Friday, February 14, 2020 // The Statement
6B
“Love Island”: The Walden Pond of reality TV

T

V has always moved too fast for 
me. I was too busy running track 
and selling books in high school 
to participate in my nuclear family’s 
“Breaking Bad” bonding routine, I gave 
up on “Twin Peaks” after distractedly 
missing too many plot points and I figured 
that everyone else knew enough about 
“The Office” and “Game of Thrones” for 
me to ride on their collective coattails. 
Last spring, my roommate and I vowed 
to get through season 1 of “Killing Eve”, 
only to abandon ship in the middle of its 
finale, broadly complaining that television 
demanded too much from our specific 
brand of attention span. We preferred 
reading. Crossword puzzles. Knitting 
with the cat on the lap. Things that were 
… slower.
So I went through a bit of an identity 
crisis when, at the end of last semester, I 
found myself watching the 2015 British 
reality dating show “Love Island” for five 
hours straight with my skinny musician 
friends, people who usually put on 
something between high cinema or the 
short film they shot and edited themselves 
earlier that day. How or why it started 
playing remains a mystery, but we were 
inexplicably hooked from the first lens 

flare and dramatic muscle shot. 
The premise of “Love Island,” especially 
to a group unacquainted with reality 
television, is inane. In the season opener, 
ten sexy-ass Brits are separated by gender 
and essentially paraded in front of each 
other one by one; a pageant that ends with 
the awkward and cheeky heteronormative 
“coupling” of birds and lads that express 
varying levels of mutual interest upon 
first impression. They are (ironically) 
isolated from reality for nine weeks on a 
luxe compound in Mallorca known fondly 
as “The Villa” to test, temper, break and 
re-break the bonds they initially formed 
— almost none of which last more than a 
week. 
Couples sleep side-by-side in an open-
room line of king beds, summer camp-
style. They have no phones, computers 
or means of connecting with the world 
outside the Villa. There is a pool, an 
open bar and a few dumbbells thrown 
on a makeshift workout lawn. If you’re 
single by the time of the next (dreaded) 
“recoupling,” you’re out. A relationship 
means survival, plain as day. Let the 
cameras roll.
Alyssa Schmid, a senior studying 
sociology in LSA, doesn’t know why she 

likes it either. 
“There isn’t even really a plot it feels, 
most of the time they’re just sitting in 
their bathing suits around the pool,” 
Schmid told me last week in the back 
corner of Espresso Royale State Street. 
She got into “Love Island” through her 
roommate, tackled the first three seasons 
and successfully converted her sister to 
the cause. She follows multiple previous 
contestants on Instagram.
“... and this doesn’t make any sense to 
me. They put them in a situation where 
it’s obviously not reality, and then it’s just 
them being themselves ... but you can’t 
talk to anyone (from the outside world) so 
I guess it kind of makes sense,” she added. 
“Like, you have a totally different life 
now, you have to make friends and build 
relationships because you’re not going to 
have anyone else to talk to for however 
long you’re there. Literally nothing else to 
do.”
Ayat AL-Tamimi, a senior in LSA 
studying political science, finds that these 
interactions-by-necessity often challenge 
what you’d normally expect from “love”-
seeking reality TV like the infamous 
“Bachelor.” In fact, it’s what excites her 
about the show.
“The goal is to be in a relationship 
that goes to be the couple that wins the 
money, and so maybe you have to find 
people that you can vibe with, just on a 
platonic level, to be paired up with for a 
little while,” she explained. This is where 
“Love Island” makes its major break from 
the norm: the premise isn’t to land one 
specific relationship with one specific 
person. It’s multidimensional in the Villa 
— a relationship, a person. You could, in 
theory, win by spooning with a friend.
Earlier in our interview AL-Tamimi 
used 
the 
term 
“strategic 
coupling” 
to 
describe 
this 
common 
Island-
phenomenon: coupling with a pal to the 
mutual interest of evading elimination. 
Social symbiosis.
“What I really appreciate is how a lot of 
them will come to mutual understanding 
of, ‘we don’t like each other that way, I 
fully support you going to find someone 
that you think you might be romantically 
invested in.’ But it’s not killing the 
friendship, so in a way it’s much like the 
antithesis of other dating shows where 
it’s a cold, one-track, have-to-be-in-love 
sort of trajectory, which statistically is not 
realistic at all,” AL-Tamimi said. 
The lines indeed blur. There’s a 
moment in season three where contestant 
Montana, strategically coupled up with 
Marcel, invites Marcel’s new flame Gabby 
into their bed to surprise her man with 
a good-night kiss. Three people end up 
sharing this moment: Marcel, surprised; 
Gabby, literally crawling over Montana 
to smooch him and Montana herself, 
smiling supportively next to her friends. 
This seems more organic than the rigid, 

elimination-controlled monogamy of “The 
Bachelor.” This seems like something that 
has happened on the couch in my living 
room
“So technically yeah, your worth is 
determined by whether you’re coupled or 
not, but that plays with it in a lot of ways,” 
AL-Tamimi explained. “It’s not like you 
have to be romantically coupled to share 
a bed with someone. There are a lot of hot 
men and hot women sharing a bed and 
nothing happening … And I think that’s 
kind of subversive.”
I

n the spring of 2017 I, like many 
confused 
writers 
before 
and 
after me, departed Ann Arbor in 
the direction of New Hampshire and 
the New England Literature Program 
(NELP). NELP is one of the more unusual 
experiences available at the University 
of Michigan: six weeks, forty strangers, 
upwards of twenty literary texts and 
something around five overnight hiking 
trips in the woods of the White Mountains. 
NELPers dwell in a boys’-camp-made-
commune 
on 
the 
picturesque 
Lake 
Winnipesaukee, cooking and cleaning 
for each other in scheduled work shifts. 
There are no phones, computers or means 
of connecting with the world outside the 
camp — all NELPers have are Emerson, 
Thoreau and each other.
I’ve never held NELP and reality TV 
in the same thought before — NELP 
touts itself as a deeply intellectual and 
introspective experience, while “Love 
Island” comes off as oversaturated, 
overstimulating sensationalism. But while 
interviewing for this piece it dawned on 
me that perhaps I vibe with “Love Island” 
because I did something somewhat similar 
three years ago in rural New Hampshire. 
Despite their aesthetic differences as an 
immersive academic program and a reality 
dating show, NELP and “Love Island” 
share enough of a structural skeleton to 
produce mirroring social effects. I mean, 
if you drop a group of strangers anywhere 
in the world, circumscribe them within 
a radius and sever all contact from the 
lives they had just left, weird things will 
happen. What Schmid said was true: All 
you can really do is sit around and talk to 
each other, whether that be in a bikini by 
the pool or in layers of thermal clothing 
on a rock in the woods. In the process, 
everyone seems to become a character, 
in the best and worst of ways. You have 
little to share aside from who you think 
you are and what you think is going on, 
resulting in what feels like constant 
commentary on self and selves. There’s 
disproportionate space for unexpectedly 
personal and confessional conversation, 
equal parts awkward and thrilling.

BY VERITY STURM, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT

ILLUSTRATION BY CAITLIN MARTENS

Read more at 
 
MichiganDaily.com

