From teen drama to Korean dating shows, today’s television packages romance as something to binge, market, and sell back to us.
Sometimes, all we want is to sit down, cuddle with a pillow, and press play on the next episode of their favorite series. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how streaming platforms have trapped us into loving our screens and the romance and drama they portray, instead of the messy reality of loving the person next to us. In today’s media landscape, love is no longer just a feeling but a product. Shows like The Summer I Turned Pretty, Better Late Than Single, and Love Island USA may seem wildly different, but each demonstrates how romance is packaged, marketed, and sold.
Jenny Han ’s The Summer I Turned Pretty began as a young adult book trilogy published in the late 2000s and was adapted into a Prime Video series in 2022, with every new season timed for a summer release. The story follows Isabel “Belly” Conklin as she spends summers at Cousins Beach, caught in a love triangle between brothers Conrad and Jeremiah while navigating the awkward but intoxicating shift from adolescence to adulthood. By the time the third and final season dropped this July, the show had cemented itself as one of the defining comfort watches of the season.
On the surface, it’s a teen romance: sunsets, heartbreak, and Taylor Swift ballads. But the show’s appeal goes deeper, tapping into multiple layers of nostalgia. For longtime fans of the novels, the adaptation commodifies memory itself. Amazon is selling not only a streaming series but the chance to revisit a beloved story in a new format. Some viewers compare scenes to the dog-eared pages they once read under their blankets. Some viewers simply watch to relive the feeling of being that teenager again. What was once private imagination is now communal, bingeable content.
The release strategy sharpens that effect. By releasing each season in the summer, Prime has turned the series into an annual ritual, one that feels less like coincidence and more like a marketing cycle. Fans may forget about Belly and her romantic indecision during the school year, but when summer rolls around, the show becomes a seasonal marker, pulling viewers back into the story exactly when they’re most susceptible to longing for beach days and first loves. In this way, The Summer I Turned Pretty commodifies not just romance, but the rhythm of time itself: selling the very idea of summer back to its audience.
While The Summer I Turned Pretty sells nostalgia, Love Island USA sells pure spectacle. Now in its seventh season, the show drops a group of singles into a luxury villa — this time in Fiji —and isolates them from the outside world. No phones, no internet, no distractions. Their lives shrink to bikinis, challenges, and strategic re-couplings under the constant gaze of cameras. The twist is that viewers play judge, jury, and executioner: voting on their favorite contestants, deciding eliminations, and ultimately crowning the winning couple.
On the surface, it’s fun, sexy, and easy to watch. It’s the kind of show you put on when you want your brain to turn off. But Love Island isn’t really about romance. It’s about selling romance as a product. Contestants quickly realize that relationships are less about intimacy and more about performance. Stay likable, stay desirable, stay “shippable” — that’s the real strategy. Love becomes a currency, traded for screen time, social media clout, and eventual sponsorship deals once the villa doors close.
The commodification doesn’t end with the finale. Love Island creates online frenzies, spilling into Twitter threads, TikToks, Instagram edits, and dinner-table conversations. Viewers aren’t just passive consumers; they become active participants, debating recouplings with strangers on the internet and bonding with friends over favorite contestants. The show sells love twice — first as drama on-screen, and then as discourse in everyday life. Even our conversations, our opinions, our memes become part of its reach, proof that romance packaged as spectacle can extend far beyond the villa.
Netflix’s Better Late Than Single, which premiered this July, feels worlds apart from the glossy drama of Love Island. Instead of Instagram-ready contestants, it introduces “모태솔로 (motae solos)” — a Korean term for people who have never dated in their lives. These men and women, mostly in their late twenties and thirties, move into a shared house where they receive style coaching, attempt first crushes, and stumble through awkward conversations with all the hesitation of absolute beginners.
What stands out is how different this feels compared to the norms of Western reality dating shows, which tend to center young contestants who present themselves as effortlessly confident in love. Here, awkward silences, tentative gestures, and shy confessions take center stage. The effect is surprising for viewers used to high-drama formats: intimacy is portrayed not as fast-paced spectacle but as slow, uncertain progress.
Until recently, a series like this might have reached mostly K-drama fans. But Netflix’s global distribution has carried Better Late Than Single to audiences around the world, many of whom find its vulnerability refreshing. That’s the irony: what is framed as “authentic” is also carefully curated, packaged, and sold as novelty. Even sincerity, even awkwardness, becomes a product for global consumption.
Maybe that’s the real butterfly effect of these shows: what starts as a simple binge on the couch ripples into how we think about love off-screen. Why risk heartbreak when Belly, or a villa full of strangers, can give you an adrenaline rush or butterflies on demand? Why settle for awkward first dates when you can watch others stumble through theirs in high definition? These series soothe us, entertain us, and sometimes trick us into expecting too much. That’s the irony of commodified love: it feels just real enough to keep us hooked, even if the romance in our lives can’t quite compete.