Losing Your Virginity on TV Is a Gen Z Smash. What Is Happening?!
Raised on screens, scared of sex: the U.K.'s 'Virgin Island' taps into those hooked on porn and starved of intimacy, opening a bold new front in reality TV
I cover int’l TV from London. I wrote about why Amazon has fumbled its U.K. business, the British company behind Netflix’s Adolescence and Ireland’s “conveyor belt” of unscripted production. I’m at manori@theankler.com. As a paid subscriber to Series Business, you’ll receive reports from Manori and Elaine Low for a global perspective on the TV business. This is a standalone subscription separate from The Ankler. For access to Series Business and everything The Ankler publishes, including Sean McNulty’s The Wakeup and Richard Rushfield, subscribe here.
Is there an American out there who hasn’t stumbled upon Naked Attraction while channel-surfing in a London hotel room? The Studio Lambert-produced dating show, now on hiatus, became the ultimate shorthand for edgy British reality shows you’d never see anywhere else over its 12 seasons on air. An unexpected eyeful of full-frontal nudity (on the show a clothed person eliminates potential dates based on their physical appearance only, starting with the feet and panning up) while flitting between the 10 o’clock news on the BBC and a Bullseye rerun tends to have that effect.
Naked Attraction was quietly added in 2023 to Max — now HBO Max — where it stirred a flurry of controversy and hit the service’s Most Popular list, but no U.S. version every came to pass. Now, there’s another U.K. reality TV contender baring all — and this one’s breaking records doing it. In Channel 4’s six-part series Virgin Island, 12 virgins between the ages of 22 and 30 travel to a Croatian island for a boot camp led by a squadron of sex therapists and intimacy coaches.
Far from those bikini-clad Love Island-ers who levitate into the villa, martinis in hand, Virgin Island participants have a fear of touch or being naked and struggle with cripplingly low self-esteem. Over two weeks, they work closely with “sex surrogates” (trained professionals who help overcome intimacy problems) to conquer these insecurities, get in touch with their bodies and maybe even “go all the way.”
In one anatomy lesson, the group looks on in bewilderment as two surrogates lie naked before them, pointing out the clitoris and scrotum. Another workshop involves writing and presenting an erotic story. Throughout, there are one-on-one sessions where surrogates slowly coach participants out of their shells (and clothes) — with extraordinary albeit painfully awkward results. Can buttoned-up Britain survive these dimly lit, breathy tutorials?
It turns out we can. In fact, we can’t seem to get enough. The Double Act Productions-made show, which premiered in May, has been streamed almost nine million times, becoming Channel 4’s top unscripted launch for the much-coveted 16- to 34-year-old demographic since modern records began, and beating reality classics like Supernanny and Married At First Sight. It’s also Channel 4’s biggest streaming hit of the year across both scripted and unscripted shows.
Virgin Island sits at the intersection between “old versus new TV,” says Jonah Weston — the commissioning editor at Channel 4 (and former Double Act development boss) who greenlit the show. “It’s the perfect case study that linear TV is traditionally an older audience — which didn’t do very well — but then it clearly grew through proper, genuine word of mouth among a younger audience.”
The show, which will begin shooting its second season this fall, is also a useful blueprint for unscripted producers increasingly mindful of how to engage young audiences and their changing appetites. It’s telling that Love Island — once the British summer behemoth that other broadcasters scheduled around — opened on ITV2 earlier this month to its lowest viewing figures in a decade, while Virgin Island and its band of “misfits” navigating sex for the first time knocked it out of the park for Channel 4.
📌 In this story:
The two key reasons Virgin Island is attracting Gen Z audiences
How Virgin Island flipped the script on Love Island — and why this strategy worked
The shocking stats about virginity and intimacy in an academic study that led to the buzzy idea
The drive for authenticity and realness in Gen Z taste that the producers see as a coming audience tidal wave
How we came to have not one but two Virgin Island shows — yes, there’s another brewing in the U.S. — at the same time
How producers navigated U.K. broadcast rules to air explicit content
Why Virgin Island may be a hit at home — but a hard sell abroad