Love Island Feels the Love

The show that Three hopes will lift its Newshub Live ratings, Love Island UK, will premiere within hours of scoring record ratings in the UK.

The series will air 5.00 weekdays following Wednesday’s 90-minute season premiere at 4.30.

MediaWorks has promoted the show as being “fast-tracked” to its streaming platform, ThreeNow, but it won’t go online until the day after its broadcast (if you can’t wait for either, here’s a recap).

On ITV2 in the UK, season five opened with an unprecedented 3.3 million viewers, which suggests Three’s timed it perfectly to poach the series from TVNZ as part of a deal that includes the rights to the Australian and US versions, and a Love Island NZ.

Deadline reports it performed better than last year’s opener, which averaged 2.9 million viewers.

It also scored an 18.5% share and a peak of 3.7M viewers and was the highest rated show at 9pm. The show also reached a peak of 488,000 people watch the live simulcast on digital platform ITV Hub and became the most watched show of the year for 16-24 year old viewers with 622,000, a 59% share. It also reached 1.6M viewers aged between 16-34.

Critics weren’t as enamoured. “On first impressions, this bunch will be just as dull as last year’s,” said the Independent while The Telegraph declared: “TV’s annual meat market returns, and something smells off.”

And ahead of the premiere, The Guardian asked: “Are reality shows such as Love Island failing contestants?”

Expect Three to edit the daytime broadcast and beef up the appeal of its ThreeNow platform by promoting the streams as being uncut.

CBS, meanwhile, will screen its version five nights a week from July 9.