It Was the Show of the Summer—but It Was Ruined by Its Own Audience
The seventh season of Peacock’s reality dating series Love Island USA, which wrapped up on Sunday night, holds the distinction of being both a supremely popular hit and what many viewers decry as the worst edition of the franchise yet. The program, an American offshoot of the U.K. series, is ostensibly about finding love, as contestants—attractive guys and gals with varying degrees of lip filler and body art, collectively known as Islanders—couple up in a Fijian villa and explore their partners and new arrivals. But this season saw infinitely more strife than love, as participants with more-established romances were summarily dumped from the island throughout the six-week run, leaving behind barely formed pairings to advance to the finale. The winning couple of Love Island USA Season 7, Amaya and Bryan, were both later additions to the cast who had only recently paired up, an unusual outcome for a series that has typically favored the “OG” Islanders and their connections. It was also the only possible outcome: All of the couples in the final four had barely been together a week, a sign of just how badly the season had gone off the rails when it came to matters of love, or even just like.
For much of the past month, fans have tried to diagnose when, exactly, it all started to go wrong. Many ascribed the show’s downfall to the moment the Islanders chose to eliminate Jeremiah and Hannah, two contestants who were actively pursuing relationships, instead of cast members whose prospects in the villa had seemingly dried up. Others pointed the finger at Huda, a controversial contestant who has been at the center of several of the season’s most dramatic storylines. Many felt that Huda, who had seemingly made castigating her partner and bad-mouthing new female “bombshell” threats part of her personality, should have been removed from the villa, rather than allowed to stay and be given another chance at romance and a redemption arc. More still blamed the producers and casting directors, asking who in the world thought it would be a good idea to fill the villa with fame-seeking influencers, people who had already met each other outside the show, and at least two individuals who were soon caught using racial slurs in the past.
Some or all of these factors may have contributed to this strange and unsatisfying season—certainly, if you ask me, none of them helped. But it was something far bigger that ultimately ruined Love Island USA this year: America itself.
The specter of public opinion has haunted the series since the conclusion of last year’s Season 6, which elevated Love Island USA from a barely watched local adaptation to the reality show of the summer. The success of that season worried fans, who feared that future contestants would flock to the competition purely to grow their follower numbers, rather than to try to find genuine love. “The breakthrough success of the series is both a blessing and a curse in this way: In casting future seasons, it will be that much harder to find cast members who aren’t preoccupied with their potential post-show careers as influencers,” Heather Schwedel wrote for Slate last year.
But the subtext became text early on in this summer’s season, when the series’ first big public vote invited fans who downloaded the Love Island USA app to play matchmaker for two new bombshells, offering up on a silver platter the opportunity to split up Huda, the previously mentioned always-yelling contestant, and Jeremiah, the main target of her yelling. It felt as if the entire viewing public were rooting for this outcome; certainly, viewing parties across the country erupted into cheers when the show’s host, Ariana Madix, announced, “America has voted, and the boy they want [bombshell Iris] to couple up with is Jeremiah.” The fact that America had voted for this result was emphasized once more by Madix: When Huda said that she felt as if she “got slapped in the face,” Madix asked pointedly, “By America?”
If the “America” mention had ended then and there, the season would’ve played out very differently. But instead, it seemed to grab hold and take root inside the Islanders’ minds, growing larger and thornier with each passing episode. “I feel like America hates me,” Huda confessed to her fellow islander Olandria following the shock recoupling. “America knows something that you don’t, so don’t think America is against you—they might be with you, and they might just want you to wake up,” Olandria replied, planting a seed that would disseminate across the villa with its utter wrongness: the idea that the public wanted to save Huda, not Jeremiah, with the vote.
Huda took it to heart, later hurling the accusation at Jeremiah during an argument: “It’s clear to America … that you’ve done things … to show that you’re not as interested.” When Jeremiah suggested that she might have it flipped, Huda continued, incredulously, “So you think America hates me? Your actions could have convinced America otherwise, and they see you’re doing the bare minimum.” By then, virtually all the Islanders appeared to have been convinced by this line of misapplied logic. Days later, when choosing which male Islander to dump from the island after another public vote left Jeremiah in the bottom three, his fellow guys directly cited “America” as a reason to eliminate him. “Looking at the bigger picture, seeing what America sees … the boy we want to dump is Jeremiah,” Taylor, Olandria’s partner, said when explaining the boys’ decision.
America continued to rear its head in other ways throughout the season. It was the elephant in the room when contestant Cierra, a front-runner and one half of the only officially “closed-off” couple, was removed from the show off camera due to a “personal situation.” (Read: After ignoring, for more than a week, a growing outcry over Cierra’s past use of a racial slur, Peacock finally pulled her from the series.) America was certainly the reason why producers saved Nic, Cierra’s partner, and Olandria, Taylor’s partner, from elimination, even going so far as to smoosh the two together to fulfill the fantasies of a very fervent faction of fans who dreamed of seeing a “Nicolandria” pairing. America was front and center when the Islanders learned about what the public thought of them in a game that ranked them in order of “most to least genuine” or “most to least trustworthy,” among other criteria. At least one contestant, Zak, suddenly seemed a lot more interested in pursuing Amaya after she was repeatedly ranked highest among the girls in that game. Another two contestants, Chelley and Ace, were noticeably shaken after being consistently placed near the bottom of these rankings, following a long period of alpha-dog bliss in the villa.
America, you could argue, was skulking in the background of some seemingly bizarre production calls, like the decision to skip the Love Island staple Movie Night, which would expose what seemingly hypocritical or unkind things Islanders had said or done throughout the show, or to not air a critical portion of a sexy challenge that pissed off Chelley, a rare display of anger that lost her slews of fans. (The more conspiracy-minded among us may assert that both of those production choices were made to sustain Huda’s redemption arc, after having milked her for all the Jeremiah drama early on in the season.)
That America—and its most vocal online representatives, many of whom became genuinely unbearable this year—is an omnipresent party in a production like this isn’t a surprise. But reality TV as a genre is all about nailing a balance: between artifice and authenticity, between sly scheming and earnest emotion, between mess and mundanity. The ever-watching eye of the public, in the social media era, has become less like a fun addendum to on-screen shenanigans and more like the Eye of Sauron, an all-knowing presence whose hot gaze makes itself known in nearly every interaction, even if no one says so. “What’s so striking about Love Island USA is how little effort it has put into incorporating the online world into the season,” critic Kathryn VanArendonk wrote last week for Vulture, but I might say that it’s the opposite: Love Island USA has gone to enormous effort to incorporate the online world—America’s opinion writ large—into this season. It just isn’t being honest about how much it’s done so, and how much that has made the show lose its equilibrium.
The concluding episode of each Love Island season is supposed to represent the ultimate unveiling of what America really thinks, as the results of the last public vote, determining which couple will take home the grand prize of $100,000 (and everlasting love, of course), are revealed. But before that, the couples have their final dates, which consist of some romantic activity and lots of repetitive talk about how they’re excited to continue seeing each other “on the outside.” This year, though, the telltale fingerprints of the producers were all over one date in particular: On Nic and Olandria’s outing, they opened up adoring messages from fans, a departure from show norms that no one else received, granted to a very nice couple that would not be together were it not for the fairy-tale magic of fan pressure and producer meddling. “It always feels nice to feel supported by America,” Nic said in an earlier episode, affirming Nicolandria’s decision to stay coupled up in the show. It’s America the fairy godmother, after we got America the bogeyman and America the all-seeing. There’s no voting America out of the villa. But to prevent it from ruining yet another season, the producers will need to stop it from taking center stage.
Slate
