The Summer of Love Island USA

By: Joelle Carr

Drama-starved reality TV watchers and a cast full of enough spirited personalities to fill several seasons of your favorite Bravo show combined to create the hottest summer for “Love Island USA”. Producers could not have dreamed up a better cast to bring them the show’s most profitable and binge-worthy season yet. 

The sixth season of the dating show premiered on Peacock on June 11. It’s a reality competition dating show – and in the end, only one couple will win – but this season had fans willing to boycott the show if one of their favorite girls was sent home. 

“Love Island USA” can attribute this season's massive success to its leading ladies – Serena Page, Leah Kateb, JaNa Craig, Olivia “Liv” Walker, and Kaylor Martin. The season kicked off with an instant sisterly bond between the women. As the season unfolded, fans fawned over their display of girlhood. They refused to send JaNa home when she was left single and vulnerable to being eliminated by her castmates, tightly hugged Liv while sobbing after she was voted out, and protected their friends in arguments with fellow islanders.

The franchise has a unique way of fostering parasocial relationships with its viewers. An episode is released every day during its first week on-air. After that initial week, “Love Island” releases an episode daily Thursday through Tuesday. 

This is a lot of TV to watch and as the season goes on, it embeds itself as part of your daily routine for 6 weeks. When it was one of those wretched days with no new episode that night, all I could think about was the next episode of the saga and what drama would soon unfold. 

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Sometimes, the forces of the algorithm and fan-made edits combine on TikTok and X to project a show into mainstream popularity. Every night at 9 p.m., watchers hop on these platforms to share their opinions, post viral-worthy moments, and argue with other viewers. Though the cast held their own and provided undeniable entertainment in a season with significantly fewer challenges and dates than usual, social media posts about the show propelled the season onto people’s For You Page and X feeds.

The frequent stars of these ‘hit tweets’ and fan edits were Leah Kateb, JaNa Craig, and Serena Page — the cream of this season's crop — who quickly amassed huge online fanbases. The trio referred to themselves on the show as “PPG,” or Powerpuff Girls, a nickname that immediately stuck. The three women struggled to find and maintain a strong relationship throughout the season.

Leah Kateb was initially coupled with Rob Rausch, which quickly went up in flames that not even Rob’s dramatic pencil dive into the pool could put out. It might have been Rausch’s goal to bring more drama than the previous season, where he briefly appeared as a Casa Amor islander but was ultimately left behind as the girls returned to the main villa. Casa Amor is a twist in the show where contestants are separated by gender and put with a new group of singles to test their main connections back at the main villa. The villas rival each other in sexy challenges and spend an uninterrupted few days together before deciding whether to bring a new partner back or leave them behind and return to their previous couple.

Kateb eventually coupled up with Miguel Harichi a few days before the islanders were split up and set into Casa Amor. JaNa Craig struggled to find her Mr. Right until bombshell Kenny Rodriguez waltzed into the villa days before Casa Amor and swept her off her feet. Serena Page coupled up with Kordell Beckham in the first episode of the season, but the couple faced serious strife before eventually winning the show.

Page and Beckham secured the winning vote with their romance book-style love story, complete with groveling, slow-burn tension, and a second-chance romance storyline. Fans joked that the couple’s viral dock scene fight was straight out of a Tyler Perry movie. The notorious scene came from the episode following the season’s infamous Casa Amor recoupling that reportedly included hours of verbal hits from the betrayed islanders.

It was unbearable to watch the men in Casa Amor explore their newfound connections while the women fretted over their existing couples and cried on the floor of the dressing room in distress. When nearly every man returned from the show’s connection-testing “‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’” fantasy with their new Casa Amor flame, I almost canceled my Peacock subscription. 

As devastating as Casa Amor was, seeing the men realize their mistakes and work to win back their couples was entrancing. Seeing Aaron Evans manipulate his way back into Kaylor Martin’s arms, however, was not. While the Kaylor-Aaron power couple might have been permanently ruined in the eyes of the public, the power couples of PPG and their men strengthened. 

Page and Beckham walked away from the season with $100,000 to split and the winners of the season, but everyone at the villa left a winner. The islanders were met with millions of fans, social media verifications, brand deals, interviews, red carpets, and fashion show invites the second they stepped foot back into the outside world.

Many islanders entered the villa as micro-influencers and left with new careers as full-time content creators. This raises the question of whether “Love Island USA” will become a popularity contest, and how the future seasons will be desperately seeking to recreate this season’s mass success.