I was at a bar watch party for the finale of a show that has held Gen Z in the palm of its hand, like few others have. Going off the massive success of last season, this season 7 of Love Island USA had lots to live up to.
While it admittedly ended on a great note, it’s safe to say that leading up to it were an underwhelming six weeks of television.
A large part of this is that most of this season felt more like Friendship Island rather than Love Island. This wasn’t a surprise, considering one of the dumped islanders revealed that many of the islanders already knew each other before the show.
As a result, when it came time for eliminations, rather than voting off the people who should’ve left the show much earlier than they did (coughs Huda coughs), it looked like they were mainly just looking to protect their friends, which didn’t allow the real connections on the show to grow.
On the rare occasions that we did see the potential of those real connections, they were instantly voted off for not having explored enough outside of their connection.
This particularly hurt the part of the season known as Casa Amor, where more islanders are brought in for the sole purpose of testing the connections that had been established. Unlike last year, where the Casa Amor episodes shook up the villa and gave us some of the season’s best moments (the Kendall & Serena boat dock scene is what got me into the show in the first place), there were no real stakes as no real connections had been established by that point.
At that point, what is there to test?
This was so dull to me as a viewer to the point where I had to stop watching for a few days to avoid falling asleep. But once they returned to the main villa and the remaining couples were paired up, the show slowly started to find its footing as we finally started to see connections being formed.
In my eyes, none of the couples were going to top Amaya and Brian; here we had a girl who had been misunderstood by her fellow islanders all season, and along came a guy who finally saw her for the person she truly was. It felt genuine, and seeing them win it all was such a satisfying moment.
Watching the reaction of the crowd at the bar I was at made it even better. The way everyone erupted when the duo was announced as the winners, like we were watching a Spurs playoff game, was so much fun.
But overall, this season was not nearly as fun as the last; it missed why people were so obsessed with the show in the first place, and that was seeing genuine connections form along the way in real time. That’s what this season was severely lacking, more than anything.
Here’s hoping that, unlike most of these episodes, the reunion coming on August 25th will bring us some good television.
