On Monday evening at the San Francisco Athletic Club on Divisadero, the crowd around me erupted into a standing-o.
It wasn’t because Steph hit a buzzer-beater or the Giants secured a walk-off home run.
No, it was because Cierra and Nic made their relationship exclusive.
Playing on just about every screen inside the Athletic Club Monday was Love Island USA — the summer dating reality series exported from the UK that, in its seventh season, has become a bona fide cultural hit on this side of the Atlantic.
If the extent of your Love Island knowledge is that one SNL skit, here’s a quick rundown: Love Island traps a dozen or so young, hot singles in a villa in Fiji where they are surveilled, Big Brother-style, all day with nothing to do other than lay on outdoor chaise longues and pull each other for “chats.” People form love connections within days; the connections get upended when new bombshells enter the villa. Rinse and repeat. The show airs six days a week, and the near-instantaneous release schedule means that the show is produced in dialogue with the social media discourse it inspires. This is appointment TV for the generation raised on the endless scroll.
At the Athletic Club, where they host watch parties every Monday and Thursday, spicy “Mamacita margs” and six-buck glasses of “recoupling rosé” were flowing. The San Francisco Athletic Club has been packed full for all the watch parties held so far.
“We do have to be a sports bar, but this is our slow season,” explained Daniel Waters, the Athletic’s bar manager. (Waters added that these nights have had the highest ratio of women to men at the bar in recent memory.)
This isn’t the first Reality TV watch night the bar has hosted, Waters said; they’ve done Bachelorette parties before. But the number of fans that have shown up — and shown their enthusiasm — still surprises him. In all likelihood, the Athletic Club will maintain this level of attendance until the season ends, sometime in mid-July.
“I love that it's not sports that's on the big screen,” said San Francisco resident Lilla Laza.
She and her friend, Lauren Karell, had plenty to say about this season: “At this point, there should be one or two couples,” Laza said. “It's weird to me that after Casa [Amor, a mid-season twist designed to test existing couples’ bonds], there'd be nothing.” (This explains the immediate excitement around Nic and Cierra's coupling, the first official coupling of the season.)
Just about everyone in the crowd had something to say — about the Islanders, the couplings, the villains and heroes of the season.
“She doesn’t know her worth, unfortunately,” one woman behind me exclaimed about Olandria. “Girl, it's so sad to see,” someone at a table directly across from them yelled back.
Jazmine Santanya, a Redwood City resident who hosts the watch parties, said she wanted to tap in on the intense fandom Love Island inspires.
She called up a dozen or so bars in San Francisco and on the Peninsula when the show first aired, but with the season premiering around the height of the NBA Finals, finding a venue was a challenge. The Athletic Club finally agreed to host the watch party the day after the NBA Finals had ended.
“A lot of people were coming up and talking to me being like, Oh my god, thank you so much for putting this on,” she said of the inaugural watch party. “People are just so invested in the show.”
Because of its real-world interactivity — fans can occasionally vote islanders off the villa with an app — Love Island has inspired analysis and electioneering usually reserved for Oscar campaigns and presidential elections. The fervor for the show has curdled into enough real-life nastiness that the show has had to air an anti-bullying PSA. (Fortunately, the vibe of the evening was harmonious; the vitriol is reserved for TikTok.)
By the end of this watch party, the crowd had thinned out. At least a third of the attendees stuck around, discussing what went down and doing close-readings of the episode, which the bar looped back for replay. Santanya went up to my table, and we immediately launched into a debate about the merits of a new couple, Taylor and Clarke.
Will their love last? Tune in, probably tomorrow, to find out.
