A hundred women gathered at the San Francisco Athletic Club in Pacific Heights Friday night, to the surprise of several male patrons there to watch the Giants take on the Dodgers. It was an unusual crowd for a neighborhood sports bar, and it paired with a surprising form of featured entertainment: the domestic version of the long-adored British reality show “Love Island.”
“They all came here to watch this?” exclaimed one of many Giants fans who entered the bar only to leave immediately. “Are you kidding me?”
As the penultimate episode got underway at 6 p.m., the bar was at capacity, with waiters and bartenders scrambling to make sure everyone was properly intoxicated. Eyes glued to the big screens depicting five girls and five guys making out in a dimly lit room, with microphones around their necks.
It was “good garbage,” as some called it — a genre of media with no substance or real meaning.
“I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but the world is chaotic right now,” said Allie DaVila, a 36-year-old healthcare worker who joined the watch party with friends. “This is trash TV to distract yourself and to disassociate.”
It helps that the show’s premise is, as Alia Gonzalez, a 30-year-old grocery worker, put it, “really not that deep.” Like a dozen other shows of its kind that have taken streaming platforms by storm over the last decade, “Love Island” finds a cult following in the desire for escape.
Narrating the show is a Scottish comedian who offers sassy commentary as the contestants navigate life in a villa on a Fijian island. They’ve been there for two months, isolated from the outside world, including all the strong — too strong, maybe? — opinions held by strangers online.
At the start of one episode this season, the show issued a cyberbullying disclaimer to fans. But it doesn’t shy away from stirring gossip and hot takes among its many fans, especially considering viewers can vote contestants off.
“Some people take it too seriously,” Gonzalez said. “They’re just young kids.”
In this particular episode, each contestant was surprised by family members, with cliche music in the background. The young men and women blushed as they talked about their newfound love, crying at the realization that the whole world has been following their self-actualization with joy. As oohs and ahhs filled the bar, soft smirks drifted across the faces of attendees.
Watch parties like these have taken over bars in other major cities like New York and Los Angeles, with one reporting a five-fold increase in sales during viewing parties. Unlike Netflix series’ that are released all at once or HBO shows that release an episode every Sunday, “Love Island” features multiple episodes a week, for a total of nearly 40 a season.
In SF, the viewing parties were inspired by a few Redditors who, deep into the show’s seventh season, decided they were tired of watching it alone and wanted to gossip about it with other people. So the day after the NBA Finals, June 23, the Athletic Club started hosting viewing parties, which will wrap up with the season finale Sunday night.
By that point, a new San Francisco tradition will have been born.
“If you have no idea what’s going on right now, you’re living under a rock,” said one of the Athletic Club’s bartenders who touted the predictable success of the business’s new endeavor.
It turns out, if you trap enough hot people in a luxurious place with impeccable weather, enough normal-looking people will trap themselves in a bar to watch it together. The premise of the show is so absurd that the viewers don’t even see it as a cathartic allegory for dating in a big city, but rather as a chance to see aliens compete for $100,000.
“They’re so beautiful,” said DaVila, “I don’t even see it as a dating thing.”