The strange wholesomeness of 'Love Island'

After bouncing off The Traitors a couple of times, it finally clicked in our household with Season 4, featuring the often-shirtless Rob, with whom every viewer fell hopelessly in love. Rob, along with fellow Traitors contestant Maura, was from a show called Love Island, which my lovely wife and I had barely heard of, let alone watched.

(This was one of the main reasons we kept bouncing off of The Traitors before it eventually hooked us: we aren't really reality TV people, and as such, it was a big ask to get us to try to care about a dozen-plus Survivors and Real Housewives and Shahs of Sunset or whomsever just because they happened to be gathered together to play a game.)

Rob was such a captivating personality because he was unlike most people on TV, and especially unlike most people on reality TV. He looked like history's greatest himbo, but was clever and funny and resourceful and ... genuinely empathetic. After becoming so enamored of him, and seeing in the reunion show and on social media that everyone else in the Traitors castle was also genuinely taken with him, both during and after the show, we heard that his season of Love Island was notable for how much his fellow male island-mates seemed to care more for keeping him around than for finding a love connection with the opposite sex.

So we began watching Season 6 of Love Island USA, which is available on Peacock. At first, the show appeared to be pure trash. We had deeply adored FBoy Island, hosted by Nikki Glaser and aired on HBO and The CW before being canceled before its time. FBoy Island, we understood, was largely a sendup of Love Island and Temptation Island and Bachelor in Paradise all other similar reality shows where they toss a bunch of horny young thong-wearers on a beach and roll cameras as they all begin making out. Love Island appeared to simply be FBoy Island without any hint of self-awareness. What's more, the seasons were over 30 episodes long! What nonsense is that?!

But about 10 episodes in, we started becoming deeply invested in these young, dumb, deeply baffling horndogs. And in this particular season, Rob being the glue that held (at least the male side of) the island together was palpable, and wholesome, and genuine.

I was stunned to learn, as the season unfolded, that what I was looking at (other than an absolute smorgasbord of buttcheeks) was the next-best genuine modern portrayal of positive masculinity that I'd seen besides Jackass.

Jackass has, for a while now, rightfully been hailed and written about as a paragon of positive masculinity. Here are a few great pieces you can read right now that will explain the situation a lot better than I can, but Jackass has long been one of the truest and most hilarious franchises of my lifetime largely because it has managed to tap into the reality of being a guy, but not being a piece of shit.

Love Island, by design and invariably, is a shallow enterprise that is primarily and initially designed to titillate and provide spectacle. A half-dozen pairs of 20-something men and women put on bathing suits and hang out at a villa in Fiji, sleeping in adjacent beds and forced to be coupled or else be at risk of being sent home. Periodically (usually without warning), a group of "bombshells" will arrive to inject new life and provide new coupling. Once a season, one of the gender groups will be sent to "Casa Amor," where they get to meet another new group of the opposite sex and decide whether to bring any of them back to the villa, while the other gender group will be welcoming another another group of the opposite sex at the villa.

Because of the age of the people (it honestly feels strange to call them "contestants"), there is so much emotion and confusion flying around all the time, and because almost everyone is invariably bad at communication, feelings get hurt and lines get crossed and huge blowups happen due to misunderstandings or perceived slights, which can sometimes result in multi-episode crying jags or screaming fits. You can shake your head and roll your eyes and scoff at the situations (and you're well within your rights to), but every time the men or women gather amongst themselves, you're reminded all over again that everyone in their 20s is an idiot, and that everything involving dating or feelings or attraction or love is stupid and impossible and terrible, and it takes a really long time to figure it all out. Maybe we never really do!

Not even Rob is immune to miscommunication or misunderstanding, or closing himself off or behaving in dumb ways, but whenever he is with his guys, he never hesitates to encourage a fellow man, or lift him up, or tell him he's being stupid (in a loving way), or just be someone there to listen while a friend vents. It's refreshing and wonderful, and how many groups of male friends behave around each other. It's also a dynamic that is almost never presented in this way on television. Dedicating so much of the show's time to the in-groups discussing their emotions amongst themselves, free from potential judgment of having to talk to their prospective romantic partners, is Love Island's secret sauce.

Yes, much of the show is surface-level trash. (But of course, I am long on the record as adoring trash.) A lot of people won't see in Love Island what I see or get out of it what I get out of it. I am, of course, only a little way into a second season of the show, and there is so, so much of it that I have never seen. But Rob's season (Season 6) was such a revelation that I'm hopelessly hooked at the moment. I simply can't watch enough of it. Give me the boys, give me the girls. Heck, give me the buttcheeks; I'll sit through an ocean of cheeks if I get to see these dumb-as-a-rock beautiful boys just be kind to one another.