'Love Island': Where Reality TV Meets Decency

Life, eh? One moment there you are, stumbling around in the dark. Trudging into work each day and laying your head down on your cold, dirty pillowcase each night, not sure what the point of it is. The world's in actual tatters. What's out there for you? Nothing.

And then, something comes along: Something good and true. Something that glimmers in the dark. You've got a reason to go into work, a reason to wash that pillowcase. No, I'm not talking about love. I'm talking about a reality TV show, of course. ITV's Love Island, more specifically. It's the show of the season, perhaps the century, where all the best and most enjoyable parts of Big Brother, The Bachelor, and Survivor are squished and folded into each other like Instagram slime, together forming absolute, undying magic.

As far as reality television goes, Love Island has truly triumphed. What might look like yet another iteration of the old "throw a few binge drinkers into a mansion and hope for the worst" formula to the untrained eye, may turn out to be our most promising endeavour yet to document horny and heartfelt millennial relationships.

In a glass and sandstone villa tucked into a Majorcan hillside, with a pool and enough oversized fairy lights to sink a ship, the Love Island contestants spend the European summer—or forty five days and nights of it—in the hopes of finding love and friendship. But mostly love. And also fifty thousand pounds.

For all its perversion, Love Island is an uplifting version of its peers: where Geordie Shore was a bona fide torrent of criminal, self-destructive and breakneck behaviour, Love Island is a wholesome family vacation. Most episodes consist of these characters laying poolside, or whispering in one of the school camp-like lined up beds. Talking things out in sun-dappled cabanas on the lawn. Cooking up meals together, and chain smoking by the fire pit (where they never inhale and for the life of me I can't figure out why).

When issues arise or tempers flare, the contestants speak to it almost immediately, taking each other aside and respectfully working it out. When relationships end, both parties say "I just want them to be happy." And when a contestant doesn't do the right thing by someone, they're confronted by the majority of the house in a very mature and level-headed way, they apologise, and it's back to sort-of-smoking by the fire pit.

It's bizarre to see reality TV contestants documented in this way, where they would usually be cast and contrived in the editing room into whichever character their footage might allow. It's all very fair, reminiscent of those first few seasons of Big Brother (albeit quite a lot less boring).

That was before everything went mad. Before reality TV became well and truly evil…

Earlier this year, Channel 9 aired the fourth season of the wildly popular Married at First Sight Australia, a reality television phenomenon that saw 20 single people set up on blind dates at the altar for non-legally binding commitment ceremonies (shout out to the LGBTQ+ community), before they would spend the following five weeks racing through relationship milestones together. Honeymooning, living together, meeting the parents, and eventually deciding on whether or not to stay with one another.

Season four was the show's biggest and most outrageous iteration yet: there were two times as many contestants as usual—previous seasons had had between eight and 10—and they were now to spend their month of pseudo-living together coupled off in separate apartments in the same building. And, because the prior season had had its most impressive ratings when a one-off dinner party for the contestants became heated and highly aggressive, there was now a booze-fuelled dinner party every single week.

After the season's conclusion, stories began to surface about just how much of a headfuck being a Married… Season 4 contestant really was. Much like its predecessor The Bachelor, scenes and chapters filmed around alcohol were later described as being "extreme" and "horrific." Contestant Susan Rawlings said that hens nights and dinner parties would be filmed over nine hours or more, sometimes going until four in the morning. They would usually become 20 minutes of footage. Lauren Bran told a reporter that water jugs disappeared throughout the night and were replaced with vodka and Red Bull, and drinks were free-poured to confuse contestants.

It's not really news, though, is it? How reality TV is manufactured and manipulated to make people look as antagonistic and unreasonable as possible? How it sacrifices its characters, putting them in emotional and physical danger so that we can watch from the comfort of the couch, gawking and cackling at the monstrosity that is human nature? No.

But season four of Married took a particularly sinister step into this new world, when it let one of its contestants, Cheryl Maitland, become the victim of—what very much looked like—an emotionally and psychologically abusive relationship with "husband" Andrew Jones. As an audience, we looked on while the majority of the characters dismissed or didn't acknowledge at all Maitland's concerns about her partnership with Jones, and as he appeared to gaslight the living hell out of her on national TV.

Particularly difficult to watch was the lack of intervention from the show's on-camera psychologists and off-camera producers. What some of the less likeable contestants called "boys will be boys behaviour," turned an audience into a complicit, uncomfortable bystander.

But it did what reality TV shows often say they set out to do, and that is Show Us Ourselves. Many of us had been Maitland, and those who hadn't had probably been Jones, or one of the contestants who said nothing. Seeing it in 3D and HD, from every angle, as "mediators" sat back and watched, was eerie. It was too close to home. That kind of fear has longevity.

This was, by no means, the most fucked up thing we'd seen in reality TV as a people. Many will remember the Sky production There's Something About Miriam, where heterosexual cisgender male contestants were told they were competing for the affections of a cisgendered woman Miriam, after which it was revealed in the season's finale that she was, in fact, transgender. And in 2010, MTV's Teen Mom aired an episode in which one of its pivotal characters attacked their partner in front of their one-year-old daughter. MTV had shot the scene one year prior to its air date, but was apparently under no legal obligation to interfere or to report it to authorities. And of course, reality TV since its very inception has propagated and profited from extensive racism, at best tokenistic casting and at worst…well, where to start?

In its most extreme form, reality TV trauma can literally be life or death. In its lifetime, reality TV has lost a number of its alumni to suicide: Chef and restaurant owner Joseph Cerniglia appeared on Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, where Ramsay warned his business would soon "swim down the Hudson [river]". Three years later, Cerniglia's body was found in it. Hell's Kitchen contestant Rachel Brown died from a gunshot wound to the head one year after her being cast on the show. It was ruled a suicide. And six years after appearing on The Bachelor, Alexa "Lex" McAllister was found in her home after overdosing on prescription pills, dying later in hospital. There was Gia Allemand (The Bachelor), Russell Armstrong (Real Housewives of Beverly Hills), Anthony Riley (The Voice). The list goes on.

These deaths prove that the experiences of contestants, good and bad, do not end when filming wraps.

Producers have been leaning into the drama and theatrics more than we ought to allow, in the hope that more aggression, more sex, and more alcohol means a more captivated audience. Figuring that the villain V victim trope is the only way to keep our attention. This did indeed seem to be true, though. In Geordie Shore season two, Gary and Ricci's all-in house brawl was genuinely terrifying, but horrific violence and danger quickly turned into water cooler conversation.

But maybe all that is changing, because Love Island seems to prove all conventional wisdom about reality TV wrong.

Before Love Island season 3 even began shooting, it appeared the producers had resolved that this show would be different: They weren't going to ship the maddest and most trifling people they could find off to Majorca, and wait for the inevitable friction to turn explosive. In fact, the producers, god bless them, found some of the funniest, kindest, and most self-aware contestants reality TV has seen in years.

They found Marcel Sommerville, the villa's peacemaker and constant well of wisdom. They found Kem Cetinay and Chris Hughes, the show's championing personalities, whose purity and wit have infatuated millions. And the northern hemisphere's most non-confrontational and drama-averse woman, Camilla Thurlow, made it into the villa. A woman who would not even say the word "sex" using her inside voice. The season's two closest things to a "villain" were loveable shit-stirrer Theo Campbell, and Johnny Mitchell, whose worst trait was that he was a bit dumb—at one point he asked then TV-girlfriend Camilla, "have we not got [gender] equality? The Prime Minister's a woman?"

It also didn't seem like producers prodded contestants to be mean or accusatory very often. The villa's diary room was almost always a place of self-reflection, or funny anecdotes. Unlike America's Next Top Model, it was quite clear that nobody was ever asked, "Who doesn't deserve to be here?" or, "Who's being fake?" The one ploy the producers did use was steeped in honesty and transparency: showing texts and tweets that might stir the pot, but each time everything would be forgiven just hours later.

What this tells us is that in conventional reality TV, the producers are the primary antagonists. And that while they might expect us to get bored without the screaming and falling over and fist fights—we actually don't. Love Island is now one of the more hopeful and enjoyable things on TV. We could probably do with a bit more of that.

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