Verity Johnson: FBoy Island as a show doesn't work - it's too realistically depressing

Monday, 10 October 2022

Verity Johnson is an Auckland-based writer and business owner.

OPINION: Before the past week, I’d been ignoring FBoy Island.

The show had been haggling for my demographic’s attention with all the subtlety of a drunk outside a pub. So of course I was going to ignore it.

But then last week happened. And now you’d be hard-pushed to find anyone in the prized 19-29 female viewing demographic who wasn’t aware of it. FBoy Island started the week as an obscure rock in the faraway seas of our collective imagination. It ended the week clearly on the map, under the line “here there be dragons…”

And there have been a lot of dragons for TVNZ’s PR department to kill this past week.

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It started when the news broke that a contestant on the show had been in court on a charge of attempting to strangle a teenager. Although he was acquitted, it was revealed he had taken the drunk 19-year-old girl home to have sex with her. (When interviewed, the flatmates said they heard her repeatedly calling out “no”, while he attempted to quieten her.)

Now we were paying attention. FBoy Island had gone from a slightly cringey joke, to reminding us of every other dark, uncomfortable time something equally uneasy had happened to us. Then our Mums noticed us all shifting unhappily in our seats. So they then leapt in, and in a show of solidarity started signing the petition that’s now circulating to scrap the show outright.

So in one week, not only had FBoy Island managed to alienate its target demographic. It had also pissed off our Mums. I bet this wasn’t part of the youth engagement strategy.

But that’s always been the real problem with FBoy Island, hasn’t it?

You can tell the show was conceived between the loveless spreadsheets of the marketing and audience-outreach departments. This wasn’t a show, it was a buzzword in a bikini. And you can tell that because it doesn't really have a solid show concept.

The premise is three women go to an island where 50% of the contestants are FBoys and the others are nice guys. The girls then smile determinedly as they endure the a..eholes, wading through the nasty behaviour in search of the elusive nice guys.

So it’s basically real-life dating then?

And that doesn’t sound particularly nice, or much fun, for the girls who’re competing. Especially because when you hire self-proclaimed fboys, you’re going to get the very extremes of shoddy behaviour. (Is TVNZ hoping this is where the drama of the show will spring from, the dudes just being meaner and meaner to the girls?)

But even if you sidestep that gruesome undertone, it just doesn’t work as TV. The show seems to have forgotten that, ironically, there’s nothing exciting about reality on screen. Good reality shows rely on selling a fantasy, albeit one dressed up in affordable fashion with a lot of down-the-camera scenes. You need an aspirational fairytale like the Bachelor, or opulent ridiculousness like Real Housewives, or glittery inspiration like Drag Race.

But FBoy Island isn’t a fantasy, it’s the depressing reality of modern dating set on an island. There’s no escapist melodrama in watching a live action replay of your last 10 underwhelming Tinder dates. It’s just too realistically depressing.

But honestly, anything that starts life as a PowerPoint presentation from the marketing department is always going to be doomed. The execs got so distracted by the thrill of a naughty word in the title that they forgot to actually think about the show…

And I guess this is what happens when you cynically pick low-hanging creative fruit. It turns into a ripe old rotten mess.