Love Island 2022: the Best or Worst Season Yet?

Words by Hannah Mace (she/her) 

Content Warning: Suicide 

Every winter, I look forward to curling up in my cold Wellington bedroom, shutting my brain off, and watching the latest episode of Love Island. It’s peak entertainment, the ultimate study break. You can always count on Love Island to provide some drama, some spice, and some banter … or can you? 

Love Island 2022 has been an iconic season, with bombshells Ekin-Su and Davide winning the prized £50,000. Notable contestants included Tasha, an original cast member who was the show’s first deaf contestant, football star Michael Owen’s daughter, and Ronan Keating’s son.

This year’s Love Island, filmed in a brand new Majorcan villa (with the same tacky neon decorations as always), seemed to have a slightly different feel to it than other seasons. It’s clear that the producers have been carefully listening to the voice of the British public, adjusting protocols and standards over the years. 2022’s season was lacking some of the iconic challenges and traditions audiences have come to know and love. But that doesn’t mean the show lost its essence that gives it incredibly high amounts of views or draws Aotearoa’s viewers like me back to a Neon subscription for only two months out of the year. 

The mental health of contestants has been an area of concern since the show’s first series aired in 2015. Because the show is so popular and viewer votes are so central to the show, many Love Island stars have left the villa only to be met with vast amounts of online harassment. In the early seasons, the contestants had little to no mental health support when they got back to the United Kingdom. The lack of this support had harsh consequences, and three people associated with Love Island have died by suicide: past contestants Sophie Gradon and Mike Thalassitis, and ex-host Caroline Flack. You might expect any other TV show to be cancelled after the deaths of three people involved, but Love Island’s incredibly high ratings mean that ITV were probably making too much money off the show for it to be outright cancelled. Not to mention the backlash that they may have faced from the angry public expecting their fix of watching British hotties tan all day in the Spanish sun. 

Producers and executives have put systems in place since then to protect and inform the Islanders so that they can handle their sudden fame. Typically we see one or two Islanders a year leave the villa without being eliminated, simply because of mental health or wellbeing issues. This year we saw Liam leave the villa on day five and Jacques leave on day 37. They both had similar reasons for leaving, claiming that they didn’t feel like themselves and needed to escape the intensity of the villa. Islanders are free to return home whenever they want, but that doesn’t mean the experience won’t have lasting negative effects for many of them. 

A couple of times a week, the Islanders get to leave the villa and we see them take part in some sexy, usually messy, challenges. A popular one from recent years has been the ‘Twitter challenge’, in which the Islanders are presented with a tweet from the outside world, giving an opinion about specific contestants with the names blanked out. Their challenge is to guess who the tweet is referring to. But sometimes public opinions can be harsh, and bringing these into the villa can really mess with the contestants’ heads. The challenge did not feature in this year’s season, which could have been to protect the Islanders from public scrutiny while this was still possible. Seeing how Tasha reacted to being in the bottom three most weeks, which is dictated by public vote, the producers may have rightly decided to eliminate any emotional fallout the challenge might have caused. 

This season was missing the level of drama that we have come to expect from previous ones. There were no downright bitches this year, I have to say. Ekin-Su probably brought the most drama, but the majority of it was surface level and was resolved very quickly. Viewers have to come to expect screaming, shouting, pointing fingers, and throwing drinks from previous blowups, none of which were delivered this season. This makes for a slightly different TV experience. Yeah sure, I’m watching for the drama, the fights, the beef, all that. But this year, I have to admit it was kind of nice to just watch people grow and fall in love (no matter how much I don’t want to forgive Dami for his behaviour in Casa Amor). 

But there are a few things that have remained the same. Ian Stirling’s over the top, Scottish narration absolutely makes the show what it is. The named water bottles, suitcases, and beds have been there for us year in and year out. And we couldn’t get through an episode without one of the Islanders shouting “I GOT A TEXT!” or “Do you think your head could turn?” or “It’s time to get the grafting boots on.” The show has changed to accomodate the better health and wellbeing of its contestants, while still delivering us months worth of sexy summer sun television. We couldn’t ask for anything more.