Stream It or Skip It: ‘Love Island USA’ Season 5 on Peaco*ck, the Hardest-Working Dating Show on TV (2024)

Love Island USA is back on Peaco*ck with a brand new season and a brand new lineup of thirsty Islanders. Sarah Hyland returns as host along with instantly recognizable Scottish narrator Iain Stirling, who both welcome 10 newbies to the brand new dream house villa in Fiji. The question is, will the supersized premiere episode make you want to couple up with Season 5 of Love Island USA? Or is the show’s six episodes a week too much of a commitment?

LOVE ISLAND USA SEASON 5: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Sarah Hyland is marooned on a beach in Fiji, wandering along the coastline alone and enduring some real Castaway-esque trials… until she stumbles across the gorgeous new Love Island USA villa.

The Gist: As with any summer fling, there isn’t much to explain about Love Island USA. It’s all about the simple pleasures and pumping your brain full of endorphins. At its core, the premiere is 75 minutes of pulsating colors, music, scenery, and skin… and secondhand embarrassment. Those five key components combine Captain Planet style to create the Love Island franchise, and Season 5 of the USA iteration is no different.

The gameplay will be familiar to anyone who’s watched copycat shows like Too Hot to Handle or Are You the One? or Perfect Match or Dated and Related or —you get the idea. A bunch of single hotties pair off, date, eliminate, and play musical chairs (or musical beds?) as new hotties are introduced throughout the season to tempt those in “relationships” or pair up with any singles left standing. It’s fairly straightforward, although these kinds of shows are always full of twists. Love Island USA Season 5’s premiere is no different and contains at least three format tweaks that maximize the awkwardness that’s already inherent with a show where everyone is a stranger* and the wardrobe department is just a drawer of bikinis.

As with every premiere episode of Love Island USA, nearly half of the episode is devoted to introducing all 10 Islanders and getting them romantically paired up via the kind of simple playground game that would absolutely make a sensitive 5th grader cry behind the swings. Once paired up, and at least 3 of the 5 couples are happy with their pairing, the Islanders move into the villa. Clearly reading this moment in time, the Fiji villa is a Miami midcentury modern Barbie dreamhouse, if took all of her design cues from Saved By the Bell.

The rest of the episode is filled with the usual first-date banter as we see how the couples vibe with each other. Keenan and Kay Kay are, out of the gate, the most romantic pairing. Marco and Destiny share the season’s first kiss, but you gotta wonder when the 27-year-old microbiologist is going to realize 22-year-old Marco is a 22-year-old boy. There are even the first inklings of a love triangle between Leonardo, Kassy, and Anna.

All of that leads up to the dreaded portion of the episode where, in a twist, the couple deemed least compatible are put up for elimination —and then must decide between themselves who should go home. And even though there are just 30 seconds left in the episode after that, there’s still time for one more twist.

* SPOILER: This actually isn’t the case this season. Two Islanders actually know each other “from the gym” and it’s a fun little twist that really, really needs to go somewhere.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? While Love Island’s formula has been imitated many, many times since the show’s premiere in the UK in 2005, I’ll point to Netflix’s Too Hot to Handle since that series is also on its fifth season and it’s dropping new episodes this week. A little Netflix vs. Peaco*ck counter-programming?

Sex and Skin: The entire show is sex and skin. This is a show explicitly for people who are brave enough to make their national TV debut with their ass fully hanging out. Not metaphorically. Literally. That being said: since the women on these shows are constantly discovering new ways to wrap fabric around their bodies to lift their boobs and bare their asses, why can’t a man enter the villa in a Speedo instead of the same boring old trunks? I demand parity in swimsuit extravagance.

Parting Shot: The evicted player gets a text, and you know that with a text comes a twist.

Sleeper Star: God help me, I’ve had to watch a lot of these shows while working as a TV critic and I have never seen anyone like Bergie on any of them.

Bergie is a 23-year-old Dairy Queen manager who was born in Minnesota and lives in South Dakota. He’s never had a girlfriend but he writes letters to his future wife. Why? Because when he turned 18, Bergie was given a stack of letters that his mother wrote to him before she passed away 14 years prior. Bergie is a self-described geek who looks like a straight-to-VOD Prince Harry. And when the Islander he ends up partnered with is pulled for a one-on-one with another guy, Bergie opts to sit alone at a table in the middle of the villa. He is sweet, shy, and soft-spoken to the point where I legitimately wondered if he was a plant. Would he reveal that he was secretly a millionaire? Or an aggressive stand-up comic doing a bit? I don’t know —is he Banksy? He’s so out of place and, so far, he’s the only thing that makes Love Island USA Season 5 stand out in a very crowded sub-genre.

Our Take: I mean… it’s Love Island. I personally can’t watch Love Island USA without constantly wondering who is joking, who is in on the joke, and/or if a joke is even being made. Are these lovable dum dums being subjected to incredibly snarky editors who will absolutely leave the most embarrassing moments in? Or are the Islanders actually razor sharp and witty as f*ck, like when Jasmine says she “needs a Swiffer” because she has “f*cking cobwebs growing down there?” The show’s entire vibe is one of irreverence, starting with the traditional scripted opening montage of all the cast members erupting from their humdrum daily lives by revealing swimsuits underneath their work clothes. I mean, it’s narrated by comedian Iain Stirling who absolutely deflates every single scenario by roasting the Islanders. But when Anna says she packed a wedding gown with her… is she serious? Her entire vibe is that of a Heidi Gardener SNL character, so probably not… but…?

This is a big part of whatever charm Love Island USA possesses. You really never know where the texts are going to shove the narrative, nor do you know which Islander is keenly self-aware and which ones you’re laughing with rather than at. A show like Too Hot, for example, exclusively casts hyper-sexed extroverts with a flair for self-sabotage. Love Island USA has those (Jasmine, probably Marco) but the show also has Bergie. That’s where Love Island USA gets a leg up on Too Hot to Handle, although the men could lift those legs a lot higher if they could live by the skies out/thighs out mantra!

The biggest downside of any season of Love Island USA, though, is the commitment. Since the show moved from network TV to Peaco*ck, it’s able to mimic its UK predecessor and drop six new, hourlong episodes a week. Speaking as an American TV viewer, this is a phenomenon that is uniquely British and still hard to wrap my head around. It’s just a lot. And since Love Island USA is filmed essentially in real-time, the editors —miracle workers — don’t know the entire arc of every romance. That means every episode has chunks filled with boring small talk that may or may not lead to the fling of the summer.

But hey — that’s why Love Island USA packs every episode with wall-to-wall sexy dance remixes of covers of ’90s hits and why the Islanders are 90% naked 90% of the time (well the men are closer to 70% naked, a problem that could be fixed in a truly equal world!). Whether or not the storytelling is actually engaging, there’s always something to stimulate the senses on Love Island.

Our Call: With six episodes a week, Love Island USA is such a commitment that it was initially hard for me to recommend this to anyone other than the diehards. It’s fun, but is it six hours of your life every week fun? Especially when a new season of Too Hot to Handle is right there, clocking in at a sane 10 hours? But… it’s the Bergie of it all for me. I have to see where his bizarre journey takes this season, so STREAM IT at least until Bergie strikes out.