Love Island Bosses Claim This Season Is, In Fact, Diverse After Criticism From Fans

Many Love Island fans have pointed out that the show failed to promote diversity among the islanders after they promised they would earlier in the year.

The first twelve new cast members were revealed with most of the women and men having essentially the body type, meaning slim for girls and muscley for men.

Despite the lack of diversity that many fans have hit out about on social media, show bosses say that they feel ‘lots of different types of people are represented.’ hmm.

“What we’ve tried to do again is have a huge range of personalities and people, hoping there’s someone in there for everyone,” they told Glamour.

The producers add that they are focusing ‘fun and aspirational’ people who viewers will want to watch fall in love.

Now I don’t know about you but I love to see all types of people fall in love…

“It’s always been key that there’s aspirational people in there, but there’s also real people in there,” said Angela Jain, Manager for ITV Studios.

It seems that the bosses focus was more on job diversity rather than any other type though.

Some of the 2019 Islanders

“We represent a cross-section of our viewers; not everyone’s got a big fabulous job and some people have got completely normal jobs. We wouldn’t want to have one at the expense of the other,” she added.

Richard Cowles, Creative Director of Entertainment added to this saying: “I think we try to be as representative and diverse as possible,”

“First and foremost, it’s an entertainment show and it’s about people wanting to watch people we’ve got on screen and then reacting and falling in love with one another. Where else can you watch people, who arrive as strangers, who fall in love over eight weeks.  That’s an amazing thing to watch in real time…”

Yes, we want to be as representative as possible but we also we want them to be attracted to one another,” he said.

I think it’s important to note that you can have people of all shapes and sizes be attracted to one another, because there is not one type of good-looking.

Although they mention the word ‘aspiration’ more than once, Richard adds that they are not saying anyone should look like these reality stars. Once again – Hhm.

“Also, we’re not saying that everyone that’s in there is how you’re supposed to look. We’re saying here’s a group of people that we want to watch for eight weeks, and we want to watch them fall in love. That’s not at the front of our mind, but we do want to be as diverse as possible.”

Love Island starts on June 3rd.

Get to know all the contestants here, and check out our Craic Rating^TM here.

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