The moment, a nod from one cultural phenomenon to another, was a tribute to the feral pleasure of “Love Island,” in which ten singles-five men, five women-are dispatched to a sunny villa, where, goaded by a lack of Internet and single beds, they set about finding true love. Around forty potential islanders, including some contestants’ exes, or the exes of their exes, wait on standby to be sent in during the course of the season. In the U.K., the show has become both unprecedentedly popular-its recent episodes attracted more than six million viewers, a record for its broadcaster, ITV2-and bitterly controversial. In 2016, a former contestant, Zara Holland, was stripped of her title as Miss Britain for having had sex on the program. In 2017, concerns about the contestants’ heavy smoking made it to the House of Lords. “What message does that say to young people?” Lord Storey asked his peers. The charity Women’s Aid spoke out against the treatment of female contestants by their “controlling” and “abusive” male suitors. Criticism of the show became more sombre in tone after two former contestants, Sophie Gradon and Mike Thalassitis, separately died by suicide, joining a troublingly long list of reality-TV alumni who have taken their own lives. In May, the British Parliament announced a committee to investigate production companies’ duty of care to participants. Meanwhile, Americans have been tuning in. Millie Bobby Brown, Amy Schumer, and Lena Dunham have all praised the show in the Guardian, Dunham recently described “listening to every murmur, the particularities of these regional accents, the smack of lips under the duvet covers.” Online, fans on both sides of the Atlantic have circulated memes featuring Michael Griffiths, a firefighter, brandishing a plastic wineglass as he calls Amber Gill, an aesthetician, “childish,” in a thick Liverpool accent. Americans’ passion for the show appears to have benefitted from the stereotypes of British people as drunken, outspoken, and eccentric.
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