It’s that time of year again, folks; Love Island is on our screens for its winter run. And just like seasonal flu, Love Island fatigue has once again set in. The latest series lost 1 million viewers during its premiere and even the Twitter commentary doesn’t feel like it has salvaged the latest offering.
Love Island’s demise would be the canary in the coalmine for all the other holiday romance shows created in its wake. Reality TV is very much a trend-led genre, and if the latest offerings are anything to go by, viewers are looking for something vastly different from “flanter” round the firepit.
This year has seen the rise and rise of endurance television. There’s Physical: 100, a South Korean gameshow on Netflix in which 100 super-ripped contestants compete in gruelling challenges – dragging a ship filled with weights, holding a 50kg ball above their heads – to be the last one standing, and claim the cash prize that comes with it. Then there’s Outlast, also on Netflix, which sees 16 “lone wolf” survival experts try to outlast one another in the Alaskan wilderness for $1m.
We still want to watch people on islands, it seems, but pushing themselves to their physical limits rather than getting off with each other. Alongside the return of The Mole and Big Brother, this year will also see the revival of another noughties reality TV juggernaut: Survivor, which gripped the nation for two seasons on ITV in 2001 and 2002. The show will now air on the BBC and will maroon 20 people on a tropical location where they will have to battle the elements, while providing food and shelter for themselves. Perhaps it was the popularity of Claudia Winkleman’s sadistic hit The Traitors that prompted the BBC to bring back such an unapologetically dog-eat-dog show. It is clearly confident in the future of this type of programming, also launching Go Hard or Go Home, another series on a tropical island, where the Warriors – an elite team of fighters, sportspeople and athletes – put eight contestants through their paces with taxing challenges such as escaping caves by shimmying up 30 metres of bamboo. (One contestant says she has panic attacks before and after each challenge, and nearly all of the contestants have cried so far.)
The pivot makes sense. The past few years have seen the world bow under the collective pressure of Covid, a shrinking economy, and the climate crisis. Shows such as Love Island feel disconnected from these trying times, with “pie challenges” now a throwback to a simpler age. But our idea of escapism seems to have morphed, too, leaving us increasingly disillusioned by shows that feel frivolous. The pendulum may have swung the other way entirely: when times get tougher, so does our reality TV. We want grit; we want to watch people pushed to their extremes. So it is unsurprising that Physical: 100 has been such a smash, after being dubbed “the real-life Squid Game”. The horrifyingly high stakes of the South Korean Netflix drama that dominated 2021 is something viewers have chased ever since. A reality show version was quickly greenlit. But it may have pushed contestants too far; anonymous participants have criticised the “absolutely inhumane” conditions in which they were made to film.
Watching people endure has long been a core tenet of reality TV (the horrendous tasks of Big Brother are likely why it remained so popular so long). But it now feels like it goes beyond the primitive want to have a Roman Colosseum in our living rooms. These shows feel as if they provide strength by proxy. They are reminders of the resilience of the human spirit and our ability to survive, whether it be the Alaskan wilderness or the weather we’re experiencing in March (which is basically the same thing).
