on streaming, with 39 percent of that audience being new to the series. View counts on TikTok are up 232 percent from season six, while voting via the Love Island app hit an all-time high for the series with one million votes cast within six minutes. Social media followings for the cast members have risen in stride; the anonymous creator behind the Reality Report, which tracks reality TV social accounts, says that the Instagram followings for this year’s cast have reached the million mark even faster than last year.

Just as it has been across the pond for a decade, Love Island is now more than a reality show in the U.S.; it is appointment viewing, an annual phenomenon with its own cottage industry of tabloid gossip, memes, and influencer spon-con. With its ascendence comes greater scrutiny from the viewers, some of whom seem, at least if the online discourse is to be believed, ready to give up entirely unless producers promise to cast fewer influencers and encourage stronger couples from the beginning. Love Island USA is by no means doomed, and it’s more than likely that everyone who cared enough about the show to complain about it online will be sat for next year’s season, just like devoted fans of undeniably terrible sports teams have done since time immemorial. Posted one frustrated fan of last night’s finale on Twitter, “IM FREEEEE!!! WORST EXPERIENCE OF MY FUCKING LIFE.” See you in 2026.