In the winter, my television mostly stays off. The winter is when my brain is at its best. I am reading. I am writing. I am maybe watching a couple episodes of a show a week. But this feels crazy to type right now, at this moment in the summer, because I currently have a minimum of four hours of television I must watch every single day. I do not have time to read or have hobbies or do anything else, because I am too busy being locked the hell in.
Television has been my best friend for several weeks because of two shows that come on every day. The first show is baseball. I am a Phillies fan, and baseball teams play 162 games over the course of six months every year. I watch most of them. Then I am also committed to another kind of sport called Love Island.
The premise of Love Island is simple. A bunch of young hot people live together in a villa. They must pair up into couples and try to fall in love. If they are not in love (in a couple), they are in danger of being “dumped” (kicked off the show). But even those in love are in a precarious situation, because at any moment a hot new bombshell could enter the villa and throw the existing couples into disarray. What makes Love Island different from other reality dating shows is that it is like baseball: It comes on every single day. Unfortunately for me, I am watching both the U.S. version of Love Island (which films in Fiji) and the original U.K. version of Love Island (which films in Mallorca).
This means that I have a minimum of four hours of scheduled programming, five or six days a week. Usually both baseball and the Love Islands have one or two days off per week (not coordinated), so I can use those to see my friends—or read, I guess. But I hate those days now. Where are my shows? I weep for my beautiful daily shows!
What’s funny is that I resisted Love Island for so long, because of the fact that it’s daily. It’s just so much television, I remember saying to my friends last summer, as if I was not already watching hours of television every day (or worse: scrolling on my phone). But I have always experienced extreme cultural FOMO, and so I decided that this would be my year. Immediately, I realized how wrong I had been. I love watching it.
A few episodes into the U.S. season of Love Island, I realized why. In the fourth episode, the contestants “played baseball,” which is to say they were given crop-top jerseys in various colors and taken to a “baseball diamond.” Each base had a challenge associated with it. All of the challenges were kissing. The contestants chose someone for each of the bases and kissed them there. The bases were called first, second, third, and fourth. “Ultimately this game makes very little sense, but everyone seems to be having a lovely time,” the snarky Love Island narrator Iain Stirling said in a voiceover. That’s when I realized that to me, Love Island is baseball.
Most of the things I love about baseball also exist in Love Island. They both feature hot people who are dressed a little slutty, and come in and out of the story. In Love Island, they are dumped or brought in as a bombshell. In baseball, a player can be traded, and on top of that there are new teams to play each week. Both have a psychological study aspect to them. The players enter slumps and lose their mental game. The contestants crash the hell out and have emotional breakdowns. Everyone is being instructed by mainly off-screen coaches or producers. There is heartbreak—sometimes for the people on the screen, but sometimes for you as the viewer.
Plus, both shows are happening live-ish. The baseball games are on a three-second delay, according to my MLB app, and Love Island is on a single-day delay because of editing, which means that all of this is happening right now. The stakes of both are slightly lower than a show that comes on every week (like the NFL or The Bachelor), because there’s just so much content to consume. If you miss one episode, it’s probably fine! If something dramatic happens, there will be a highlight clip going around for sure.
There are so few relevant daily shows now. Late-night programming has lost its juice, and soap operas haven’t been popular in the United States for years. But there’s something I love about a daily show. A show that comes on every day (be it the sport of baseball or the sport of love) creates around it a bubble of comfort. It is there for you every day, if you want it. There is a comfort in seeing the same strangers’ faces each night, and in learning to predict how they might behave. To be able to watch something each day that you know everyone around you is also watching—to have something new to discuss with anyone at a surface level—is a beautiful beacon of community building. It’s easy to connect with people over something as silly and low-stakes as a game on television in late June. It feels effortless and universal.
Part of the fun of both baseball and Love Island is the dissection you get to do with other people. Should Huda be less serious in her relationships? Should a hitter in a slump change his walk-up song for better luck? Should Nic allow someone else to bring his girl coffee in the morning? Should the runner on first base be given a green light to steal? It’s always easy to have an opinion from the couch, and that’s where I’ll be for another month: watching my beautiful television for four-ish hours a day, yelling at the screen the whole time.
