Love Island USA Understands That Reality TV Rules Don’t Matter

This article contains spoilers for Love Island USA season 7 episode 12.

Reality is stranger than fiction. Managed reality is even stranger. Love Island USA understands that as well or better as any current reality program.

An American remake of a successful British format that’s gone global, Love Island‘s premise is as simple as they come. The Peacock dating series ships a handful of hot young dudes and dudettes to a gorgeous villa on a tropical island (most times in Fiji, give or take a Covid season or two) where they romantically couple up with one another to find love. New episodes air daily throughout the summer as there are periodic “recouplings,” with the most popular couples being crowned winner by the end of the season.

The islanders must endure the occasional game – which often inexplicably involves being covered in chewed up food on a hot island day – but for the most part they merely get to put on nice bathing suits and kiss. The fact that events are occurring in close-to-realtime a la Big Brother makes the show a fun mid-summer background watch. Or at least it was until 2024 forever upended what Love Island could be.

Blessed with a particularly charismatic cast that produced some sparkling romantic chemistry, Love Island season 6 represented the apex of the U.S. version and perhaps even the entire Love Island franchise itself. That batch of islanders proved to be so popular that Peacock commissioned a Love Island: Beyond the Villa spinoff to follow fan favorites JaNa Craig, Aaron Evans, Miguel Harichi, Leah Kateb, Kaylor Martin, Connor Newsum, Serena Page, Kenny Rodriguez, Olivia “Liv” Walker, and Kendall Washington. Additionally, fellow season 6 star Rob Rausch joined the cast of The Traitors season 4, also on Peacock.

The success of season 6 created a challenging scenario for Love Island season 7. How can a mostly unstructured show guarantee another hit when so much of its success comes down to the unscientific art of casting? Well it turns out Love Island season 7 had a fairly elegant solution to this. It opted just to cheat.

To be clear, there isn’t actually any cheating in a legal sense on Love Island season 7. Though the object of the show is to find love, that love also comes along with a payday ($100,000, split two-ways), which means the series and its contestants are subject to the United States’ surprisingly-thorough game show legal code. Love Island season 7 is not actively sabotaging relationships or fabricating voting results. It is, however, putting its usual lack of structure to good use.

The “rules” of Love Island, such as they are, have always been amorphous. Recouplings occur on Sunday episodes … unless they don’t. Becoming single makes an islander eligible to be booted from the island … unless it doesn’t. The viewing public’s votes on the Love Island app are largely symbolic and don’t lead to dismissals … unless they do. There are no immunity idols for islanders to collect and there is no coherent strategy to be gleaned from previous seasons.

The only constant that remains between seasons is that there will be four couples by the final week for America to choose from. Everything that happens before that is largely up in the air. Love Island‘s contestants are at the mercy of the show’s ever-shifting regulatory landscape, trapped in a Skinner box for our amusement. Case in point is season 7 episode 12, which just like season 6’s 12th episode, throws its poor islanders for one hell of a loop.

Like most Sunday episodes, episode 12 features a recoupling in which the islanders are shuffled into new groupings. Unlike most recouplings, however, this decision is made by we, the American voter, and not the islanders themselves. Anyone who knows anything about the American voter knows that they will opt for the most chaotic choice possible. Sure enough: voters decided to split up power couple Jeremiah and Huda to every islander’s complete astonishment.

If this bit of rule-bending weren’t enough, Love Island compounds things further by demanding an immediate vote among the survivors to dump one of the three suddenly single islanders – Huda, Charlie, or Taylor – from the show. Dumpings don’t always occur immediately post-recoupling but the nice thing about not having many established rules in the first place means that the show gets to “break” them at its leisure.

The potential jettisoning of one of three islanders in relatively stable relationships isn’t a place the show often finds itself in. The islanders are generally quite good at self-policing the most compatible couples and determining who is there for the dating show-approved “right reasons.” Tweaking simply one element of the formula by deferring the decision to the viewers is enough to send the island into complete chaos.

The moment that the islanders realize what is about to happen is almost tragic and legitimately upsetting. Amaya immediately bursts into tears and screeches at host Ariana Madix to not make them do this. Charlie steps forward from the chopping block and makes an unprecedented plea to his fellow islanders to spare his reality TV show life. It doesn’t work: Charlie is voted off and the preview for Monday night’s episode features his partner Hannah weeping over his picture like a Great War widow.

Love Island season 7 episode 12 has a result in mind (weeping islanders) and works retroactively to develop a process to make it a reality…or a managed reality at that. That’s the kind of storytelling a reality series can achieve when it realizes reality TV rules don’t matter.

New episodes of Love Island USA season 7 premiere every day but Wednesday at 9 p.m. ET throughout the summer on Peacock in the U.S.