So… Love Island (US). Hm.

• The girls are moderately better looking.
• The boys are moderately better looking.
• The girls dress a little less trashy.
• The boys dress a lot less douchey. (The difference is pretty noticeable.)
• What fucking genius at CBS looked at Mallorca and thought, “Y’know how we could improve this? Put the villa in Fiji!” Predictably, Day One: torrential downpour.
• The rain has already had an impact on how the show works. The UK cast stays clumped together next to the pool or fire-pit most of the day, but the rain drives the US cast indoors and encourages them to pair off and squirrel themselves away in various corners of the villa. I’m honestly just waiting for one of these idiots to say “alliance”.
• …particularly because, in oh-so-American fashion, CBS has jacked up the prize money. Going from the UK’s ~$65,000 prize to $100,000 means people have a lot of extra incentive to actively game-ify their interactions.
• I don’t know anything about the presumably prominent designer they hired to create the look of the Hideaway, but it’s clear no one has ever told that motherfucker “no”. It’s an eye-boggling, cluttered mess that sits in stark contrast with the villa’s overall aesthetic and seems completely unsuited to encouraging horny twentysomethings to “do bits”.
• For the record, I insist that the US cast adopt “doing bits” as the default euphemism for dry-humping and finger-banging under a blanket. It is perfect.
• The barefoot drummer from Sacramento is just as off-putting as that description makes him sound. He might even be a nice kid, and I still hate him. Put some fucking socks on and stop being so pointedly laid-back, dude.
• Within the first eight minutes, someone sincerely praised God. Which is completely unremarkable for an American show, but really stands out in comparison to the UK original.
• …but not as much as the way the kids speak in general. I mean, besides the to-be-expected elimination of the UK show’s omnipresent “fuck”s, it’s striking that the UK cast tends to speak in more complicated, flowing sentences. On a show where “reality” is rehearsed and often reshot, the difference shouldn’t be so stark.

Verdict: way too early to tell if this is gonna work. Caro’s a nutjob and Kyra is fairly hot, so at least I’m not bored.

Spitswap Island

Anyone who wonders why I’m watching this brilliantly executed, profoundly stupid show, look no further.

Molly-Mae is roughly 3x as hot when someone’s spitting in her mouth.

• So it’s interesting that the show silently booted Sherif from the villa for booting Molly in the cooch and referring to it as a “cunt-punt”. Interesting in the sense that no one would ever remember Sherif otherwise…
• …and that in the process of figuring out what happened, some of the show’s rules were re-publicized. Some seem to be a reaction to all the drunkenness last year —a two drink limit, apparently— but some are more manipulative. Like the ban on masturbation, which is sadistically clever… as everyone around this part of Tumblr knows, you put a bunch of horny twentysomethings on a orgasm denial program, and all kinds of crazy decisions are gonna get made.
• How have the producers managed to make me pity Anton? Eldritch magic, I suspect.
• Maura is what would result if Krysten Ritter fucked the Lucky Charms leprechaun.
• Tommy is what would result if something really dumb fucked something really dumb with pretty eyes.
• Lucie continues to look like she woke up this morning feeling like P. Diddy. If Joe were hormonally capable of growing one, I’d expect to hear her giggle “I really like your beard.”

With Game of Thrones officially gone, The Expanse is the next-best-thing. It doesn’t have the massive budget of GoT and none of the central characters are involved in an incestuous relationship, but otherwise, it checks all the boxes: epic political intrigue, centuries of internecine wars, and something inhuman lurking out there in the cold.