Love Island

Love Island USA is pure chaos, and admittedly: we love it. It's one of many spinoffs of the long-running British hit series, Love Island — and it might be the closest thing we've got to a watercooler event. The latest season of Peacock's knowingly trashy reality dating show has fired up the group chats thanks to this messy batch of conventionally sexy singles. Sometimes, for better or worse, fans even get to stir the pot and decide who stays or goes. To access bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening for Pop Culture Happy Hour, subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+ at plus.npr.org/happy. https://plus.npr.org/happy See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel? That's your drive for more. Capella University's FlexPath learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella.edu.

• 0:19Aisha Harris?

  The monoculture no longer exists, but this summer, Love Island might be the closest thing we've got to a watercooler event. It's pure chaos and admittedly, we kind of love it. The latest season of the knowingly trashy reality dating series has fired up the group chats thanks to this messy batch of conventionally sexy singles. Sometimes, for better or worse, fans even get to stir the pot and decide who stays or goes. I'm Aisha Harris, and buckle up, babes. Today, we're open to exploring Love Island on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour.

• 0:58Speaker 00

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• 1:27Speaker 02

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• 2:10Aisha Harris?

  Joining me today is BA Parker. She's one of the hosts of NPR's Code Switch podcast. Hello, Parker. Hello. Also with us is Ronald Young Jr. He's the host of the film and television review podcast, Leaving the Theater. Hello to you, too, Ronald.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  You know, I'm looking forward to exploring this connection, Ayesha.

• 2:27Aisha Harris?

  Aren't we all? Aren't we all? And rounding up the panel is culture writer and critic Shamira Ibrahim. Hello Shamira.

• 2:36Speaker 04

  Aisha, you know, we've known each other for so long. Are you ready to close this off yet or no?

• 2:41Aisha Harris?

  I don't know Shamira, do you have pancakes ready for me? I expect some pancakes at the end of this recording. Freshly made.

• 2:47Speaker 04

  Duly noted.

• 2:48Speaker 03

  Shape of a letter A.

• 2:53Aisha Harris?

  Oh man, okay, so yes, Love Island USA is one of many spin offs of the long running British hit Love Island. A crop of hot men and women are thrown into a villa in a tropical locale to compete for each other's affections via highly convoluted games and scenarios. Every once in a while, new hot singles, known as bombshells, are also thrown into the mix. The ostensible goal here is to quote unquote, "find love", but there's also a cash prize at the end for the last couple standing because of course, they're games, you gotta have some games in here. Now, what makes Love Island different from other reality dating shows is that it airs six days a week. My god, for several weeks. And viewers experience it in realish time, Big Brother style.

• 3:37Aisha Harris?

  There's just a mere one to two day delay between the taping and airing of new episodes. In fact, some folks are currently still on that island, making out probably right now as I speak on this Monday afternoon. Love Island USA is streaming on Peacock and the finale drops Sunday. So Ronald, I'm actually gonna start with you. I know that you are a huge fan, but tell me, like, what is it about this show, and this season in particular, that has got you like hyped? Why are you loving Love Island?

• 4:07Speaker 03

  I've only watched one other season of Love Island, and it was of the original Recipe, the British one. This one in particular, I sensed people around me gearing up and being excited about it. And I was just like, I haven't watched a season of Love Island USA, let me just jump in on this one. And from the first episode, I don't know if it's this cast, or I don't know if it's the discourse, or probably some combination of both, but I'm hooked. It is peak trash reality television. And if that is your jam, then you probably should be watching this show. You should have FOMO.

• 4:41Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, yeah, it's unlike anything I've ever seen. And I'm sure we'll get into- Some of the reasons why this season in particular has been very, very messy. For me, at least, the sheer amount of episodes was what originally turned me off. Because I did try to watch the first season of Love Island USA back in 2019. And I tapped out because I was like, I can't keep up with this. But, oh, man, as I've been watching this for this, I have been hooked. I will admit it. Parker, I am so curious because I know you have a lot of thoughts on reality TV and reality dating shows. You've talked about it on Code Switch and elsewhere. So what is it about this season and just Love Island in general that you are just really, really into?

• 5:23Speaker 05

  I mean, it quenches a thirst for messiness that I'm not going to get anywhere else. Like, not since, like, F Boy Island have I truly felt like being satiated in my thirst for mess. I started watching with season six, like a lot of people, and did an episode for Code Switch about the first Asian bachelorette that was happening in 2024, and how people of color seem to have, like, poor time on these shows. And it felt like season six of Love Island was kind of like a solution for that. And then I'm coming into season seven, like, hmm, maybe not.

• 6:02Speaker 05

  It is a very diverse cast. This is, like, spoiler alert, a huge crop of white people got sent home, like, last week.

• 6:10Aisha Harris?

  Yes.

• 6:12Speaker 05

  So like, from a diverse standpoint, it fills an appetite. But like, the way that cultural relations are handled on there, done poorly. So you're just, you're like, watching, it's like, I don't know, you're like, it's like you're having a magnifying glass on a bunch of ants in Fiji is what feels like what's happening right now.

• 6:29Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, yeah, that's a great, great descriptor. I was actually quite shocked at how many black women there are on the show. Because as I've said, I've watched a lot of reality dating. And usually there's one or two, and then you might have like an ethnically ambiguous person on there. But like, two dark-skinned women from the beginning and who, as of this recording, are still both there is kind of shocking. Wild, unheard of. Shocking to me. Yeah, yeah, so. Definitely feels like a different type of show. But Shamira, please tell us, what are you taking from this season so far?

• 7:01Speaker 04

  One thing that I really get away from the franchise in general is just how different iterations of the franchise really reflect the social realities of each locale, right? Like, when I first got into UK, I was so enamored by how much of it was consumed in the idea of self-concept, right? Like, how you want to present yourself, how British-coded kind of levels of hierarchy make it very clear when someone is trying to be posh, but is actually a roadman, or actually from Essex, or, you know, all these things that aren't explicitly clear to me as a non-Brit. I found it fascinating to, like, actually watch tease out on a trashy reality show. You know, I'm more Bachelor in Paradise, not Bachelor: Traditional Recipe. It's perfect for me, right?

• 7:42Speaker 04

  Coming to the US, I think that racial switch that we've all been alluding to becomes much more explicit, right? And all of the years of Love Island, they've always been a multicultural, you know, cast. But there has been an increasing kind of perception that if you're a black cast member on Love Island: Original Recipe, you have no shot. It's basically a humiliation ritual for you. They'll just throw up people who pretend to be interested in you, but there's no bombshell that's actually looking for you, right? You are always a consolation prize. In the US, that's very much different, right? Like, it still sticks to, like, the precepts of racial hierarchy and romance fantasy. But we're allowed to look at black women as desirable on the show, right?

• 8:24Speaker 04

  And I think season six led to an explosion in that respect because we got to see a black love story, and people were hoping to see that again this season. And I think results have been mixed at best.

• 8:38Aisha Harris?

  Okay, well, let's talk about that.

• 8:40Speaker 04

  I would just like to note that I did not down my Black Kings.

• 8:46Speaker 04

  It was not me.

• 8:48Aisha Harris?

  Oh my goodness. Yeah, I mean, we won't go through every single couple, but I feel like two of the biggest couples that have caused the most drama have been Shelley and Ace. And then there's the love triangle. You have, originally it was Taylor and Alandria, and now you have Taylor and Clark.

• 9:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:04Aisha Harris?

  And these are all black people who have, some of them have been at times linked up with other people. But it's just so interesting to me because, oh man, Ace is a menace. Yes.

• 9:16Speaker 04

  He's 22. I gotta remember, he's 22.

• 9:18Aisha Harris?

  Get him out of here. Get him out of here, Parker. Yeah, I, okay, fine, he's 22, but. It's so interesting to me to watch Ace and the way he's moved throughout this entire season. He's like the pretty boy. He's the one that, in the very early parts of the season, all the women seem to be drawn to him. And I found it interesting because like, he is, as they've called him, a short king. Although he's not that short. I think he's like, he says he's 5'10". That's a lie. That's a lie.

• 9:45Speaker 04

  I don't mean he is 5'10".

• 9:47Aisha Harris?

  Cat.

• 9:47Speaker 04

  As journalists, we have an ethical responsibility.

• 9:50Aisha Harris?

  Thank you.

• 9:52Speaker 04

  To hear reasonable assumptions of the truth, Aisha.

• 9:55Aisha Harris?

  Thank you. Thank you. I said, he says.

• 9:57Speaker 04

  I don't think he's even 5'10" with Tim Zoff.

• 10:00Aisha Harris?

  No. Absolutely not. He is the type of guy who, I look at him and I'm like, oh, you are, you are trouble. You have your name tattooed in large letters on the back of your body. And on top of that, his whole thing with Huda, Huda, Kuda, Shuda, and Jeremiah. And this is what I found really fascinating, and what I always find really fascinating about these reality shows, is the way, there's the racial component, but then there's also just like this, if it's a straight show, or a show where the, the couples are ostensibly going to be hetero pairings, is that like, there's all this masculine, feminine, old school way of looking at things. Yes. And the way Ace was so upset with Jeremiah for linking up with Huda so quickly,

• 10:44Aisha Harris?

  and was trying to do this whole bro code thing. Like, it was very, very strange. I was like, first you're saying Jeremiah did it too quickly, but like, at some point, you're supposed to link up with people. What do we think of that whole dynamic? I need to hear. How people perceived that because I thought it was just out of control.

• 11:01Speaker 05

  I mean, it's also why there's been like a dissatisfaction with this season is because there's been such a delay in like real established couples because there was this kind of jealousy and manipulation frankly of like getting rid of the competition. No one ever talks about this $100,000 at the end. Like the rule is one person in the couple gets the money and can decide whether to keep it all to themselves or split it in half. So essentially you have a bunch of like half naked people performing the Stanford prison experiment on each other for after taxes, hopefully 30K.

• 11:37Aisha Harris?

  Yeah.

• 11:38Speaker 05

  So it doesn't make sense. But yeah, like Ace needed to like focus on his own home and not like worry about what Jeremiah's beautiful self was doing.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  I think that that was an example of poor production. We know that a lot of these shows are highly produced. We know that the producers are involved, or at least we can surmise that from any of our past interactions with reality television, even if we do not have that on a factual basis. And to me, letting Jeremiah leave, when you had something like this brewing between Ace and Jeremiah, was a mistake in production for me. And you also tilted the whole slant of the show to be towards doing things the right way, when Love Island in the season that I've seen before is about doing things the wrong way. It's about doing things.

• 12:23Aisha Harris?

  It's about chaos.

• 12:23Speaker 03

  Yes, it's about that. And so for him to even introduce the term love bombing, which is being inaccurately depicted in this show, which I think is a very serious accusation, and the ways in which he's speaking to people, calling himself a leader, calling out his height, going at people, saying that he did it right, all of that, and it feels completely unchecked is wild. What is the opposition to Ace? That's what you should have put in the house or left the house, in my opinion.

• 12:48Speaker 04

  My thought about this is I think it connects to two things. One is the gamification of reality TV that Ace has kind of come out of, right? By that, I mean that Ace is someone as a personality who was clearly going to end up on reality TV one way or the other. This is a man who prior to this was going viral on TikTok for teaching Pakistani people dances, right? Like you can look it up, it's viral everywhere. Right, yes. Literally giving instructions on how to do like common TikTok trends, right? I'm unclear if that's what he means by he has a dance company, by the way. Neither here nor there.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  If you think about how he approaches the game, though, it's very much reminiscent of like Real World Road Rules Challenge, it's very reminiscent of Big Brother logic, very reminiscent of even Survivor, right? I have to establish fealty to me, I have to start to create camps. We all vote in coalitions. These are common tactics in gamesmanship. The thing about Love Island, though, is that it's supposed to sell a veneer of a fantasy. Now, do we know that we're in late-stage capitalism, reality TV, and that most people are trying to get their followings for brand deals? And most of these couples don't actually succeed, to the point that the few very successful ones become huge icons? Yes, right?

• 14:00Speaker 04

  That said, I think that in that kind of nuancing of how to work my self-concept into this image, they've forgotten to abandon that. You're supposed to pretend to actually want to get to know people, right? You're supposed to pretend to actually like people. Part of me also wonders, by the way, if it's in part a generational thing, right? I hate to do a lot of, I look at young people online and therefore it's representative of a whole generation. But there is something to the fact that there seems to be a repudiation of the idea of hookup culture, right? And I think that kind of manifests in like how a show like Love Island, which essentially thrives off of hookup culture, like can be realized, right? If there's arguments over whether it's irresponsible to be casual with dating and going around and searching,

• 14:45Speaker 04

  and whether or not that's responsible or healthy, and it's the same people who are voting, that level of self-awareness or self-consciousness that comes into those choices you make and how casual or cavalier you may have been about it, say, five years ago versus now for the same voting audience, is going to shift a little bit as well.

• 15:01Speaker 05

  I did see, like, there was like a tweet, there's like a large portion of the people on this island right now were COVID teens in lockdown. Yes. And now they're on the island.

• 15:11Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  That explains a lot.

• 15:14Speaker 05

  It does explain a lot. Like, there are certain views of women that feel regressive that comparatively to last year, where the women were like, they were the ones that elevated the show. You had Lea, Serena, and Janaye, this coalition of women who kind of elevated the show. And like, right now, there's like, there's a shining light, who is like Amaya, who is this, you know, sweet Dominican nurse. And you can see, like, once it was revealed that she was beloved by audiences, men started to clamor towards her, like, she was the prize.

• 15:50Aisha Harris?

  Yeah.

• 15:50Speaker 05

  Which is icky, because you could see, like, the money rolling in their brains. I was like, oh, no.

• 15:56Aisha Harris?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, that is something, another point I wanted to get to, which is this idea of, like, America becoming a character in this entire, this entire season. Because once that aspect of it is introduced to the show, it becomes more than just, okay, trying to attach yourself and maybe presumably trying to find love, but also trying to endear yourself to the American public who is voting. And I found it so fascinating, the way that, that especially kind of broke up the Jeremiah Huda situation, and the fact that, like, everyone in the show started saying, well, don't you realize, like, this is the sign that America sees something you don't about your relationship? And I'm just like, the

• 16:39Aisha Harris?

  peer pressure, and the level of, like, just having a devil on your shoulder and an angel on the other, but like, it's mostly just the devil who's talking to you. And how quickly people can change, all of a sudden, switch up. Yeah. And, again, this is like, both the contestants and America, "America" in air quotes. But, like, it's just fascinating to me how the scales can shift and tilt so quickly, and how the producers kind of respond to that, in a way. I find it very fascinating, the way the outside world doesn't really trickle into the show in any, like, obvious ways other than people getting kicked off. Specifically about the way they're not really addressing political issues. I'm thinking about how Ciara, who we've already mentioned, left the

• 17:23Aisha Harris?

  show due to a quote-unquote "personal" situation, which the producers have not said straight out, this is why, but apparently, we found out that there were Instagram posts. From on social media where she had used a racial slur. The same thing happens with Ulyssa, who also left the villa and like after the first or second episode.

• 17:43Speaker 05

  Fascinating, isn't it?

• 17:44Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, I mean, clips of her on a podcast, no less, like a public thing of Ulyssa using the N word. And so she left. So the way this works is the narrator, Ian Sterling, kind of comes in and he just says, Ciara left for a personal situation. Just skates by it. And how does that affect your viewing of the show when we know all the politics are happening and the audience is responding to these politics and pulling out these things from social media? And clearly it's affecting the show, but the show refuses to address it.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  I feel like the impact of the world and outside of the house, outside of the villa, on the villa, I think that's the best of reality television, is to acknowledge that there is a world happening out there and it's affecting the world here. And when it comes to them making mistakes and getting kicked off, I don't know if they're handling it great, if it's something that's going to impact Love Island, like i.e. Nick is now single and we have to deal with that. But obviously he's sad, obviously there was probably a tearful departure and you put none of that into the show.

• 18:47Speaker 05

  Because Alangia is right there.

• 18:49Speaker 03

  So you're a Nicolandria stan?

• 18:51Speaker 05

  Not the Nicolandria conspiracies already.

• 18:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, we had to have one stan out of the four.

• 18:58Speaker 05

  No, I will say, like, the social media aspect of the show that creates that level of dramatic irony where the audience is more informed than the participants, I find interesting. But what happens is like, my TikTok for you page is giving me like all of this like Nicolandria, which is for Nick and Alangia, who are two separate cast members who were in separate couples and had really nothing to do with each other, but. Certain factions of of American viewing audience were like, we want them together.

• 19:28Aisha Harris?

  Well, don't forget that Nick kissed Alondria.

• 19:31Speaker 05

  In the blindfold test.

• 19:32Aisha Harris?

  In the blindfold, early on.

• 19:34Speaker 05

  I'm aware.

• 19:35Aisha Harris?

  He was clearly attracted to her.

• 19:36Speaker 05

  Yes, but like, we also have like this side story that like, audiences can create for themselves, which, healthy or not, who's to say? It's like when you watch baseball and you're not really there for like, the play by play. You're there for like, the overarching narrative that is happening along the way. And so that, I find interesting.

• 19:57Speaker 04

  I do find that the insertion of America as kind of the proxy for the fourth wall is compelling and also just reflective of our current time, right? Now, you have streamers who say stuff like, chat, how do you feel about this? And they're getting real life feedback. This is accelerated version of that, right? It's even accelerated version of the existing model with like, something like reality TV. As most of us are housewives, connoisseurs, you know a season when you watch someone who thinks they're going to be the champion of the season and don't realize until the reunion or until it's playing in full, that the audience is just actually not receptive to the plot that they marked out for themselves, right? And to watch people's brains break in real time while a little masochistic, I would argue, is genuinely engaging.

• 20:39Speaker 04

  Like, watching Ace slowly have to make his way down to the end because he was so convinced he was the most liked, viewed as the most genuine, only to find out he's actually near or at the bottom every single time, is what I think is the magic that makes reality TV. Like, how do you see yourself? How do we see you? What is the gap in between all of that? I think the problem comes where audiences get a little bit too self-aware as well, right? So like, as the contestants are getting self-aware, so are we. So people are looking for authenticity and a highly curated experience. That's how someone like Amaya becomes popular.

• 21:15Speaker 05

  It allows for like, the the audience to feel like they have like, participated in like, their enrichment.

• 21:22Aisha Harris?

  Yeah.

• 21:23Speaker 05

  Which is double edged sword though, because then they feel overly invested. And that's when you have like, racist threats to like, Shelly and Alondria that they don't know about because they're in a villa.

• 21:33Aisha Harris?

  Well, that was another thing I wanted to bring up, which was the way that this show handles the harassment from the outside, the social media world, that is being delivered upon the cast members. And like, in the middle of one episode, they cut to a commercial or they end it, and there's a whole silent worded message. It's like, Love Island, we love our fans, but also we don't love you harassing. So they're very explicit. They're like acknowledging the outside world in that way. But then when a cast member leaves because they may or may not have said something racist, or they leave maybe because they said something racist, they don't address that. And I think it's both not surprising because reality TV rarely ever, you always have to go to like the subtext or like you for that kind of stuff.

• 22:14Aisha Harris?

  The racism never actually fully appears in the way that I think, you know, we'd like them to show themselves or like gets addressed in the way that we'd like them to show themselves. It's very rarely like rural season one in New York. Like we rarely have those kind of conversations.

• 22:29Speaker 05

  Or in the street having like a full blown come to blow, let's talk about it.

• 22:34Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, that's not what's happening. And I, I think the closest the show has come to sort of acknowledging something along that lines is with Amaya and the way that Ace got really upset at her for calling him babe, even though we all know she calls every single person babe.

• 22:47Speaker 05

  Right.

• 22:48Speaker 06

  I usually make up a nickname for them, like my own personal nickname. Or babe.

• 22:57Speaker 07

  Even, even babe is like a lot for me too. And I know she like to say that a lot.

• 23:01Speaker 06

  Oh my God. So you want me to stop calling you babe? Damn.

• 23:05Aisha Harris?

  If she calls you babe, that probably doesn't mean anything. But he was like, I'm putting up my boundaries. But then Brian shows up as one of the bombshells later on. It gets brought up again and Brian's like, this is a cultural difference. Like this is the way like Dominican people speak. And so you need to give her grace. And I thought that was like the closest it came to sort of acknowledging these cultural differences in a very explicit way. And I thought Brian handled it well. And I was also very.

• 23:31Speaker 05

  That's how he got into a new couple with Amaya.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  But isn't Brian older than like, I imagine he's not 22. Cause I think part of, somebody mentioned that Ace is 22 years old. And when you put it through that lens, everything that he's saying, cause I'm thinking about what I said at 22, that 22, I thought I knew it. I was a senior in college. Like I'm like, I know everything. I'm smarter than the people that are doing the thing out there. There's only a little bit more I need to learn and I'm going to be on top of the world. If you would have given me a million followers on Instagram and a national platform, I might be behaving the same way that he is.

• 24:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think for better or worse, it's a reflection of how people engage on the internet today. I find the conversations that do touch on what we're talking about to exist just coded, right? Like you mentioned about how Alondra backed off. There was also a separate incident where, you know, Huda like admits that she crashed out. And then, you know, Alondra is like, well, I would never do that, right? And the subtext there is that she's not allowed to do that, right? You know, or even when like Shelley and Alondra are in like circular conversations around girls, girls. It really sounds asinine because one, you're on reality television. But what they're really trying to say is that there's a black girl called on how to represent each other on television that they have a social contract on that the other women don't understand, right? And are trying to meet and not and not equivalating to, right?

• 24:50Speaker 04

  Or making it equivalents on. I think you see that a lot, right?

• 24:54Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, yeah, I think that's such a good point because I did also notice the way all of the black women move in this season, even when, you know, Alondra and Clark, who are in the middle of this triangle with Taylor, who I don't understand the attraction to him, but whatever, that is my thing.

• 25:10Speaker 04

  There's one TikTok of him strolling as an alpha that people have clung on to for.

• 25:15Aisha Harris?

  Oh, of course he was an alpha. Of course he was an alpha.

• 25:19Speaker 03

  That's right. I thought Sigma.

• 25:21Aisha Harris?

  I was actually thinking Sigma too, but yeah. But like even the way that Clark and Alondra really handle themselves is that like on a different show, they might be going at it all the time and there could be catfights and whatever. And instead they're just like, they acknowledge each other, but I think they're very aware that they do not want. Well, one, they're like, yes, we're competing for this man's affections, but we don't want that to like be the main thing. And then also I think they are aware of what it would look like if two black women start going at each other. Like they are very respectful anytime they acknowledge each other.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  Especially two black women with different shades. That also comes into conversation.

• 25:59Aisha Harris?

  Exactly.

• 26:00Speaker 03

  I just appreciate that we can watch a show with this many black people that I can root against some of the black people.

• 26:05Aisha Harris?

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:06Speaker 03

  Because typically, like there's one black person, I'd be like, even if they're a jerk, I'm like, I'm rooting for the black person because there's only one. I don't know, it's like, whereas now I'm like, oh, I can openly and actively hate both Ace and Taylor because there's plenty of other black folks to root for.

• 26:22Speaker 04

  It's like, I want Taylor out of my villa. Jeremiah got a book club going on, you know.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  Let's go.

• 26:28Speaker 04

  I have to support the brother who's out here reading.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  Jeremiah.

• 26:32Speaker 04

  I'm shamelessly rooting for Brian and Amaya for no other reason other than the Bronx Catholic Parade is coming up. And if they get to return to that reception in New York, baby, I would be up there.

• 26:44Speaker 03

  Hudda and Chris all day, baby. Hudda and Chris. What?

• 26:47Aisha Harris?

  Hudda and Chris.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, sorry.

• 26:49Aisha Harris?

  Interesting.

• 26:49Speaker 03

  I don't like anyone else.

• 26:50Speaker 05

  Hudda ain't getting my $100,000. She ain't getting my.

• 26:54Speaker 03

  Let her have it.

• 26:55Aisha Harris?

  Parker, who are you rooting for, if anyone?

• 26:57Speaker 05

  I mean, I'm rooting for Brian and Amaya.

• 27:00Aisha Harris?

  Well, we want to know what you think about Love Island, who you're rooting for, who your sad left. Find us at facebook.com/pchh. That brings us to the end of our show. BA Parker, Ronald Young Jr., Shamira Ibrahim. Where are my pancakes, y'all? Where are they? It's OK.

• 27:17Speaker 04

  I got them for you to borrow.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  You are dumped from the island.

• 27:23Aisha Harris?

  Oh, thank you for being here, even without the pancakes. Thank you. Also, a sharp left turn here. This Sunday in our podcast feed, we're going to have another monthly bonus episode for our Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus supporters. Instead of being on the island of love, Stephen and I are going to be talking about the movies that landed at the bottom of our Pixar poll, which included a film that received zero votes. Zero, zilch, nada. No one voted for it. Oh, poor movie. We have thoughts on thoughts on thoughts about that. And you can sign up for Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus at plus.npr.org/happy. And we'll also have a link to that in our episode description. This episode was produced by Mike Katsev and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Brady.

• 28:08Aisha Harris?

  Engineering was performed by Neil Rouch, and Hello, Coming provides our theme music. Thanks so much for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Aisha Harris, and we'll see you all next time.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.