Keeping the spark in a relationship over the long haul can be challenging in the romance department. Appropriately enough, the same holds true for streaming’s top long-running unscripted dating-themed series.
Premiering earlier this month, the latest season of Love Island USA is hitting all-time highs in viewership on Peacock, according to Luminate Streaming Viewership (M). Season 7 drew the two biggest weeks of streaming viewership for Love Island USA since the series moved to Peacock from CBS in 2022, notching more than 1.1 billion minutes streamed for the week of June 6-12 and more than 1.6 billion the week of June 13-19.
Notably, this puts the Island, in weekly viewership terms, almost within spitting distance of Netflix’s Love Is Blind, which has reigned as the dominant streaming reality series for much of its eight-season run.
The dating show-slash-social experiment’s sixth season, released last year, was the most-watched unscripted TV season on Netflix in the U.S. for 2024 (and the No. 6 most-watched original season overall), with nearly 7 billion minutes streamed that year. This was driven by massive weekly viewership, with S6 racking up close to 1.8 billion minutes in a single week and more than 1.5 billion the following week.
Those figures represent the series peak, however. Two editions of Love Is Blind have followed since then — S7 rolled out in October 2024, S8 in February 2025 — with each falling from the previous season’s highs.
Season 8’s weekly viewership, in fact, topped out at just over a billion minutes, peaking at a lower figure than anything S6 earned in its first four full weeks of release.
This suggests that Love Island USA is usurping Love Is Blind as streaming consumers’ unscripted series of choice, at least as far as SVOD originals go — an achievement all the more impressive considering Peacock’s U.S. subscriber base is less than half that of Netflix’s.
That’s not entirely surprising, as Netflix has flooded the market with Love Is Blind since the series’ 2020 debut, not only releasing multiple seasons per year but launching spinoffs from Brazil, Japan, Sweden, the U.K., Germany, Argentina, Mexico and the UAE, with Italian and French versions still to come.
Netflix may now be facing a truth broadcast networks have known at least since the days of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: It is very possible, and in fact very easy, to overload the public on even the biggest unscripted hit. With Love Island now ascendant, perhaps Peacock, which has already greenlit multiple spinoffs, should take note of this lesson as well.
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