With the latest season of Peacock’s Love Island crowned the most-watched streaming original series of 2025 in Luminate’s annual Film & TV Year-End Report, it’s clear that NBCUniversal has an asset on which to build.
And in the latest episode of the Luminate podcast In the Lab, Dave Kaplan, NBCU’s head of content analytics for entertainment, sports and Peacock, explained how the hit unscripted series is being innovatively utilized as the streaming-era version of what’s known in primetime jargon as a “lead-in.”
The term used to be reserved for a series programmed in a particular time slot in advance of another series that would hope to hold on to its audience. But the traditional lead-in is being reinvented.
Rather than letting the show’s momentum exist in isolation, NBCU sought to deploy Love Island strategically across its portfolio. The company identified Bravo’s Next Gen NYC — a docuseries following young New Yorkers navigating career, friendships and family — as an ideal beneficiary of Love Island’s youthful, socially engaged audience.
In place of a linear time-slot lead-in, Peacock used a combination of platform merchandising, editorial curation and, most notably, autoplay. Episodes of Next Gen NYC were sequenced immediately after Love Island, minimizing friction and encouraging sampling.
The results were striking: Nearly three-quarters of Next Gen NYC’s Peacock audience had also streamed Love Island, and episode-to-episode retention remained within single-digit declines — a rarity for new launches.
The strategy paid off beyond the streamer as well. Next Gen NYC became the most-watched series premiere in Bravo’s history and the network’s biggest series overall on Peacock. Audience research further revealed improved perception of the Bravo brand among younger viewers and increased intent to explore more of its programming.
Kaplan emphasized that success at Peacock is now defined less by raw subscriber acquisition and more by engagement, cross-pollination and habitual use. Shows such as Love Island are valuable not merely because they attract viewers but because they move them — across genres, brands and platforms.
As Love Island prepares to roll out its eighth season this summer, NBCU is already planning how to again deploy it as a streaming-era lead-in, unbound by time slots but powered by data, curation and intentional audience design.
