What U Watchin’ #9: Are You New Here? Love Island USA
When you try to relax from your long day at your internship and get ready for your last semester of grad school by watching reality TV and that’s disrupted by the nonsensical discourse that came from Love Island USA Season 7 what can a girl do but turn to her beloved #Haven™️. The discourse is nothing new to the show. However, the way people are consuming entertainment. These days are definitely new. As a long-time, reality TV watcher and enjoyer the audience of reality TV these days doesn’t seem to understand what the main premise of reality TV let alone dating shows is, which is entertainment. Growing up in the era where reality TV was golden, authentic, and fun makes me look at our current reality TV slate and wonder how far we have fallen. What used to be fun dialogue that can either be trivial or spark a more important discussion has turned into identity politic slop that has strayed FAR away from the show's original premise.
Love Island was a show that I typically strayed away from because I felt like it lacked a premise. Conventionally attractive people hooking up for 4-6 weeks with the sole intention of being an influencer while being on a dating show… yeah, no. My sister has been a mega fan of the original Love Island UK since its conception. I peeked in from time to time to listen to her rant and rave about the Islanders and the reaction of the British public. However, nothing has ever gotten too crazy to the point of having asinine takes. With the success of Love Island season six, it was going to be tough to follow up but season seven did not disappoint if anything it had more attention than season six did but, with this amount of newfound attention and popularity, it comes with some of the worst discourse imaginable. Race wars, mom-shaming, misogyny, slut, shaming, etc. all in the name of a cheeky show that runs for a month and a half? Hell, no.
A noticeable shift in viewers can be traced back to 2020 with the Love Island contestant Catherine. She and Scott were coupled up and it didn’t work out It was edited to make it look like she was just a complete bitch towards Scott while Scott is the damsel in distress white left to pick up the pieces on his own in an island. People did not take kindly to what they saw on their TV and went on a week's worth of maligning Catherine’s character while watching hate watching her every day. It got to the point where even her friends in real life wouldn’t back her up. Catherine was eventually eliminated from the villa and it was almost scary like I was bracing for how she was going to react to the backlash that she had received. She exits the villa and goes on to say that what we saw was not necessarily the truth. She wasn’t interested in Scott however she wasn’t a “conniving bitch” as the editors portrayed her as or what the Love Island fans thought she was. Evil editing is a part of the ugliness and the beauty of reality TV. It sways an audience to either side because the audience is easy to manipulate and fickle. Catherine was unfortunately a victim of having a poor edit on her however, she isn’t the first. But the uncanny reaction of the fan base was shocking. I come from an era where you could say whatever you wanted, however, we all knew that it wasn’t that serious. Seeing people wishing for her to die, not have a life for herself outside of this show, and being outright cool to someone they only see for an hour and a half daily on a TV screen was absolutely insane to me. At that moment, I realized, the new reality TV show watchers aren’t the ones who watched reality in the early 2000s.
Love Island season seven introduced us to new characters who are interesting however, they fall into the “I’m gonna go on a dating show to launch my influencer career” trope. Motives were clear, however, we fall back into the problem with the new generation of reality TV fans. Huda was a contestant on the show this season and arguably the most polarizing popular contestant on the show. Huda had a lot of blowups on the show and was often reprimanded for it, whether that be in the villa or in real life by the fans. While you can 100% say Huda was a train wreck. She was perfect for the show and for reality TV, she was one of the most authentic characters to come off of a reality show in a while. Huda was hated in the villa for typically overreacting to her partner's actions and being territorial over her partner, even though she had just met them within the month that they had been there. She wore her heart on her sleeve, and that garnered a lot of backlash. Initially, I was going into the season after looking at all the backlash that she’s received, with a guard up thinking that she was genuinely a menace. Imagine the confusion on my face after I watched the season and saw what the fans were reacting to. Huda was perceived as an anti-Christ when she wasn’t even demon and that had little to do with the editors and everything to do with the fans. Huda isn’t the first and won’t be the last to overreact to unserious situations on a reality show and while I did NOT approve of her behaviors throughout most of the show there was nothing Huda did that was necessary for the backlash she received. Attacking her motherhood, her character, and finding her baby daddy became a normal occurrence for the fanbase which set off alarms for me. While the other islanders have dealt with hate campaigns as well, there was a different level of parasocial when it came to women on the show more specifically Huda.
I don’t like making judgements based off of tweets, so that’s why I consume my media a week or two after the hype has died down to make my own conclusions. I watched season seven of Love Island, which is my first season ever watching when the winners were already announced. At the end of Love Island, I became a viewer like the rest of America and I was able to come to my own conclusions about everyone especially about Huda. To say there was an overreaction to Huda was an understatement. I completely understand the “Hurricane Huda” tag but the way people were disparaging her was concerning. Huda shouldn’t have called Jeremiah a pussy ass bitch and she was dead wrong for that but to act like Huda wasn’t held accountable for that is kind of insane. Due to her actions, Huda became one of the most polarizing islanders in recent times people genuinely loved to hate her but the hate was incredibly loud the first three weeks. I can give you a list of reality stars that I can’t stand but I knew that it was just a show and to turn it off if emotions were high, never in life did I think to attack someone’s family, heritage, or call CPS on someone I’m watching. Huda isn’t perfect and she undeniably has toxic traits that she has been accountable for but as a reality TV connoisseur, it becomes boring when you have someone who is seemingly perfect on reality TV.
No one likes to watch reality TV where everyone is perfect and for anyone who says they will, they won’t. Huda doesn’t even scratch the surface of the worst reality stars ever, I mean come on we literally are in an era where prostitution rings and fight clubs are on a subscription-based platform that people are actively buying from. I grew up watching Flavor of Love where Pumpkin spat on a reality TV ICON New York, no one called for her death or life to be ruined while she did something vile it was even considered good TV so much so that she got called to do two more spin-offs on the same network. Train-wrecks and bad behavior are accepted in reality tv, it’s their domain and it’s made for some of the best entertainment we’ve seen I can’t imagine a world where I wasn’t enjoying Sammi from Jersey Shore because she wasn’t a “girls girl” or Nene Leakes because she made the “audience” uncomfortable that’s not the make up of reality TV nor is that how it’s supposed to be received. Reality is supposed to be thought-provoking and trying to see what someone like you would do in a highly unlikely predicament. Conflict is always gonna come with reality TV and that’s the beauty of it we all know how we would handle ourselves in certain scenarios, but the fun of it is finding out how other people would.
Reality TV is quite literally a social experiment, as viewers were watching them in not ideal situations and they have to figure it out in this case, it’s a love show where they have to figure out their feelings and sometimes it does get intense. Why are we acting like the world is ending? Reality TV plays off the intensity of these scenarios that its cast is put into. It’s meant to be thought-provoking at times but a lot of it you have to take it for what it is and go about your day. Back then, reality TV was a lot of fun it felt authentic and we also have to remember that a lot of the cast members of these shows did have jobs, were fresh out of college, and had little to gain from social media as it wasn’t a thing yet. I think the difference between having social media with these new age new reality stars is that they are seeking to be crowned the “people’s champ” by social media which then loses their authenticity and makes the viewers more invested than they should be. New York wasn’t beloved on Flavor of Love, telling someone they could choke first thing in the morning isn’t going to go over well with the audience, but her authenticity and ability to not search for an iconic moment channeling her authentic feelings in the moment whether people liked it or not is what made her go on to have THREE spin-offs, an extensive reality tv career spanning over 20 years, a resurgence of popularity through internet memes, and long cemented herself as a reality tv LEGEND. We’ve strayed far away from the light and Love Island is one of the most prominent examples of how far we’ve fallen from a simple ki before bed to toxicity filled think pieces after any bit of action and we’re actively losing the plot and time will tell if we’ll ever get back on track.
Do you guys sense the shift in the audience now watching reality TV? Am I being dramatic? Do you think we’ll ever get back to a sense of normalcy? Would guys be interested in a Love Island review?
Thank you guys so much for reading my post. Your girl is in grad school, and I’m finally entering my final semester and also doing an internship, so I’m really excited. Things are a bit crazy right now, and I’m also actively searching for a job. I want to keep updated because you guys have been my day-ones since I was 11 years old, and more posts will be coming out!
See you guys next time!
Cherokee🩷
