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25 June 2021

Will this be the most feral Love Island yet?

For years, we have lamented Love Island as commercialised and insincere. But after the past 15 months, who actually cares?

By Sarah Manavis

By February 2020, it looked like we were witnessing Love Island’s death rattle. After airing its first ever winter season – a move that was widely criticised – viewer numbers started to plummet. The winter debut episode (12 January) was the first in Love Island history to receive fewer viewers than the season before. Its finale (23 February) lost a staggering 1 million viewers compared to its summer season.

A Love Island in the dead of winter fundamentally misunderstood why people watch the show, but its fall in the ratings appeared to be due to something bigger: fatigue with the franchise. The spike in “sponcon” (sponsored content) in the villa gave it an air of being nothing more than an islander-to-influencer pipeline; the show felt increasingly hollow. In 2019, I even called that year’s series the worst season ever. By the time it was announced that it wouldn’t air in summer 2020, it was hard to tell if the decision was because of pandemic logistics or if ITV needed time to figure out the problem.

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