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.
What makes Love Island the best show on television is that its producers cannot do that. The new season of Love Island USA premieres this week, and the islanders are in the villa right now, 16 hours ahead of us because they film in Fiji. When their day ends, the producers cut it together. Editors look at the first draft the following morning. They tweak it throughout the day and give it voice-over narration. Then it airs at 9 p.m. ET. The delay between what is actually happening in Fiji and what we are seeing on television is so slim. It is not live, but it is close.
It is disgusting how much Love Island I have consumed since I watched my first episode last summer. In the past year, I have watched Love Island USA seasons 4, 5, 6, and 7, and I have watched Love Island UK seasons 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9 and 12. Each season is about 30 hours long.
This past year has been one of the hardest of my life. I was terribly depressed and then, just as that lifted, I entered one of those seasons of life where every single day feels like a curse. Things got so much worse before they got better. Fear and misery can consume you if you don’t find a way to distract yourself, and the thing that turned out to be the perfect distraction for my household was watching a bunch of dummies every single day.
For months, I have been unable to articulate what it is exactly about the show that feels emotionally satisfying to me. Sure, I love reality television, and this is reality television. Sure, I enjoy the kind of social analysis that shows like this allow you to do on your couch. But there was something earnest and sweet beneath all of the screaming and crying that kept bringing me back to Love Island in the midst of a hard time. Over the weekend, I read Anna Peele’s new book Enter The Villa: The (Unauthorized) Reality Behind Love Island, and there, at the end of a list of why people are drawn to the show, was my answer.
It is a show about love, or dating, or competition, or the fleeting glory of warm weather and being young and hot, or insecurity, or conflict, or some combination of all those things. It is an annual televised summer fling. It’s communal voyeurism. It forces young adults to put down their phones and engage. It fosters emotional intelligence in the kind of people who would elect to go on a series that almost invariably features more than one wet T-shirt contest.
That was it. It wasn't just that Love Island fostered emotional intelligence, it was that for some contestants, it seemed to birth it.
On every season of Love Island there is one dummy (usually, but not always a man) who endears themself to me in the early episodes of the season because it appears to be their first day on earth. They are so beautiful that the learning experiences regular people must have to survive their childhood and early adulthood breezed right past them. They have not ever really considered that they are not the center of the universe, because everyone has always treated them as if they are. It is a curse to be so hot in your youth, and the curse is that everything is easy for you except empathy.
One of these perfect dummies, to me, is Chris Hughes, from Love Island Season 3. “There are two sides to me. There’s Funny Chris and then there’s, like, Really Funny Chris,” Chris said before going on to rate himself a 9.5 out of 10 and declare that he was hotter than David Beckham. Chris—who is currently dating JoJo Siwa—was 24 years old in the villa. He came in as a bombshell and immediately began flirting with three different girls. A few episodes later, after kissing one of them in front of another, an islander had to pull him aside. He had hurt that girl’s feelings. Chris was stunned. This seemed impossible. Why would her feelings be hurt, he argued, when they weren’t in a relationship? The goal of the show was to find love, and he was just doing what he was supposed to be doing!
Every season this happens. Another islander, whoever they may be, takes the biggest dummy (in this case Chris) by the hand and walks them through the idea of empathy. Imagine, that islander might say in the gentle tone of a parent, that someone you had a crush on went and kissed someone else in front of you. How might that feel?
I will never forget the look on Chris Hughes’s face when he had this kind of question presented to him in Season 3. There was a slow dawning of misery, followed by a sudden and harrowing look of regret. It had never occurred to him, or any of the dummies who came after him, that other people’s emotions and realities were different from his own—that even if he might have good (or at worst neutral) intentions, he could still cause harm. This dawning is terrible for the dummy. They have hurt someone. They must apologize! Almost always, they do apologize. And then, a week or two later, the whole process happens again. I use Chris Hughes as an example because he is one of the few islanders I remember who was the dummy and then later in the season helped another new dummy achieve empathy. He grew so much over his six weeks in the villa.
This is the comfort of Love Island when the world around me feels cursed. You spend so many hours with these people you will never know and never meet, and you can see the scales fall from the eyes of a new dummy or two each summer. From my couch on the other side of the world, I can observe almost in real time a stranger who has newly discovered what it means to be a person in the world: to care for someone else even if you don’t want to fuck them.
