Department of Communication Studies

Northeastern professor Steve Granelli says the live format and constant new episodes make the show very popular.

People have their teams. They have their watch parties. Each new airing is fodder for water cooler and social media discussions.

The show in discussion? “Love Island,” of course.

The new season of the U.S. version of the British reality series has caught fire in a way that other dating shows have not. It seems like everyone is talking about the latest drama from the charm of “Amaya Papaya” (one of the contestants) to another one, Cierra Ortega, being sent home when a video resurfaced of her using a racial slur.

Why the constant chatter about “Love Island” over other reality dating shows like “The Bachelor” or prestige TV like “The Bear”? Part of it is the formatting, says Steve Granelli, a pop culture expert and associate teaching professor of communications at Northeastern University.

Unlike “The Bear,” which is released a season at a time on Hulu, or “The Bachelor,” which usually has one episode a week air on ABC, “Love Island” drops six hour-long episodes a week that people often gather together to watch.

“There’s always new content that people can watch,” Granelli says. “Love Island is something that you can engage with during the particular episode. But the fandom is so fervent that it’s going to continue.”

“You can be watching TikTok compilations of different characters. You could be going on subreddits and you can be reading about people’s backgrounds. Because it’s this kind of proto-reality, it extends like it gives us the viewing experience, but then it extends into us trying to figure out who these people are in ‘real life.’ It has a bunch of different avenues for engagement outside of just the week-to-week airing of the episodes,” he says.

The constant content is also being churned out in, more or less, real time. Unlike shows like “Love is Blind,” which are filmed months before airing, “Love Island” airs episodes filmed the day prior, which creates what Granelli says is a sense of immediacy.

“It’s the perception of closeness that you have with either a person or a situation,” he explains. “The closer that we’re able to feel to a person or to a situation, the more we’re going to identify with it and the more we’re going to follow it. This is the reason why live is always going to be more inherently intriguing than something on tape.”