On Monday, August 25, the seventh season of Love Island USA was capped off with its customary reunion episode. All of the contestants throughout the latest season were back, and so were their drama, secrets, and gossip. More than a month after the July 13 season finale, the reunion episode saw Jeremiah Brown and Ace Green finally bury the hatchet, winner Bryan Arenales address the rumors that he cheated on Amaya Espinal, and Chelley Bissainthe and Olandria Carthen were confronted about their bullying at the villa. Oh, and fans were right: Huda Mustafa totally twerked over Ace’s face after the cameras cut during the heart-rate challenge.
If you know, you know, and if you don’t, you’re in the minority. Love Island USA Season 7 set records as the most streamed reality show in history, with over 18.1 billion minutes viewed, the most watched series on streamer Peacock. In six years, the show went from 570,000 viewers for an entire season to 300 million in just six weeks, while unscripted series on the whole have been in decline since quarantine ended. What makes Love Island different from those other shows is a one-two punch of the most outrageous contestants on television and the hardest, fastest-working film crew in the world.
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Soul Ties, Bombshells, and Casa Amor: How the Island Works
Every summer since 2019, a new season of Love Island USA brings five men and five women together at a tropical island villa in the Pacific—while the locale is different each season, the island has to be in the Pacific for logistical reasons. The men and women “couple up” when they meet—the couple could be friends, lovers, or merely a pair of people trying to survive elimination.
The goal of the game is for the couples to find the perfect partner and stay together. Ultimately, viewers vote for their favorite couple as the series goes on—couples that rank at the bottom of the vote get eliminated until there is one couple left, who win $100,000 to split between them or share as a romantic pair.
Since the initial coupling is only based on first impressions, host Ariana Madixx of Vanderpump Rules re-couples the contestants, and each islander gets the choice to stick with their current partner or become part of the new couple. Couples don’t always agree on which of these paths to take, and anyone left single after the recoupling is eliminated.
To test the mettle of each couple, the islanders compete in games where a winning couple can win a date night off the island or even a night at the Hideaway, a private bedroom separate from the other couples. Contestant couples can also build their relationship by having deep, intimate conversations in the “Soul Ties” area or by texting each other. While the contestants have cell phones, they have no access to the outside world and can only text one another (and some members of the crew in case of emergency).
There’s one more twist that makes Love Island different from other reality shows: the bombshells. While the ten contestants couple up and compete at the main villa, the producers also have a second villa full of attractive men and women. Whenever the producers want to stir up drama, they can bring any one of these bombshells in to compete at the main villa. These new contestants exist to test the fidelity of the existing couples.
The show can either introduce a couple of bombshells at a time or upend everything with a visit to Casa Amor. When Casa Amor shows up, all the guys and girls are separated—one group goes to Casa Amor while the other group stays at the main villa. Then a group of male bombshells join the girls and female bombshells join the guys to tempt the contestants into infidelity.
Chaos Is Key: How the Island Works Up Contestents
Fans tune in to watch Love Island for six weeks during the summer—this year, the first episode dropped on June 3 and the finale hit on July 13. Unlike most reality shows, which air one or two episodes a week, Love Island airs every day but Wednesday. This means instead of filling one or two hours with fights, flirting, and drama, Love Island needs a constant stream of contestant antics to keep their show engaging.
The show accomplishes this in two ways. One, there are cameras everywhere, and they are always on. Even the “private” areas away from other contestants like the Hideaway and Soul Ties aren’t safe from the cameras. By capturing everything everywhere on the island, the producers are sure to not miss a thing.
The other way the show guarantees drama is through complete unpredictability. The producers drop bombshells at random times. Re-coupling happens whenever Madixx decides they should happen. Even viewer voting doesn’t always happen on the same day, meaning that a fan needs to watch every day if they don’t want to miss a vote. This constantly unfolding chaos as to how the show functions keeps the show interesting.
Take the first week of Season 7: on Sunday, the contestants all had their new couples and were getting to know them, then on Monday, there were games to strengthen the couples relationships and try to bring in some chaos. Tuesday brought more drama when bombshells were dropped into the villa. After taking Wednesday off, Thursday saw some new sparks flying because of the bombshells. On Friday, there were re-couplings, and then on Saturday, there were brand new couples. With schedules like this, Love Island never has any lulls or days that feel the same.
Next Day Air: How the Show’s Production Works
Generating six episodes worth of content each week is one thing, but bringing the episodes to air is another. Audiences want to vote for a couple and see the results of their vote the very next day, so to pull this off, every episode of Love Island USA (except for the reunion) has a 25-hour turnaround from filming to airdate. Everything—editing, narrating, graphics, music—gets done during that 25-hour window. This may seem impossible, but not for Love Island.
While most TV shows edit footage after filming is done for the day, Love Island edits the footage as is it is being shot. Since the villa has several dozens of remote-controlled cameras throughout, this means the show has around a dozen camera operators watching feeds instead of the one or two most shows have. They cut footage into batches of clips, and these clips go to a room of keyloggers who, without AI assistance (because of accent issues), write down every word of every conversation caught by every camera and attach it to the footage. This allows every clip to be searchable later—if a producer wants a clip of, say, Amaya talking about Ace, they can type in this command and all the clips where Amaya mentioned Ace’s name will pop up.
While the clips are being filmed and text added, a team of 20 producers are watching the live feed from the cameras and taking notes on anything interesting that’s going on. While this is pretty easy if the whole villa is playing a game together, each producer is trained to follow one contestant or bombshell. If a producer sees something that would be good for the general story arc of the show, they alert one of a team of 30 editors to find the clips of the moment from the database, edit the various different camera shots into one polished clip, sync the recorded audio to the video, and add the clip to the overall show file. This process can take as little as 15 minutes for a two-minute clip.
Every few hours, the main show file is sent to the “stitch team” of editors, storywriters, and executive producers who ultimately pick what makes it in the final show and what doesn’t. The storywriters then create a script for the narration to connect the clips. The hosts also spend time with the producers and storywriters watching and figuring out who to re-couple, what game should be played next, and what the hosts need to say.
Once the contestants are asleep, filming for the day is essentially done, though this can vary day to day–there are no accurate clocks in the villas so the producers can generate more footage if they need to. The day’s stitched footage is sent to the audio team. The audio team has until 5:00 a.m. Fiji time to fix any issues with the sound added to the clips. At 5:00 a.m., the executive producers get on a Zoom call with the head editors, audio team, and narrator Iain Stirling (who does his voiceovers all the way from the UK where it’s already 4:00 p.m.). As they play through the episode on the call, producers give Stirling his lines as they happen in the episode (tweaking them if needed)–he records them on the call and the audio team adds the narration as the call continues.
Music is also added this way, as producers tell the audio team what kind of song they want playing for each scene. Unlike most shows, which decide what song they want to go with footage before they request the rights from the music publisher, Love Island clears thousands of songs in advance of the season and sorts them in a database by feeling. The music editor looks up what feeling they want the music to have for a scene, and all the songs they are allowed to pick pop up. Like the narration, they select, trim, and add the audio mid-call.
When the call is finished around 7:30 a.m. Fiji time, the executive producers go back to watching the villa feeds for the next episode while the now-finished rough cut of the episode goes to Peacock’s legal department in New York City (1:30 p.m. local time), who makes sure everything in the episode is okay to air. Any edits to the final cut must be made by 6:00 p.m. New York time so the episode can make its 9:00 p.m. premiere.
No other show does this or even comes close. Take Survivor: Season 50 also filmed in Fiji during the month of June, but the season premiere won’t be until February 5, 2026, more than six months after filming wrapped.
When Things Don’t Work as Planned: Contestant Controversy
While fast production and curated chaos makes Love Island a hit, it also creates an opportunity for things to not go according to plan. In Season 7, one of the initial five female contestants, 27-year-old Yulissa Escobar, was quietly escorted off the show on the second day and replaced with another contestant from their stable of bombshells.
This came after clips Escobar posted years ago using a racial slur on a podcast went viral online. The audience lobbied a campaign to remove Escobar off the show immediately, as they are used to the show rting to audience feedback next day. While producers immediately escorted Escobar off the show, it left them with no time to properly respond to the media about the change nor to reconfigure their plans for the first few games, which also got a negative response from some.
Another issue plagued Season 7 when 25-year-old bombshell Cierra Ortega was taken off the show days before the finale was filmed. This time, an Instagram post she made using a derogatory term went viral and drove the network to remove her. With no real time to react, the hosts claimed that Ortega left the villa for “personal reasons,” which to some felt like it trivalized the damage Ortega did with her post.
This was not helped by rumors that some viewers could hear Ortega screaming, “You can’t do that!” in the background of episode 30, which fans thought was Ortega getting dragged out of the villa by force. Host Ariana Maddix addressed rumors in the reunion (to which neither Ortega nor Escobar was invited) with a clip revealing that the screaming some fand heard was just Huda and Iris singing together.
Ortega, in fact, was very contrite about her removal from the show. Ortega said in an apology video, “I completely agree with the network’s decision to remove me from the villa. I think that this is something that deserved punishment and the punishment has absolutely been received.”
These repercussions didn’t just end at the villa though: Oretga and her family have been receiving threats and cruel messages even after her apology video, and both she and Escobar have expressed fear of angry fans physically hurting them. Some criticism has been levied at the show for waiting so long to clear up rumors, which allowed the online hate to continue.
Working Things Out: How the Reunion Sets Up Love Island‘s Future
While some answers come too late, the reunion episode is Love Island‘s way of resolve any of its controversies and issues. Most reality shows have a reunion special to close out their season, but Love Island‘s is unique because it’s the only chance all season where the show can look back and reflect on things that happened.
For instance, a lot of the Season 7 reunion episode revolved around the two biggest instigators of drama on the show: Jeremiah and Huda. Ace Green accused Jeremiah of only being in it for the money: “When I hear comments about getting the money, I hear comments about followers outside of the villa, I don’t feel like this is a genuine connection.” Jeremiah defended himself, saying he wasn’t in it for the money or love bombing Huda in any way.
Then”Hurricane Huda” was called out for her frequent bouts of anger and saying cruel things to her friends. After denying this, a montage of Huda’s most explosive moments on the show played. Huda responed by saying, “I’ve done so much self reflection and so much work that I can look back on these moments and laugh. Now I would handle things so differently.” However, she does not regret cursing out her coworkers and name calling them because she felt bullied on the show.
For the viewer, these reunion moments are critical for Love Island to keep going because they address and rehabilitate some of the awful behavior that pops up over the season. This helps fans to get over any upsets in who wins and loses and not have lingering hate for any of the players, unlike what Ortega and Escobar have faced. These moments help the show bank good will with fans, which is critcial for a show that films so fast that it doesn’t have time to stop and reflect.
It can be crazy, it can be messy, and it’s far from perfect, but Love Island USA pushes what is possible in TV and streaming while creating an addictive and popular show. Casting is already open for Season 8, and the series shows no signs of slowing down despite some Season 7 controversies. Ultimately, it’s because America loves Love Island.
