Love Island: Winter Is the Perfect Cure for Your Seasonal Blues

This month, we have ventured into a new frontier, plodding ahead into lands unexplored, unfamiliar territories: Love Island is back…in January. After the British dating show broke out beyond U.K. shores to become a global sensation last year, ITV (dollar signs in their eyes, no doubt) quickly greenlit a winter edition. That’s right, we’re getting four months of Love Island a year. Please help me.

If there’s any trashy reality show that can fill the gap The Circle has just left behind, it’s Love Island. You know the drill by now: A bunch of attractive singles in swimwear move into a villa. They “graft” with their type “on paper,” some get “mugged off.” And if you get “pied,” well, it is what it is. Iain Stirling is back with his withering voice-over. Presenter Caroline Flack is absent because of, uh, complications and has been replaced by her clone, Laura Whitmore.

Host aside, there’s an uncanny strangeness to this winter edition of Love Island. The new series is filmed in South Africa (does that negate the island part of Love Island?), which means a new, much larger villa compared to its Spanish counterpart. Oh, and also it’s (the titular) winter—the biggest summer show doesn’t exactly scream cozying up to the fire for some evening telly. But apart from that, it’s the same Love Island we love/hate to love. The only difference is that you don’t have to feel so guilty about ignoring your friends every night to check what unfolds at the next recoupling.

It’s still early days, to borrow from the Love Island vernacular, but some strong characters are beginning to emerge, all with eyebrow-raising spellings of names and accents. There’s Shaughna, a no-nonsense government worker with zero filter, or there’s Siânnise (I don’t know how to pronounce it either), who thinks loving Disney films makes her quirky. The entrance of a pair of identical twins has expectedly heightened tensions at the villa, though the real chaos they have caused comes from their inexplicable decision to wear the same clothes all the time. Am I supposed to be able to tell them apart??

If the recent U.K. election results were a bummer, you can always feel vindicated as you watch every girl reject Ollie, a posh bro who could not sound more like a Tory if he tried. He doesn’t like to brag about his wealth, he confesses, just before he reveals that his job title is “landowner” and his neighbors are Prince Charles and Camilla. Seeing him being pushed firmly into the friend zone is a small consolation for the country becoming a dire mess, but I’ll relish the victories where I can get them. My pick is the token Scot, Paige. She began coupled up with Ollie, then hit a rough patch when he lied about being interested in another girl. “I’m putting all my eggs in your basket,” he says, to which she responds by shutting him down: “You’re shit at shopping.” I would die for Paige.

It’s an unquestionable fact that Love Island isn’t really about finding romance in a tropical paradise anymore. It’s about aspiring influencers doing the most to boost their follower count and get spon-con money—and we love them for it! A small smile graces my face when I scroll through my Instagram feed and see #ad on the latest post from last season’s fan favorite Maura. Good for her. So while there is no way Paige and Ollie are going to live happily ever after (clearly not, because Ollie has left the villa after photos of him trophy hunting were discovered. Oh, to be rich and immoral!), I can envision Paige with nightclub photo-ops and an ASOS discount code.

Whether we’ll soon face Love Island oversaturation remains to be seen, but this new version is a welcome addition to what’s become a megawatt franchise of reality television. Winter TV is comfort viewing, something to pass the time through the cold months (though not as cold because the planet is dying). And is there anything more comforting than the daily reliability of petty relationship drama between scantily clad twentysomethings? Love Island miraculously works even better at this time of year than in the summer. Love Island in June is the flashy main event, but Love Island in January is the weird cousin, an incongruous but much needed antidote to the cold back home. Like it or not, Love Island is evergreen.


The reality dating show is about more than just "snogging."

Originally Appeared on GQ