love island is better for my brain than instagram
an ode to the communal pastime of reality television
Dear friend—
My first taste of reality TV came from VH1’s I Love New York, a bachelorette-style dating show. My cousin put it on while I was at her house and I pretended to be less interested than I actually was. I did the math and I must have been 10 or 11 years old at the time.
Almost immediately, I knew this was something my mother—soft-spoken, practical, polite, erudite—would disapprove of. My cousin and I never watched it in her presence (sorry Mom, sorry Steph!). But the part of me that loved gossip, loved romance, loved to see folks who didn’t look and sound like me, was super into it.
I remember watching Jersey Shore a few years later (with the same cousin) and being amazed that people like Pauli D and Snooki existed. Maybe partly with some feeling of superiority (I’m not that shallow or reckless or love-obsessed, etc. etc.), but also with an anthropologist’s fascination for a social world completely unfamiliar, with its own interior quirks and slang and symbols and values.
When my cousin left for college, I didn’t watch MTV-style reality TV for a long time. I was embarrassed to admit that I enjoyed it, as a nerd and lover of books who perhaps had a touch of “not-like-other-girls” syndrome. I had better things to do with my time than watch scantily clad dudes and dudettes chase each other around a beachfront penthouse.
The pandemic and my current group of friends have shown me the error of my ways.
My return to reality TV has been slow. I watched two seasons of Netflix’s The Circle over Zoom with some friends who were living and working in different places. It wasn’t my favorite show ever, but the Zoom dates helped fill the holes of drama and fun that the pandemic created. My friends’ commentary made me laugh in ways that felt increasingly elusive at the time.
More recently, while I was hanging at a friend’s house, I suggested we watch Love Island. I knew they loved it, and I was hankering for something fun and silly. We started watching the newest season, and I was expecting the same lukewarm enjoyment I’d felt toward The Circle.
For the uninitiated, Love Island is a British reality TV show in which five ridiculously fit geezers and five ridiculously hot birds live on an island together, do challenges, couple up, and perhaps fall in love.
But the couples switch up every week, and someone is eliminated every week, until the last couple standing. The winners can take home £50,000 if they stay together or split it if they decide to part ways.
It begins with each girl arriving at the villa on the eponymous Love Island (this year in Mallorca, off the coast of Spain) astride a jeep, bikini-clad, hair blown-out, hands waving slow-motion in the air. Each gets their own intro, where they break down their dating history, what they’re looking for, some quirky fun facts. They’re there to find love, to break the cycle of dating, to finally settle down.
By the end of the first episode, I was entranced.
The contestants all have strong personalities and I instantly attached to favorites. The conversation is vapid but earnest (take a shot every time someone says, “So how are you feeling?” Another for “Where’s your head at?”). The drama and tension is immediate. The accents, *chef’s kiss*. It was exactly what I was looking for—silly, mindless fun.
We can have lots of conversations on what the show reflects about beauty standards and body image, on its almost grotesque displays of wealth, and its even more grotesque interior design choices. The show often replicates real-life’s fucked up racial and gender dynamics, which are and should be picked apart considering the show’s viewership of millions. I actually want these conversations, because Love Island is such a shining diorama of our collective relationship to love, sex, other genders, and unspoken prejudice.
But I’m also learning that the older I get is that life is stressful, and sometimes you need to turn off your brain to get your shit together. Certainly there are worse vices.
For years, I have gone to social media for this mental lidocaine. Tumblr, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Instagram is now the social media I use with the most compulsion. I can lie in bed and scroll through the Discover page anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour, racking up dopamine hits and stimulating the parts of my brain that crave pretty colors, good lighting, and cute animals.
I justify it at the end of a workday, itching for an escape from existential dread and planetary anxiety.
But Love Island does something for me that social media could never—it provides a joyous, in-person communal activity. Half the fun is the real-time reactions. The gasps of shock, the cackles thrown up at the latest pointless fight, the meals shared around it. When we pause so a friend can explain a bit of British slang, or us calling to each other in echo, like the seagulls in Finding Nemo, “I gawt a tex!”
Thanks for reading, catch you soon,
—mia xx
