Just when you thought that reality TV was dead, a show like Love Island USA comes around and changes everything.

This show, available on Hulu, taps into the heart of the human experience. Its cast members are raw, relatable, and multidimensional. All they want is love, and they're willing to do just about anything to find it.

Take Episode 10, which saw the cast members swallowing their pride and competing in a relay race that involved dropping fast food into each other's mouths. Gazing into each other's eyes as they vomited pink milkshakes onto each other's faces. For a moment, there was no division at all between these human beings. For a moment, it seemed that the walls of the simulated binary we all build between ourselves and others fell down, and they were all one, and we were one with them. We were all Caro, unable to stomach the waves of pink sugary liquid that Cashel was trying to spit into her mouth and unable to handle the blinding sweetness of another's true affection, but wanting so desperately to learn how. We were all those hot dogs, being passed by the currents of time from lover to lover, wanting simply to be digested within the stomach of our true soulmate.

Image via Daily Mail

Love Island is not always an easy show to watch. The Instagram influencers who come on the show are going to show you all their flaws and deepest insecurities. They're going to bare their true selves for the camera. They come from diverse backgrounds, and many have struggled all their lives, but this gives them a unique kind of grit and perspective that we could all learn from.



Love Island is a vital show for our time. For what else do human beings have but romantic love and beauty? What else matters except being in a relationship and earning money on reality TV? It's certainly not having healthy boundaries, or becoming friends before dating, or having positive friendships in your life, or living your dreams, or caring about others. No, to be single is to be dead, and these Love Islanders are not about to go gently into that good night. They will find love (and prize money) if it literally kills them.

For all its emphasis on human beings, Love Island is really a show about finding the greatest lover of all: God. For who else besides God could the announcer, Matthew Hoffman, be channeling when he says things like, "If I'd gone to college, I'd have a degree in women"? The message is clear. In the Love Island universe, the announcer is the Holy Spirit, and the challenges sent down by archangel Arielle Vandenberg are his ways of transmuting scripture to his blessed, lost disciples.

Image via CBS Press Excess

Love Island is about the resilience of the human spirit in the face of impossible odds, and about finding the divinity that lives within each of us. As one of this decade's rawest, most boundary-shattering television experiences, Love Island is a must-see.

