Editor’s Note: This article is a review and contains subjective opinions, thoughts and critiques.

Netflix is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a measured purveyor of moral content. Its assembly line churns out enough media that keeping up with every original as it came out would consume all of a person’s waking hours, and even constantly watching would merely keep their head above the rising tide of slop. Most egregious in the streamer’s suite of ethically questionable content are true crime dramas and documentaries, which replay and dramatize murders without the consent of the victims’ families. 

Of course, these are some of Netflix’s most successful shows — second only to the great unscripted cash cow of American culture: reality television. Year-round, Netflix’s Top 10 page, is dominated by thumbnails depicting ambiguous tropical destinations, L.A. almost-models and mildly familiar silver-haired hosts. Both true crime and reality satisfy our base instincts as viewers —  comforting us in their depictions of the awfulness of others and reminding us that, however terrible we are, the world’s evils put our own to shame. 

Seeking to consecrate it’s dominance of the morbid-curiosity market, Netflix has produced a champion. “Temptation Island”’s (2025) rise to the top of our algorithmic cultural conscience is the canary in our hearts’ coal mines, signaling that our fascination with depravity may have passed the point of no return. 

The show’s conceit is genius: four couples, already on foundations fraught with insecurity and cheating, are split along gender lines and left to swim in separate moats of beautiful sharks. Their tightrope path to TV semi stardom only lies in induced infidelity. Every day, they’re shown videos of their partners’ worst actions; sometimes, somehow more cruelly, they watch videos of the effects of their own actions on their partners.

There is no contest, no prize money, no marriage promised to the victor. There is no victor. Within three days, three of the four men have cheated. 

In this first season, the evils perpetrated between people on the show flow in one gendered direction. Worst is Brion, whose fethishistic fixation on threesomes leads him to a menage in his bathroom as his unaware girlfriend, Shanté, cries in her bed like a child during a thunderstorm, sick with the fear that he’s doing half of what he’s actually doing. 

The camera presses an unyielding mirror to the male contestants: Brion’s desperate justifications — to himself more than anyone else — range from a characterization of the act as impersonal because of the number of participants to a sickening description of his intimacy with Shanté, delivered while creeping towards a visually uncomfortable Amiah, peppered with repeated characterizations of Shanté as a “good woman.” This breathless self-justification, is the defining male behavior of the series, reflected in Tyler’s fixation on Tayler’s ascribing him “bitch tendencies” and Grant’s genuinely incoherent ramblings, between instances of infidelity, on whether Ashley will “finally move past” his active (and future) transgressions. 

While the men’s villa is a miasma of confusion, illogicality and guilt, the other house is significantly more depressing. The most common facial expression there is the resigned stare of a woman who’s just watched a video of her significant other sleeping with another, and now must endure the halfhearted flirtatious advances of a man who watched them weep. There are no phones, no books, no television; nothing exists except for their three compatriots in suffering, their suitors-turned-confidants and a siren that blares when the men a mile away enter a tent designated for lovemaking. The only two actions available to the women on the show are to lay in their bed weeping and to suffer through dates, some of which appear to have had $30 budgets. During one particularly brutal bonfire scene (imagine watching a video, in front of millions, of your partner, captioned “rhythmic wet slapping” or “heavy panting”), I imagined that the women banded together and slashed their way out of the show, perhaps burning down the villa behind them. 

The chief villain of the program, then, is not the men — although they serve admirably as the face of uncomprehending wickedness. No, the show’s villain is the faceless system of its creation, which allegedly pays people between nothing and $2,500 weekly to have their heart ripped out or be portrayed as a heartless moron on television. 

I’ve attempted to divine a meaning or utility for “Temptation Island” beyond its car-crash rubbernecker’s appeal since I’ve watched it and have come up empty-handed. The show takes place in the real world, with real people, but the contrivances of its conditions are so totalitarian — all one can do is cheat or weep — that the only response to its inhumanity is to call it fiction. “They signed up for it” and “they want to be famous” are the two thin stilts held up as moral justifications for this torture-as-TV. The show, though, is so overwhelming that it cannot be comprehended until it is complete; that is, no couple could understand the depths of participation until the show has destroyed them.

We tell ourselves that we wouldn’t behave the way they do, or that they’re acting, or that we’d never go on reality TV. But reality television’s power over its “stars” is that it exploits the human ability to normalize even the most unreal situation, forcing participation in a tyrannical hyperreality because to accept the conditions of one’s own existence is standard practice. Focus on the eyes of a man as he internalizes the brutal ramifications of his thoughtlessness while attempting to justify himself to millions, or a woman whose only job, for two weeks, is to entertain a replacement for the man who just promised her he wouldn’t cheat, and tell me it’s not real.