Blue swimming pools, golden sunshine, white walls and near-nakedness fill our screens when Love Island is on. The glorious summer event has been such a hit that McGreedy over at ITV wants a winter season. Double the revenue!? Where do I sign?
The Islanders, we are told, are in the villa to find love. They couple up, and when fans vote for their favourite couple every week, the producers make some decisions. Who to kick out, when to introduce more single people, and when to ask everyone to couple up again.
The rules are simple: couple up with someone, and be interesting enough to remain on the show. If you are left single, or in an unpopular couple, you could be kicked out. Or not. The producers reserve the right to do the Most Dramatic Thing.
When we watch people play games, the gaming industry gets all uppity and wants to call it eSports. We watch hot people play a game on Love Island over eight weeks, but no one would call it an eSport. Love Sports might be a better name for this genre.
All Love Sports have an underlying game that has to do with finding love. In Too Hot to Handle (Netflix), contestants are told that they are going to be on a reality TV show in a beach villa for six weeks. Naturally, they assume that it must be something like Love Island. In the first episode, hot people make fabulous entrances. As night sets in, the contestants huddle around Lana, who announces that they can’t have sex for three weeks. Jaws drop, and we are treated to cutaway scenes of their reactions to this news, again, in private. They are nice enough to re-enact their feelings for us. Three weeks!? I haven’t gone a day without poppin’ off!
Lana is a robot. You may have the wrong impression here. Lana doesn’t have an auto-tuned robot voice with bleeps and blops. Lana looks like an Alexa mated with a lava lamp, and sounds like Siri. Lana is not real, of course — it is a prop with blinking lights. The producers ‘tell’ Lana what to say.
Lana has set up this game to teach these hot people to build emotional connections. Lana lays down the rules: no kissing, self-gratification, or sex. Or “heavy petting”. Money is deducted from the $100,000 prize for rule breaks. Since the prize is shared, there is social pressure to not engage in sexual activity.
Rule breaks are fun, and Lana makes pronouncements in a voice-assistant voice. There has been, an incident. Some of you kissed last night.
When they build genuine emotional connections, couples are rewarded with a temporary green light. They can finally kiss! And more, if they want to. Lana hopes to condition the ‘right’ behavior with these rewards.
But green lights are less interesting than rule breaks. So the producers… ahem, Lana, puts people in difficult situations where they might break the rules. A sizzling new arrival makes the single people forget about the rules. Lana might reward a couple the use of a private room overnight, but without a green light. This drama is interesting to us, the viewers of Love Sports, so the producers try to create the perfect amount of it.
In Love Island, the perfect amount of drama is achieved by creating a perfect number of new couples every week. The producers work hard to make three new couples each week, which is about half of the couples at any time in the villa.
I only wanted to write words, but data on a graph makes it more believable, I guess.
If Love Island was a tech startup, we’d jump up and down and call this a North Star Metric. When done right, they can be a powerful unifying force. The North Star Metric for Uber is zero waiting time for drivers and passengers. Surge pricing, for example, is an effort to reduce waiting time for passengers. So are driver bonuses.
The producers use this 50%-in-new-couples rule to decide when to introduce new single people, when to kick people out, and when to ask everyone to recouple.
How do they use this rule, you ask? For this, we must journey, quickly, through the first week of Love Island 2021.
The boys are asked to pick a girl. The one in blue, says Brad. Faye is not impressed. This isn’t going to last. Five couples are formed, and then Chloe enters. She’s told that she can steal a guy the next day. Chloe chooses to couple up with Aaron, which leaves Shannon single. Shannon is then dumped from the island.
All of this happens so quickly, and we are barely in episode 2. It is constructed for immediate drama, of course, and it is such an artificial way of creating a new couple. It needs to seem natural. There are five couples in name, but no one’s really cracking on yet, except for Liberty and Jake.
So two guys, Liam and Chuggs, enter the villa on Day 4. Everyone gets a chance to hang out before a recoupling on Day 5. This time, the girls get to choose. Liberty stays with Jake, and Kaz with Toby. She’s not getting any vibes from Toby, but she’s hoping they can crack on. Sharon chooses Aaron, Chloe couples up with Hugo, and Faye picks Liam. Brad and Chuggs are single, but not for long! Rachel enters, and is told that she can couple with one of them the next day.
Phew! That’s one week on Love Island. Five couples are formed, and three of them are new. 60% new couples, and three single people with one more new couple on the way. That’s a wrap for the first week, everyone— well done, production team! Now, how are we gonna make three more couples next week?
From the producer’s perspective, single people are the ingredients to create couples. It takes a lot of ingredients to keep making 50% new couples every week. In the 2021 series, 37 people went through the villa.
Ah, let’s talk about the athletes! Regular people don’t get to play Love Sports — only hot, somewhat-already famous people get to play them. If we think tennis is inaccessible, Love Sports are a million times worse.
The kind folks at Liverpool University got some teenagers together in a focus group to quiz them about Love Island. They had to talk to youth, because it is the most popular show in the UK amongst people aged 16-34.
“They chose Insta models, people who are already famous who already have a particular life style. They don’t choose average people. So if you think they are like you, you are fooling yourself [….]I think that the contestants weren’t interested in love just wanted to become more famous (FG year 11 age 17 F).”
Love Sports solve the problem of authenticity by aligning what the athletes want, to what the show needs. The show needs enthusiastic players who will play the game earnestly, and the athletes want some serious social media followings. Not for now… for later! After, after the show ends. They are smart enough to play the long game.
Being on a reality TV show is an amplifier, a new audience acquisition channel. Would you go on Love Island if it guaranteed you a million followers on Instagram? There’s no guarantee that swathes of social media fame will follow, of course. But that doesn’t stop our athletes from expecting it. They gotta see a return on their investment.
The Love Island 2021 contract signed by the athletes had a new clause — they acknowledge that they may not get famous. That’s a weird thing to say in a legal contract. Did a millennial sue because they didn’t get enough followers?
The athletes get on-site counseling during the show, free counseling for 8 weeks after leaving the show, and social media training to handle the hate and abuse flung at them. ITV calls this ‘duty of care’ and touts it like this big responsibility thing, which is a bit like Facebook touting their support for the GDPR.
ITV was forced to care by Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator. They issued updated guidelines in 2020 to broadcasters that participants “be informed about potential risks arising from their participation in the programme which may affect their welfare (insofar as these can be reasonably anticipated at the time) and any steps the broadcaster and/or programme maker intends to take to mitigate these.”
Producers play with people’s emotions on the show, and they keep pushing the line. Ofcom and every media lawyer must have spooked when Sophie Gradon in 2018 and Mike Thalassitis in 2019 took their lives after being on Love Island.
The Dani Dyer incident of 2018 was partly responsible for the updated guidelines. In week 5, the guys move to Casa Amor to hang out with new girls. During the week, the producers sent a heavily edited video to Dani Dyer. She was coupled up with Jack, who’s in the video going ‘oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god…’ when he sees his ex at Casa Amor.
That, with some creative editing, is enough to convince Dani that Jack is cheating on her. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t true. Jack is at Casa Amor and Dani can’t confront him. Dani breaks down, extremely upset, while she is mobbed by the girls and the ever present cameras roll on.
Fans were not happy that Dani suffered like this for our entertainment, and Ofcom was promptly inundated with 2,500 complaints. They shrugged and said, well — you just expect these kinds of shows to create this kind of drama. But it’s some PR person, so they actually said: “While we understand her distress made for upsetting viewing, we consider that viewers are likely to expect emotionally charged scenes that have been engineered to test contestants’ relationships”
The regulator permits things like this because viewers expect it? If Love Sports are going to manipulate the athlete’s emotions for our entertainment, just let the athletes know what they are in for. Get informed consent. So a lawyer at ITV said, the biggest risk is that they don’t get the fame they expect. Shove that in the contract. Informed consent, check.
The producers are not shooting from the hip here. They know the broadcast guidelines and implement them to the letter. Yes, the letterr, Superintendent Hastings! It is borne out of a need for compliance, not genuine concern for the athletes. They do it because it gives them air cover to keep using these tactics.
After Casa Amor week in 2021, producers pulled another Dani Dyer-style trick. During a movie night, the Islanders watched clips of themselves at Casa Amor. Again, convenient editing causes Faye to have a huge fight with Teddy.
This time, Ofcom was hit with 20,000 complaints. Expect them to shrug again. And again, and again. Until the basic assumption that underlies the guidelines stops being true — that viewers expect it, so it’s okay that producers keep doing it.
Love Sports are different from eSports in this fundamental way. The game is not made for the players, it is made for us – the viewers. The players must suffer for the viewer. They know what they are getting into, because there is informed consent. Just be sure to follow them on Instagram.
The producers follow the unfailing rule of capitalism and give us what we want. We want to see relationship problems on screen.
It’s drama, sure. But we also learn from it. We see toxic masculinity on display and some of us are turned off by it. Social media debates about gaslighting on the show means that gaslighting is talked about. Young people become aware of these ideas and learn about relationships. Courtesy our friends at Liverpool University, again:
“It’s good it can teach young people about relationships what’s good what’s bad. It gets us talking about relationships in school and it’s lets us see bad personalities (FG year 9 age 13 F) “
The paper is optimistic about Love Island’s impact on RSE — Relationship and Sex Education. Most teenagers are learning about bad behaviours, bad people, and toxic relationships from Love Island. Could Love Island teach something good, too?
If that happens, Love Island will cease to be successful. Good relationships don’t make for new couples, and the game needs a lot of new couples. Don’t ruin the game, you’ll ruin the sport.
It all began with The Bachelor, in 2002. We know too much about human nature and behaviour now, after twenty years of designing games for Love Sports. We are experimenting a lot. There will be many failures, but we will keep getting better at making them. Even Love Island failed as Celebrity Love Island in 2005.
Netflix is not shy with their experiments. They’ve got Too Hot to Handle, The Circle, Love is Blind, Say I Do, What the Love, Indian Matchmaking, Love on the Spectrum, REA(L)OVE, Back with the ex, Dating Around.
They are not sports, you say. That sounds weird! I hear you.
But consider where our definition of sport comes from. Perhaps the world’s male gaze does not allow us to see Love Sports as sports. We may enjoy watching them, but we accommodate them with guilt, and a sense that it is a waste of time.
Love Sports are like any other sport. There are ardent fans, and there’s people who are bemused by the sport’s existence.
Thank you to Georgia, Alex, Sneha, Christine and Holly for reading early versions. And to Akanksha, with whom I watched many Love Sports.
P.S. Hey, Leibniz!
While working on this piece, I managed to use calculus in real life. Who knew it would involve reality TV! If spreadsheets are your thing, you can find data from the 2015 and 2019 seasons of Love Island here.
The derivative of the ratio of singles to couples, I believe, is a good approximation of the drama curve of a Love Island season.
The intuition is as follows. A low ratio of singles to couples — let’s call it low S/C before we lose our heads here, means that there are less single people relative to couples. So, there are less ingredients for building couples. High S/C is more ingredients. A change in S/C means that ingredients are changing. There are attempts to create or break up couples, which is how drama happens. That means that the rate of change of S/C (basically… S/C today minus S/C yesterday, divided by S/C yesterday), over time, should give us an approximate drama curve.
I was over the moon when I realized that this was differentiation of the d/dx type. I now join the chosen few who have used calculus for something. Hey, Leibniz! Hold the elevator.
I didn’t say something useful. Just… something outside the textbooks!
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