How the Eternal Pantomime of Love Island Draws Us In

Although I’ve spent more than a thousand hours watching, publishing a book about, reporting on, discussing, and reading Reddit threads about Love Island, it is impossible to imagine myself in the position its cast members have put themselves in. To write Enter the Villa: The (Unauthorized Reality Behind Love Island), I did nearly a hundred interviews to personally interrogate the motivations of Islanders but can’t fathom wanting to be on the show. I can’t imagine submitting myself to 24-hour surveillance and public votes about whether people like me and slow-motion camera shots of my butt in a thong. I imagine this is the sentiment of most of the millions of people who watch Love Island, except of course the 100,000 or so who apply to be on the show annually.

And yet, every season, I become deeply invested in the personal choices and outcomes of the Islanders. This happens because I, and the rest of the audience, see every granular decision that led to where the cast members end up, in ways that meet or even transcend what could be drafted as dialogue or stage direction. “If I write it in a script, you won’t believe it,” Love Island USA’s then-executive producer Simon Thomas told me last year. But when you see it on Love Island, he says, “it is cinema.” In Love Island USA’s case, that genre of cinema is romantic comedy.

It’s not an accident that an unscripted show shares the same spine as traditional drama. Completely independently, on different continents and months apart, Love Island UK’s creative director Mike Spencer-Hayter and Thomas described Love Island UK as a different type of production: pantomime, a form of participatory, archetypal theater that came to the UK three centuries before the first Islanders ever did bits under their duvets.

Though playful transgression is encouraged, pantomime relies heavily on rules, even when they aren’t made explicit.

Pantomime establishes a clear moral universe: some characters are evil, and some are virtuous, and they get what they deserve based on their actions. “It’s drama that engineers transformations, because that’s what we want to see,” Oxford culture theater professor and pantomime expert David Taylor says. Characters evolve, whether they want to or not, through situations they can’t control. The machinations of the play, and its producers, force them to adapt to those situations. “We both anticipate those changes and also are surprised when they happen,” Taylor says. “Pantomime has to tread this quite fine line between something that feels very familiar to us as a formula we immediately recognize and that we can immediately engage with emotionally, quite strategically placed surprise, in order to keep us coming back to it. We’ve seen it all before and we’ve also never seen it before.”

As ITV executive Huub van Ballegooy says of these familiar beats, “Fans expect them, but they want to be surprised in what is expected. If you go to Mission Impossible, you want to see Tom Cruise jump out of a plane, but the way he does it, it’s always a bit different and sets you on the wrong foot.”

“It’s the most relatable show,” Spencer-Hayter says of finding yourself in characters who happen to also be real people. “You’ve all been in that situation. You’ve all had your heart broken. You’ve all fallen in love for the first time. You’ve all picked the wrong guy.”

The relatability allows viewers to cast the judgment inherent in watching . “Because it’s a running pantomime, it’s really, really easy to almost sit at home and narrate the show yourself,” Spencer-Hayter says. (That would be extra narration, on top of Iain Stirling’s slide-whistle Scottish commentary.) While audiences would yell feedback at characters during live pantomimes, Love Island fans take to Instagram and TikTok. Usually, Spencer-Hayter says, “I don’t think it’s very vicious. I think it’s, ‘I can’t believe she did that to him. She’s awful.’”

But like everything on Love Island and this mortal coil, it’s all temporary. “It’s only in that moment,” Spencer-Hayter says. “And a couple of days later when that person’s with that one, it changes again.” That is, unless the audience has already decided to dump them from the Villa in one of the many votes that take place on the way to the finale and prize money.

Just as fans speak to them, pantomime actors talk directly to the audience, which Islanders also do during the confessional interviews filmed in what is called the Beach Hut. These monologues are delivered directly to camera under the questioning of the voice of a producer who is unseen to the Islander and unheard entirely by the viewers.

Though playful transgression is encouraged, pantomime relies heavily on rules, even when they aren’t made explicit. UK executive producer Lewis Evans says one of the most important rules in the Villa is that the man in a couple must bring his partner some kind of breakfast offering every morning as a sign of devotion, or at least respect. “A girl will kick off if they’re not delivering their coffee,” Evans says. “Back in series 8, Ekin [-Su Cülcüloğlu] cried that Davide [Sanclimenti] never brought her a coffee.” There’s no law that says an Islander can’t crack on with someone without letting their current partner know first, or that you can’t kiss a new person you’re coupled up with in front of your former coupling, or that you can avoid vulnerability and just play a part on a TV show. But, you just, like, can’t.

The characters in pantomime know they’re characters, though they often forget as the drama plays out.

Taylor says, “Pantomime, throughout his history, is about ritual, formulaic forms of humiliation.” (He mentions no historic precedent for pantomimers transferring hot dog ingredients to each others’ mouths and dry humping in condiments.) The form is reliant on certain characters, like the lover, the clown, and the ingénue. They align with certain roles that the Love Island casting team looks for; for example, the lover is called “the brooder” in Love Island-ese. Though Love Island USA is more rom-com than pantomime, on season 8, the lover/brooder label would apply to cast member Sincere Rhea. With his lustrous hair and penchant for metaphor, Sincere has seemed titillated by provoking tears and screams from his other half, Melanie Moreno all season by briefly falling for many other women before returning to the siren’s song of Melanie’s wounded outbursts.

Season 8’s clowns are “cheeky chappies” Zach Georgiou and Bryce Dettloff, the latter of whom is also proficient at brooding. Zach and Bryce’s cheekiness has the common Love Island frisson present in male friendships; in their case, this can manifest as anything from examining each other’s penises to simulated thrusting. Bryce’s partner Trinity Tatum is the year’s ingénue, which aligns with what the production team calls a “yes girl”, a woman who throws herself into any situation, including giving Villa tours to bombshells sent in to break up existing couples.

Taylor, whose wife watches the show, says, “I wonder whether people in Love Island themselves know that if they’re going to be voted for, they need to make themselves into a type, something that feels legible to their audience.” None of the Islanders I spoke with said they did, consciously, at least.

The characters in pantomime know they’re characters, though they often forget as the drama plays out. “The danger for the contestants on Love Island is on the one hand to be in the pantomime, but never to forget that they also have to be in the melodrama,” Taylor says. But the Islanders always do forget at some point that their actual feelings are being filmed for entertainment, no matter how obvious it should be that all of those dozens of cameras and hundreds of producers and millions of viewers are watching them. “Characters don’t really have any true kind of interiority in pantomime,” Taylor says. “Their joy and their sadness is always something that is part of the formula. Whereas, melodrama is always about characters who are defined by their emotional journeys, by their desires, their fears.”

Love Island ultimately diverges from pantomime in a more obvious way. “At the end of the pantomime, we know that the person who’s been coveting the boos as villain can step aside from that larger than life villainy,” Taylor says. “Whereas on Love Island, you can’t step out of that character, can you? That is who you are.” And when they step out of the bubble of the Villa and into the yawping masses delivering what they believe is justice into cast members’ DMs, Islanders must learn to reconcile their pre-Love Island self with the character who is now their public identity.

Love Island presenting this is as just a silly production lulls the Islanders into relaxing enough to feel real things. To get angry enough to enact real-life melodrama. And to let producers manufacture love.

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Enter the Villa by Anna Peele is available from Atria, an imprint of Simon and Schuster.