Love Island USA Season 8 launched on Peacock on June 2 to the strongest debut numbers in the show’s history — though not before a pre-premiere controversy stripped one contestant from the cast before a single episode aired.
In its first three days of availability, the season accumulated 824 million minutes viewed, a 74% jump over Season 7’s launch and enough to make it Peacock’s most-streamed original season ever through that window, per internal NBCUniversal data. The show’s young audience is watching differently than most Peacock subscribers: Season 8 debuted to 23% phone and tablet usage, more than any other Peacock original in its launch window. Social media engagement is running hot too, with over 43 million video views across platforms in the opening days.
The season’s commercial momentum arrived despite — or perhaps partly because of — a casting crisis that played out publicly in the days before the premiere. Two videos began circulating on social media showing cast member Vasana Montgomery, a 25-year-old business owner from Beaverton, Oregon, using the N-word — once apparently while singing along to a song, and once while at an arcade game.
The videos, which had previously been on private accounts, surfaced just after Peacock announced the Season 8 lineup, meaning they would not have been accessible during the standard vetting process. Montgomery was removed from the cast by May 30 and issued a public apology via Instagram Stories. “There is no excuse for it, and I am deeply sorry,” she wrote. “I am embarrassed and disappointed by my words.”
The incident was an uncomfortable echo of Season 7, which saw two contestants removed for similar reasons — Yulissa Escobar for using the N-word on a podcast, and Cierra Ortega for resurfaced posts using an anti-Chinese slur. The back-to-back seasons of pre-air or in-villa removals have raised questions about whether Peacock’s vetting process for contestants is adequate for an era when private social media content can be surfaced and weaponized almost instantly.
The series airs daily except Wednesdays, hosted by Ariana Madix and narrated by comedian Iain Stirling, with Saturdays reserved for the Aftersun companion show. Season 7 ultimately accumulated 18.4 billion minutes of watch time across its run — a figure the show will be under significant pressure to beat.
