Love Island to Heat Up TVNZ 2

The same week MasterChef Australia winds up another marathon run, TVNZ 2 will strip the return of Love Island in primetime.

The first series of the steamy reality smash aired as daytime fodder in 2015 but season three will screen 9.30 Monday-Thursday and 9.10 Fridays from August 14 in a bid to arrest an audience slide that last week saw Three post its highest weekly share in four years.

Said the network in a statement: “Three is celebrating its best week since October 2013 with an average share of 25.2%, winning five of the seven nights last week including winning the week in the crucial 25-54 commercial audience; Monday (25-54, 18-39, 18-49), Tuesday (25-54, 18-39, 18-49), Thursday (25-54), Friday (25-54) and Saturday (all four demos).”

Pivotal to Three’s resurgence has been the nightly success of The Block NZ, which last week won its slot on Monday (25-54, 18-39, 18-49), Tuesday (all four demos), Wednesday (all four demos) and Sunday (all four demos).

This 7.30 strip has set up Three’s schedule for the rest of the night, helping Westside to dominate on Mondays for three weeks in a row while cementing the enduring appeal of staples like 7 Days, The Graham Norton Show and SVU and helping last Tuesday’s Diana: Our Mother, Her Life and Legacy, which aired only hours after its UK premiere, to win all four demos.

TVNZ 2 is banking on Love Island to build a Block-like momentum as it’s done in Britain, where it was the talking point of summer.

“Over the summer, there was only one reality TV show everyone was talking about: Love Island,” The Independent reports.

“Before consolidated viewing figures were accounted for, the total number of people who watched the series finale totalled 2.43 million, becoming ITV 2’s most watched programme ever.”

At the same time, the series final of Big Brother reached an all-time low. “Turns out, people have moved onto their new favourite reality TV show,” the Indie observed.

“I thought I should watch Love Island because everybody else is watching it,” The Times’ Hugo Rifkind said in his review of the phenomenon. “Although now I wish I hadn’t, because I feel shocked and sad and old.”

He described Love Island as “a show where couples actively have to couple up, in shared beds in a dormitory, not to get kicked off the show” but said “the sex, though, is weirdly unsexy“.

But The Guardian, which headlined its review, “What can 12 horny men and women teach us about romance?”, argued while it may look cheap and tawdry, “delve deeper and you’ll notice that it speaks wider truths, revealing much about who we are and how we love.”

Let’s hope so, because it will lock up TVNZ 2’s weeknight schedule for nine weeks.