Love Island

Love Island is a British dating game show. It is a revival of the earlier celebrity series of the same name, which aired for two series in 2005 and 2006 on ITV. The series is narrated by Iain Stirling, and was hosted by Caroline Flack until her suspension in 2019; Laura Whitmore began presenting the series in 2020. The series is the originator of the international Love Island franchise, with twenty-two versions of it having been produced so far worldwide.

The show has been highly successful and influential in British popular culture; it became ITV2's most watched show in the network's history in 2018, and as of 2020 was the most watched TV show among its target audience of 16-34 year olds. However, it has attracted a considerable amount of controversy, with four people linked to the show having died by suicide. Contestants Sophie Gradon and Mike Thalassitis died by suicide after appearing on the programme; Gradon's boyfriend died by suicide about 20 days after her death. The following year the show's original presenter, Caroline Flack also died by suicide. There have been calls from some to cancel the programme.

Plot
Single hopefuls looking for love complete tasks, couple off and get voted out week by week. Packed full of drama.

Why It's Not at All "Lovely"

 * 1) The main problem with this show is that it terribly executes an already bland and uninteresting sounding concept of a game show which focuses on young couples doing whatever they can to reach the finals.
 * 2) If you think about it, who would even want to watch an hours worth of young couples doing pointless things such as muck about, bicker and cuss, flirt or even sleeping with each other? That alone just being plain weird.
 * 3) Abysmal pacing.
 * 4) A ton of pop culture references which go absolutely nowhere.
 * 5) The narrator, Ian Stirling is just plain EAR GRATING. With a loud, raspy, high-pitched voice, it's basically the equivalent of hearing a blackboard being scraped with a fork.
 * 6) Most of the contestants who appear on the show are HIGHLY unlikeable, shallow, and obnoxious, especially the females.
 * 7) Speaking of the contestants, it's like they're just a load of fame-hungry losers just having the desire of becoming famous off this show to feed their own ego.
 * 8) Much like other awful reality shows like Keeping Up With the Kardashians, it manages to come across as annoying, pathetic and boring.
 * 9) The show has a cheap, scripted feel to it.
 * 10) The humour falls flat on every level, coming off as stupid.
 * 11) It promotes backstabbing, lying, bullying, jealousy and fame-hogging.
 * 12) It's filled to the very brim of mass filler, of pointless moments to reach the 60 minute mark.
 * 13) It has a large fanbase that also happens to consist of under 13s, which is seriously worrying, tuning into a show loaded with lots of drinking, swearing, sex talk and sexualised imagery (especially from the bikini-clad females), especially the fact that parents these days don't bother taking parental control over their kids of what's best for them to watch.
 * 14) Quantity Over Quality: After Flack's death in February 2020, there were calls from some to cancel the programmes. Questions were raised about the pressures of the show, and many drew attention to how The Jeremy Kyle Show had recently been cancelled after the suicide of a participant. Ian Hamilton, a senior lecturer at the University of York on addiction and mental health, described the programme as one that "thrives on manufacturing conflict" and that "unfortunately it's the contestants who bear the brunt of this". Despite the mass controversy, the show somehow manages to still run to this day, and has become one of ITV's biggest cash cows and IPs to date.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) Decent looking sets.
 * 2) A few likeable couples, especially on the first series.

Reception
Despite having quite a large watchbase, this show is very infamous all around the UK for its multiple flaws. There have been numerous complaints, with 4,100 people lodging official complaints about the 2018 series over issues such as the footage aired and how contestants have treated one another. The charity Women's Aid has criticised the treatment of female contestants by "controlling" and "abusive" male contestants. The Mental Health Foundation charity has also criticised the show for the negative impact it can have on viewers who feel insecure about their bodies. The show has also received criticism for its lack of body and ethnic diversity. The show's producers responded to this criticism by stating that the show was "aspirational" and that they "make no excuses" about having a cast of 'attractive' people on the show. It currently holds a 5.1/10 star rating on IMDb.

Trivia
On 23 July 2019, ITV announced that from 2020 there will be two series of the show per year. Series 6 will be broadcast in early 2020 and will be filmed at a brand new villa in South Africa. Series 7 will air in the Summer of 2020 and will return to a European villa as the filming location.

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