‘Love Island U.K.’ is Turning into ‘The Bachelor’

Season 9 of Love Island U.K., which is the second winter season of the show, has garnered some of the worst ratings in years with an average of 2.9 million viewers per episode, down from 5.6 million in 2019. Fans have taken to Twitter to gripe about the show, saying it’s boring and that the cast is generally unlikable. So what went wrong with this beloved reality dating show? Simple: it’s turning into The Bachelor. 

Love Island is usually a staple of the summer. Its episodes air every night, but only for about two months of the year, meaning fans can fully invest themselves in the show for that short amount of time. It became a tradition for fan accounts, edits, and memes to skyrocket around that time, and it was easy to keep up with the show considering its short run time.  

This year has been different. A winter season premiered just a few months after the finale of the summer season, and especially considering the daily episode release, many viewers are simply “Love Island-ed out.” One Reddit user said: “I never wanted a winter version for that reason, the Bachelor is so oversaturated here with 3 shows a year and that’s already with less interesting formats, editing, and contestants. I don’t want this show to have the same effect.”

(Love Island aired one other winter season in 2020, which also garnered low ratings).

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But beyond the schedule, predictability is Season 9’s biggest flaw. And it’s to be expected. When you’re on the ninth season of a show, there are bound to be aspects of the formula that lose their entertainment value. We can see this in The Bachelor, which has been on for over 20 years. Each season follows the same series of events: rose ceremonies, group dates to create drama, one-on-ones to establish romance, and then the hometown/overnight/proposal episodes to round out the season. In a way, this works for The Bachelor, whose fans love the predictability of the show. But this setup doesn’t really work for Love Island, which was previously known for dropping absurd, drama-causing challenges and twists on the contestants. 

This predictability has extended to what used to be the most anticipated part of Love Island: Casa Amor. A series of episodes that are considered the “ultimate test” of the relationships, where the boys and girls are split up and introduced to a whole new set of cast members, Casa Amor was instead hobbled by the cast clearly bracing and preparing for the event for most of Season 9. During Season 8, one Reddit user commented: “There are certain things that are just predictable. We know that Casa is going to happen and so do the Islanders, the Islanders know when there is going to be a dumping, we and the Islanders know who is going to be dumped, we know there will be some cringe challenges, we now know movie night is becoming a thing, the baby challenge towards the end (worst thing ever), it’s all becoming rinse and repeat.”

Compounding that predictability? Like The Bachelor, which is known for “Bachelor Nation,” a group of cast members who return season after season looking for love, Love Island Seasons 8 and 9 brought back cast members who had been on previous seasons, or other spin-offs (like Adam Collard, Jessie Wynter, and Aaron Waters). That may work for The Bachelor; for Love Island, we need to see a fresh set of contestants every time.

There’s still time to turn all these problems around with the next iteration of Love Island. If producers diversify the casting, ramp up the challenges, and avoid inundating fans with too many seasons, Love Island can surely avoid falling into the same tropes as The Bachelor, and continue to thrive.