In this week’s newsletter: The dating show conquered TV by attracting a broad audience to a niche genre, before novelty wore off and quality began to drop – sound familiar?
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Did you catch the Love Island UK final earlier this week? You didn’t?! You mean to say you missed the crowning of this year’s winners, who of course, as everyone knows, were … [furiously Googles] Jess and Sammy?!
At this stage, even pointing out Love Island’s decline from its late 2010s peak feels a little tired, every broadsheet having long since published their “where did all go wrong” piece (here’s ours). Still, it was hard not to gawp at the ratings for Monday’s finale, which averaged out at a middling 1.5 million viewers, dramatically down on 3.4 million who tuned in at the same stage in 2022. Perhaps even more catastrophically for a show that trades in the currency of “buzz”, anecdotally there is a feeling that next to no one has been talking about this latest season. This despite a washout July that should have seen its sun-kissed escapism clean up with soggy, sofa-bound viewers.
