Love Island's dark side: why three deaths have haunted the show

Amazon's new two-part documentary hits Prime Video this week, timed perfectly with Love Island's latest finale. It's asking the question nobody really wants to answer: is there something genuinely toxic about the show itself?

The numbers tell part of the story. Three people linked to the programme are dead by suicide — Mike Thalassitis and Sophie Gradon were contestants, while Caroline Flack fronted the thing for five seasons. That's not a coincidence people can ignore, no matter how much producers might want to. And it's probably why viewing figures have dropped to 600,000 for this year's launch, down from the cultural juggernaut it was back in 2017.

What makes the documentary interesting isn't just the deaths themselves. It's the people still alive who walked out of that Mallorcan villa feeling broken. Luis Morrison, who appeared in 2015, describes the experience as "disgusting" and "embarrassing" to revisit. Malin Andersson, another 2016 contestant, calls it toxic and superficial — and she's got stories about producers actively meddling with contestants' heads during filming.

But here's where things get complicated. The documentary seems to want to pin everything on Love Island as if the show exists in isolation. It doesn't. These were real people with real lives before they stepped into that villa, and real struggles after they left. Flack faced relentless tabloid harassment. Thalassitis battled demons that had nothing to do with reality TV. Gradon's death involved layers the show can't be held solely responsible for.

That's not defending Love Island — the pressure cooker environment, the constant filming, the manufactured drama, all of it takes a toll. And the producers absolutely knew what they were doing when they wound people up for better footage. Andersson's claim about them "fucking with people who can feel deep things" rings true.

Yet the documentary wants to treat this like a simple horror story where Love Island is the villain. Reality's messier. The show's part of a bigger picture that includes tabloid culture, social media pile-ons, and the mental health crisis that nobody was really equipped to handle in 2015 or 2016. Maybe that's what the documentary should've tackled instead.