After a dramatic six weeks of “Love Island USA” that generated constant headlines and social media controversy, the seventh season wrapped up on Sunday night with a lukewarm outlook on love.
The show was a pop culture constant this summer, with Peacock airing six new episodes per week. It became one of the most streamed programs, and its popularity was also reflected in the millions of votes that viewers cast to try to keep their favorite islanders in the villa on the Pacific island of Fiji.
Just because the season is wrapped doesn’t mean that “Love Island” will be off our screens for long. Far from it. The show’s host, Ariana Madix, will be joined by Andy Cohen for a reunion special on Aug. 25. And on Sept. 16, Peacock will begin airing “Love Island Games,” a spinoff coming back for its second season. It features contestants from different iterations of the show — U.S., U.K., Australia and others — as they compete in challenges while also trying to date.
After the finale, here are the big moments and takeaways for the show’s seventh season.
A finale usually celebrating love instead featured a breakup.
Though “Love Island” seasons are often unpredictable, finales always tend to follow a set formula. The four final couples go on elaborate dates, film slow-motion make-out scenes and talk about how they will approach their relationship outside the villa.
And then, based on viewer votes, a winning couple is crowned.
On Sunday night’s finale, most things went according to that blueprint — until the date between Huda Mustafa, 24, and Chris Seeley, 27. Instead of sharing kind words and dreaming about the future, they broke up and decided to go “no-contact” after leaving the villa — a franchise first. While other couples literally rode off into the sunset, Mustafa downed a glass of champagne before walking away from dinner by herself. In the past, couples have broken up shortly after the finale wrapped but never during.
Because fans’ votes were locked in before the finale, the noncouple of Mustafa and Seeley took home third place, ahead of Iris Kendall and Pepe Garcia.
In the end, Amaya Espinal and Bryan Arenales — fan favorites and the only committed couple left in the villa — were crowned the winners.
Nic Vansteenberghe and Olandria Carthen, who had a friends-to-lovers arc heavily supported on social media and who had only recently coupled up, were the runners-up.
Two contestants were sent home when old social media posts using racial slurs resurfaced.
It was just days before the premiere of the seventh season, and Peacock was already dealing with a public-relations nightmare — videos dug up by online sleuths and then reported by TMZ showed one of the contestants who had just entered the villa, Yulissa Escobar, 27, a Cuban American woman from Miami, using a racial slur on a podcast. Because of the few days’ delay between filming the episode and airing it, viewers were already vowing to vote Escobar off the show as soon as they could.
They never had the chance, though. About 18 minutes into the second episode, the narrator, Iain Stirling, announced to viewers: “Yulissa has left the villa.”
After her elimination from the show, she posted on Instagram to “apologize for using a word I had no right in using.”
She wasn’t the only one to leave because of resurfaced social media posts. In early July, screenshots went viral of Cierra Ortega, 25, a content creator from Arizona who is of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent, using an anti-Asian slur while describing her appearance and why she was getting Botox in a 2023 Instagram story. She had also used the same slur as the caption in a 2015 post.
On social media, viewers were quick to call for her to be kicked off the show, arguing that it would be hypocritical to removed Escobar from the villa but allow Ortega to stay.
During the July 6 episode, Stirling again spoke to viewers and said, “Cierra has left the villa due to a personal situation.”
A few days after arriving back in the United States, Ortega posted a video on Instagram in which she was wearing a sweatshirt with the word “empathy” emblazoned across the chest. She said, “I was very naïvely using an incredibly offensive and derogatory term,” adding, “I want to first start by addressing not just anyone that I have hurt or deeply offended but most importantly the Asian community.”
Mental health and online harassment became major subplots.
For a show featuring young people plucked from obscurity and thrust into the spotlight, maybe it’s not surprising that the generation-defining topics of mental health and online harassment played such a large role.
The week before the finale, on “Aftersun,” a weekly recap show, Madix, the host, shared her frustration, saying: “It blows my mind that again I have to say not to harass” the islanders on the internet. “And I don’t understand why week after week we have to keep saying, ‘Don’t do that,’” she added.
Madix had previously spoken directly to viewers: “Don’t be contacting people’s families. Don’t be going on the islanders’ pages and saying rude things.”
On the June 24 episode, a disclaimer at the beginning warned against cyberbullying: “The keyword in ‘Love Island’ is … love. We love our fans, we love our islanders. We don’t love cyberbullying, harassment or hate.” A similar message was shared across “Love Island” social media accounts.
This season, backlash initially seemed specifically targeted toward one contestant, Mustafa, a mother from North Carolina, who at first was coupled up with Jeremiah Brown, a fellow islander. The two had a tumultuous relationship, and an argument prompted concern from both viewers and islanders who worried for her safety and the safety of the others in the villa.
Noah Sheline, the father of Mustafa’s 4-year-old daughter, posted a TikTok story that read: “At the end of the day I hope everyone remembers we’re human. Her going on that show to find love, or whatever you think it was she’s doing, remember she’s still human, she has a daughter, and a life.”
In the Instagram video posted by Ortega, she shared a similar sentiment. “What’s been extremely, extremely difficult is the way people are approaching my family and my loved ones — they have had ICE called on them, my family doesn’t feel safe in their own home, I am receiving death threats.” She added: “There’s no need to fight hate with hate. I don’t think that’s justice.”
ITV America, the production company behind the show, shared via email a list of resources it provides contestants, including an on-site psychologist while filming and mandated check-ins with that same psychologist after they leave the villa.
The season provided an illuminating look at trends, and terms, in Gen Z dating.
If you want an unvarnished look at what dating is like for Gen Z, you could do worse than this season of “Love Island.” All of the cast members (except Zak Srakaew, who was quickly eliminated) were under 28 years old and hesitated to commit to one connection. The lack of commitment but increased physical intimacy exhibited by the islanders seemed to be incompatible with the typical process of the show, where the goal is to couple up, stay coupled, test the connection and then emerge with a strong relationship.
Because of this, certain “Love Island” hallmarks — Casa Amor, frequent recouplings or access to the hideaway — were ditched or modified.
“This was the first season I had really clocked them talking about things like being a ‘lover girl’ or ‘being in my feminine’ or ‘being in my masculine’ or ‘letting him lead,’” said Rebecca Jennings, the author of “Be the Bombshell: What ‘Love Island’ Teaches Us About Dating.” “Those kinds of terms that you hear a lot on TikTok and among kind of people speaking to Gen Z about dating.”
Before Ortega was sent home, she and Vansteenberghe were briefly “closed off,” a “Love Island”-specific vernacular that means exclusively together but only in the villa. But as the finale loomed, no other couples still on the show had made that commitment.
“I think the contestants’ refusal to really define what they’re even doing is so indicative of how a lot of young people are dating,” Jennings added. “You can kind of be in a talking stage for, what, six months; you can be in a situationship for years.”
With two episodes left until the finale, another couple — Ace Greene and Chelley Bissainthe — became exclusive but then were dumped from the villa the next day. The day before the finale, Espinal and Arenales also committed. But the other three couples who made it to the finale never defined their relationships.
Shivani Gonzalez is a news assistant at The Times who writes a weekly TV column and contributes to a variety of sections.
The post ‘Love Island USA’ Ends With a Franchise First. Here’s How It Got There. appeared first on New York Times.
