Nine’s Love Island Australia will return for season two on October 7
Nine’s local version of Love Island will return to Australian screens at 8.45pm on October 7 for its second season. This year the program will air on Nine’s main channel, after running on 9Go and 9Now in 2018.
Sophie Monk will return as host, and it’s been teased that other familiar faces may return, including former Married At First Sight contestants.
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Love Island Australia premiered to 155,000 metro viewers in 2018 on Go, before being encored to 246,000 on the main channel shortly after. Nine promoted the program as being a success story for cross-platform viewing, drawing 511,000 viewers according to OzTam 28 day figures, with a focus on the youngest key advertising demographic (16-39s).
“Love Island has redefined the traditional view of what television in Australia is,” said Hamish Turner, Nine’s program director during the first season.
“The show broke all the rules, with an audience first approach, which saw the viewing on 9Now smash records but most importantly Love Island has provided a blueprint for what the future of television looks like.”
Love Island first launched in the UK in 2015, based on a celebrity series of the same name from 2005, and has since been franchised into Australia, Germany, Sweden and the US. The format has faced controversy after the suicide deaths of two contestants in the UK led to a review from the production as to what after-care it was providing.
The show sees a collection of young single people gathered in a house in a tropical location – season one was shot in Spain while season two will be filmed in Fiji – before they couple off in a bid to find love and/or win a share in a cash prize. New singles are brought in throughout the show and those not in couples leave in eliminations as the season progresses.
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Nine’s Adrian Swift said the show was an attempt to drive younger viewers to Nine.
“The one fundamental thing you have to say about Love Island is it’s actually brought kids back to TV. They came back in a number of ways. They came back with linear broadcast, they mostly came back through catch up, they came back on social,” Swift told Mumbrella.
The show was also a massive success for Nine on Youtube, although group content strategy director Lizzie Young said the network has issues with monetisation from the platform.
Turner spoke with Mumbrella ahead of the second season’s commission and said the network had significant learnings from the first season which it would be pouring into the second.
Monk said of the second season: “I’m ridiculously excited to meet a whole new group of Islanders. The cast is on another level this year. I’m hanging to watch my favourite show with you all and see gorgeous people falling in love. My advice to Islanders? Just be yourself, but from what I’ve heard… be prepared for some serious twists and turns!”
