It’s finally here! The reality TV sensation Love Island, which has had five successful, constantly-discussed-on-social-media seasons in the UK (and in the U.S. via Hulu), has finally landed across the pond on CBS. The dating competition show will air every weekday and, like the original, will include a cash prize for the winning couple.
Both UK and U.S. Love Island are essentially combinations of Bachelor in Paradise and Big Brother, with cameras are rolling 24/7 as single “Islanders” enter the villa in Fiji and couple up. If they don’t make a connection, they risk being dumped or voted off from the island. Everything is happening in real time which makes things juicier. But for the newbies in the group, is Love Island actually happening live? Like anything worthwhile, it's complicated.
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Hosted by actress Arielle Vandenberg, Love Island has been compared to CBS' other semi-live competition series Big Brother because of the real-time aspect (technically, only one of Big Brother’s three episodes each week is live). But as far as just how live Love Island is, there is one slight snag, as the Islanders live in a villa in Fiji which is 16 hours ahead of the U.S. East Coast, where each episode's first airing will appear (sorry, West Coast!). So while the show is very much happening in real-time (unlike say, Bachelor in Paradise, which films months before being edited and aired on television), Love Island's editors have about a day in between episodes to edit everything together.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, executive producer David Eilenberg explained when CBS says Love Island is filming constantly, they mean it:
“The nice thing about Love Island is it really is happening 24/7 during the airing window. A big differentiator from other U.S. reality shows is that each episode has not been in the can for six months. People want to feel that sense of urgency and immediacy. Younger viewers, especially, can smell it if a show has been in the can for a long time. So as much as it's an incredibly exhausting undertaking from the production side, it's worth it to get that sense that the show is happening in real life as you're watching it."
The constant footage separates Love Island from Bachelor in Paradise, especially when it comes to the possibility of leaked spoilers. The audience will be finding out about what happens on Love Island almost immediately after it happens, which also means that the audience’s opinions on contestants can change each day — and even more intriguing, audience opinions can affect how the Islanders behave and react when audience voting and new Islanders from the outside world are introduced to the villa. Perhaps that's why Eilenberg refers to the series as having "genuine unpredictability," to which we say, bring it on.
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And as UK viewers know, the element of audience participation is no joke. Like the UK version, American Love Island will allow viewers to choose who can stay on the island by voting for their favorite couples. It's an obscene amount of work, but producers need to deliver new, relevant footage of the contestants interacting so that the public can vote in real time and the producers cna then tally the votes in time for a live elimination. Islanders will also compete in challenges, some of which bring the outside world in (The Bachelor could never!), like the Twitter challenge, which allows the Islanders to see some supportive and not-so-nice tweets about their relationships. Public opinion and social media will definitely play a major role not typically seen in popular US dating shows.
However, some parts of the UK show don’t appeal to an American audience. During an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Eilenberg spoke about the effect of censorship on Love Island here in the States. “We have to conform to broadcast standards, so what happens with language and — to some extent — what we see visually will be a little different because of the platform we’re on,” he said. (We can probably assume Eilenberg is talking about the graphic, brazen depictions of sex we often see on the UK version, which wouldn't exactly make it past U.S. censors.) Of course British sayings like “crack on” and “factor 50” will also be absent from the US version, which is a bit of a bummer.
CBS is taking a huge gamble running a new series five nights a week and collecting hours of footage for an entire month, because it's a seriously huge amount of work. But if Love Island can capture the same audience as it does in the UK, then it will all be worth it.