The most consoling thing one can do right now is to imagine life somewhere far away from here, in a time unhooked from today, tomorrow, next week. To escape to an unreality, distant from the constant shrill of sirens beating against apartment windows and the daily reminders that a virus has undone what can never be pieced together again. To put space between one’s self and the world. To be as selfish as possible.
Lately, doing this means turning on the TV, skipping past the news, past the highbrow drama of Devs and the candied dysfunction of Better Things. These days, the mind needs a much more manicured kind of disorder. It needs Love Island. Click Play, and soon the body—that mound of flesh and unease—is free from it all. The show narrator begins. “Previously on Love Island,” he says in his cheeky Scottish accent. Light jumps from the TV screen and animates the living room. I absorb everything it has to offer.
In this current moment of unscripted catastrophe, one that even seasoned producers Mona Scott-Young or Mark Burnett could not have dreamed up, all that feels right is the sugary chaos and redemptive thrills of reality TV. Not counting the lunatic number of naps I take or all the extra time I’ve devoted to reading (I started revisiting old favorites and, yes, Edward P. Jones’ Lost In the City is still that good), this is how I’ve made the most out of isolation: cycling through one reality program after the next, feeding on the genre’s formulaic delights.
The end goal of