I Finally Understand Why I’m Obsessed With ‘Love Island’

I call them my dummies, the people who I watch on my big screen in the evenings as a way to calm my nervous system. It's not necessarily that my dummies are stupid, but anyone who agrees to go on a reality television show has to have enough optimism in their body to drown out any truly critical thought. They believe in love, or at least fame. They believe not only that they are special, but that in a villa with 12 other people and hundreds of cameras, where the hottest hotties you’ve ever seen in your life will be brought in to try to destroy your crush, they will come out on top. My dummies. I love them so much.

Love Island has been a staple of British reality television for more than a decade now, and Love Island USA has surged in popularity in the last three years. Like other dating shows, Love Island is theoretically about finding a partner. Singles couple up immediately, then the show does everything in its power to “test” these brand new couples. They send in even hotter singles with no attachments and call them bombshells. They make the contestants play games where they have to kiss each other or try to get each other's heart rates as high as possible. Halfway through the show, just when couples are starting to gain a sense of security, the islanders are split in half by gender for "Casa Amor" and presented with five new bombshells. It’s demented. It’s the kind of “tests” that you might imagine a relationship would endure if you exclusively watched '90s rom-coms and never ever went on an actual date, or—in the case of all the islanders—you were so hot that your perception of reality was that you are a '90s rom-com heroine.

None of this is what makes Love Island so addictively watchable. There are dozens of reality shows that conduct versions of what is essentially the Stanford prison experiment on hot singles in exchange for potential Instagram followers. This is a whole genre of reality television that people love. But all of those shows film their seasons, and then producers take the reality of what happened and map it onto storyboards. They create satisfying narratives and build out heroic and villainous character arcs for real people.