Why Everyone’s Watching Love Island- But No One’s Enjoying It

Love island USA season 7

On July 1st, 2025, America (and anyone with an American phone number) locked in and exercised their democratic right to vote. The Love Island polls opened at 10 p.m., and by 10:06 p.m., one million people had already voted for their favorite male and female Islander. By the end of the two-and-a-half-hour voting window, 3.5 million unique users had secured the fate of the Islanders.

That kind of engagement is wild, and it proves that Love Island USA is no longer just a casual summer show. It’s appointment television, a nightly ritual, a group chat with millions of people. I left plans at 8:30 p.m. more nights than I’d like to admit, just to be in front of a screen by 9. And yet… it wasn’t a good season of reality TV.

Don’t get me wrong — Season 7 outperformed the last in both viewership and online chatter. But while the addictive nature of the show had audiences coming back night after night, the general sentiment around the cast and episodes was far more negative than Season 6. It felt off. The show has never been more popular, but it's also never felt more broken. And I think it comes down to two major issues that fed into each other.

1. Audiences forgot that reality TV is supposed to be messy.

Love Island is meant to be chaotic. The concept is simple: Islanders are coupled up each week, and being single puts you at risk of elimination. Random bombshells are sent in to shake things up. Everyone’s trying to find love — love that’ll convince America to vote for them at the end and bag the $100K prize. The episodes air a few days behind real time, giving producers just enough space to craft drama and let the public vote.

But the culture around reality TV has changed. Thanks to the influencer-ification of contestants after the show, audiences now expect players to be media-trained and politically correct while they’re still in the villa. (To be clear, I’m not talking about the very real and serious controversy around Cierra and Yulissa’s past use of slurs and their removal from the show — that’s a separate issue.) What I mean is: American viewers seem genuinely shocked that the average person applying to a dating show might not be a polished, PR-ready saint.

We used to tune into Bad Girls Club and Jersey Shore because people crashed out. They got messy, made bad decisions, screamed, cried, hooked up, and stormed off. In 2025, people are getting bullied online for doing exactly what makes the genre work — being chaotic. And the worst part? Those crash-outs are still drawing millions of viewers in. So the audience is feeding the machine while also punishing the people inside it.

2. The show was split across two screens, and not everyone was on both.

This season, the drama didn’t just happen in the villa. It unfolded simultaneously on TikTok, with conspiracy theories, dating rumors, and resurfaced receipts about cast members shaping how certain contestants were perceived — and voted for. The narrative wasn’t controlled by producers anymore; it was scattered, decentralized, and wildly uneven.

Since Love Island USA is built around a public vote, this has real consequences. Some viewers were watching just the Peacock episodes. Others were deep in TikTok echo chambers, learning things about the Islanders that the show never mentioned. That made the votes unpredictable and, in some cases, confusing. People weren’t just voting on the chemistry or gameplay happening on screen — they were voting based on things that existed entirely outside the villa.

The clearest example of this disconnect was the Cierra scandal. TikTok had been circulating clips of her using anti-Asian hate speech long before it became public knowledge on the show. So when she was abruptly removed, viewers who weren’t chronically online had no idea what happened. My friend, who doesn’t have TikTok, texted me frantically after the “Hate to Burst Your Bubble” challenge, where the Islanders had to rank themselves on questions like “Who’s the most genuine?” and “Who’s the most trustworthy?” America’s votes completely flipped their rankings. Chelly (a seemingly unproblematic contestant) was suddenly at the bottom, and my friend was like, “What did I miss?”

It felt like all the viewers were in a group chat she hadn’t been invited to. And honestly? She wasn’t.

Love Island has always been about playing the game of love, of popularity, of timing. But this season, the game felt bigger than the villa. With TikTok whisper networks, influencer aspirations, and hyper-aware audiences shaping every move, the original premise — that we’re watching people fall in love in real time — started to unravel. As the lines between producer-curated drama and platform-driven narratives blur, I’m left wondering if Love Island can ever go back to being fun, messy, and a little bit dumb — or if reality TV is now just another genre of strategic content creation.