“Sweet Sixteen/Dark Baptism.”

That’s the reminder scrawled into the Oct. 31 box of the wall calendar in the bedroom of Sabrina Spellman.

Yes, “Spellman.” She’s a witch, and her name … is “Spellman.”

Look, just reconcile yourself to the fact that your tolerance for on-the-nose nomenclature (Sabrina’s mentor is called Miss Wardwell, the local ophthalmologist is Doctor Spector, etc.) is gonna get severely tested. That’s due in part to Chilling Adventures of Sabrina‘s roots in the sunlit, kid-friendly, primary-color world of Archie Comics. (The Netflix series is technically an adaptation of a decidedly not-for-kids Sabrina comic of the same name launched in 2014 from the publisher’s Archie Horror imprint, which was written by series creator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa with art by Robert Hack.)

Similarly epi-nasal are the Riverdale-adjacent series’ music cues, which: oof. Think of a song with the word “magic” in the lyrics, and odds are good that it — or at least a cover of it — is gonna get dredged up at some point during these first 10 episodes. Clearly, the show’s music supervisor rules with a hammy fist.

But let’s go back to that calendar entry.

“Sweet Sixteen/Dark Baptism.”

That right there is Chilling Adventures of Sabrina‘s mission statement, distilled to its essence. (It’s also a pretty solid joke, just on its face.)

If you’re on board — really, really on board — for both halves of it, you’re going to enjoy the series, which got picked up for a second season months before this first season dropped.

Tackling them in turn:

“Sweet Sixteen”

This is a high school series about a young girl’s coming of age. The happy fact that said young girl is played by Mad Men‘s Kiernan Shipka tells you a few things from the jump.

First, you’re gonna be on Sabrina’s side. Shipka is great here: The startling promise she showed on Mad Men has matured into bona fide acting chops. She infuses the character with a confident, self-assured strength; a headstrong desire to make her own choices; and a keen, grounded intellect.

Second, you’re gonna stay on Sabrina’s side, even though, to be honest, she’s … a bit of a pill. That confident, self-assured strength spills over, from time to time, into “Only I can save the day” exceptionalism. That headstrong desire to make her own choices shades into stubbornness, and that keen, grounded intellect into know-it-allism. Shipka lets all that spilling, shading and nuance slosh around together, but she never loses us, because she locates an appealing vulnerability underneath the confidence.

That said, neither she nor the character she plays is particularly funny. And when the series she’s shouldering owes as much to Buffy the Vampire Slayer as this one does (read: just a whole lot), that absence is felt. (Later-season Buffy Summers was a dour drip, yes, but Sarah Michelle Gellar remained a deft hand with a quip.) The series, undaunted, shunts the much-needed humor off onto actors more at home with it, like The Office (U.K.)‘s Lucy Davis as Sabrina’s dithering Aunt Hilda, as well as—especially and wonderfully—onto Sabrina’s scheming mentor/secret antagonist Miss Wardwell (Doctor Who‘s Michelle Gomez, who lovingly chews her every line like tender morsels of marbled ribeye).

As in the comics, and the beloved-by-those-of-a-certain-age Melissa Joan Hart sitcom Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Sabrina is saddled with mortal love interest Harvey Kinkle; it’s to actor Ross Lynch’s enormous credit—and the character’s melancholic backstory here—that Harvey doesn’t come off as a stick-in-the-mud, dull-as-dishwater dud who impedes Sabrina’s potential. (Which is to say: a real Darren.) Instead, he’s supportive, vulnerable and, mostly, sad.

In the time-honored manner of high school shows, Sabrina’s pals prove earnestly and nerdily woke: Roz (Jaz Sinclair) and Susie (nonbinary actor Lachlan Watson) face down bullying and other issues of the day while tossing out pop culture references. It’s in these storylines that the series struggles most visibly to escape Buffy‘s long shadow.

And speaking of shadows:

“Dark Baptism”

Let’s be clear: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina isn’t merely steeped in the occult. It’s drowning in it.

Series such as Buffy, Charmed, Supernatural and Lucifer have, to varying degrees, dressed themselves up in the trappings of black magic—demons, spells, curses, charms, etc. But while both Supernatural and Lucifer feature Satan as a character, they’re not truly Satan-satanic. They’re more … seitan-satanic.

Sabrina, on the other hand, doesn’t truck with vague, winking, hand-wavy allusions to “the fallen angel” of Milton and Dante. Neither is it about Wicca, or a kind of scrubbed, Bewitched/Bell, Book and Candle/Sabrina the Teenage Witch species of white magic. The Big Bad is not some generic “demon from the pit.” No, he’s the real, Judeo-Christian biblical deal. As in, the full-bore, goat-headed, cloven-footed capital-D Devil—complete with followers who are depicted murmuring “Praise Satan” the way most people say “Gesundheit.”

Some viewers expecting the bright, silly magic of the original Sabrina comics, the Hart sitcom, or even Buffy‘s darker (but still carefully couched) parade of demons as metaphors may be taken aback by the series’ eager embrace of pentagrams and perdition, and wonder if the show glorifies satanism.

The answer will always be a personal judgment call, but it’s worth noting that while Sabrina shows characters worshipping Satan in exchange for the ability to wield dark powers, and has them espouse Anton LaVey’s It’s about free will, not good and evil party line, it depicts the actual lived life of a coven member as … kind of a bummer. Sabrina’s fellow members of the Church of Night are hemmed in by bureaucracy, bylaws, murky tradition and deceit. It’s as sexy as a condo board. But evil.

(Well … more evil.)

The series also makes a choice to place our hero Sabrina, who belongs in both the mortal and witch world, in a kind of stealth opposition to the Church of Night while still availing herself of its powers. No, it won’t be enough to allay the concerns of viewers who would condemn any depiction of the occult, especially one as full-throated as this one—but it’s something.

The show’s magical subject matter brings with it the (too) usual trappings and devices. There is, it will likely not surprise you to learn, a Prophecy. There is also a Destiny To Be Embraced. Where death is concerned, there is a Balance That Must Be Maintained. (If the nigh-inevitable and deeply regrettable phrase “The Chosen One” came up at any point, I either missed it or deliberately erased it from my memory.)

And while its characters do make pop culture references, as mentioned above (including real groaners such as, “penny dreadful for your thoughts,” which: NOPE), they don’t do so at anything like the stylized breakneck pace made famous by Buffy. Instead, the show employs thematic and visual references to that show, and many, many other familiar occult narratives. Here’s a shot from The Exorcist, or The Witch. Here’s a plot element borrowed from Rosemary’s Baby, or The Masque of the Red Death. Here’s a bottle episode that owes so much of its structure to Buffy that you find yourself idly wondering how litigious Joss Whedon might be feeling nowadays.

Aguirre-Sacasa, the creator, made his bones as a playwright and drops several theater-people Easter eggs into the mix. Characters unwittingly mouth scraps of dialogue from Our Town and Angels in America. The town’s bookstore owner, we learn, used to work as local late-night monster-chiller-horror TV host Dr. Cerberus, a character from a 2010 play … by Aguirre-Sacasa.

And it’s not just plays. In the pilot, a bat crashes through Sabrina’s bedroom window. The show waves it off as an ill omen, but you’d be forgiven for half-expecting Sabrina to react by donning a cowl and cape and waging a one-woman war on crime.

And in a way, she kind of does.

Sabrina as superhero

What none of the trailers or press materials will tell you is that Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is, at its black heart, a superhero show.

To wit: Sabrina has powers, and she chooses to use them, consistently, to help her friends—to punish those who would harm them, and to ease their pain.

In the first half of the season, things come awfully easy to her, and she’s unfailingly right about everything. The show’s smart enough to realize this, however, and has her friends call her out on it; as the season progresses, she starts to screw up, with big, bad consequences that serve to give the last few episodes a momentum, and a real sense of danger, that are missing from earlier in the season.

Which is to say: Yes, the series suffers from classic Netflix bloat, but it’s forgivable here because most of the tangents and detours the series explores over the course of its first nine episodes actually factor into the season finale, which changes the game in a satisfying way and sets up the next season nicely.

And even when it feels like it’s treading water, you have to admit that the water’s refreshing. This show just plain looks great, from Sabrina’s severely (and hilariously) gabled house to the most sumptuous public school library imaginable (it has a roaring fireplace, which has to be a code violation), to the mist-shrouded woods which, yes, have been featured in every serialized television show that shoots in and around Vancouver for decades.

If this first season of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina doesn’t seem particularly interested in stepping out of Buffy’s long shadow, that’s fine—but now that we’ve established the world, the players, and the central conflict(s), here’s hoping season two will give the series a chance to find its own voice, and step out into the light.

Into the dark.

Whatever.

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Earlier this year, when Roseanne Barr was forced to exit the revamped Roseanne after just one season, questions were raised about how ABC could even consider keeping the show going. How on Earth do you make Roseanne without Roseanne? We got our answer last week with the premiere episode of The Conners, in which the titular family is in the aftermath of dealing with Roseanne’s sudden (off-screen) death. It took only three minutes for the audience and family to simultaneously find out what killed the matriarch: an overdose of prescription opiates.

On seeing the episode, real-life Roseanne quickly issued an objection. “We regret that ABC chose to cancel Roseanne by killing off the Roseanne Conner character,” Barr’s statement said. “That it was done through an opioid overdose lent an unnecessary grim and morbid dimension to an otherwise happy family show.”

The statement smacked of hypocrisy. The pain pill storyline was originally introduced in the rebooted season of Roseanne. At the time of that episode, Sara Gilbert (who plays Darlene) said in an interview: “I know it was really important for Roseanne to tackle the issue of opioids. She has always been in touch with issues that the country is facing and wanted to bring a voice to those, and bring humor to it as well.”

Barr confirmed this on The View, after the Roseanne revamp courted controversy for portraying her as a Trump supporter. “I wanted to show an accurate depiction of our country,” she said. In one episode, Roseanne tells her Hillary-supporting sister that she voted for Trump because: “He talked about jobs, Jackie. I mean, he shook things up. This might come as a complete shock to you, but we almost lost our house.”

Since its 1988 inception, Roseanne has acted as an important representation of the struggles of certain working-class Americans. Barr was right in her initial stance that the same communities that ultimately swayed the vote in Trump’s favor are the same communities that are shouldering the brunt of the opioid crisis. In losing her job, she seems to have lost sight of the whole point entirely.

The fact that The Conners picked up the opioid baton in its premiere is far braver than it is “grim.” And honestly, it’s long overdue. Since the opioid crisis turned into a national epidemic, practically the only prescription painkiller addiction we’ve seen on network television was Kevin’s in This Is Us. His story was that of a wealthy, famous Hollywood actor who injured himself on a film set and spiraled into addiction as a result. It was an important conversation-starter, though not a particularly relatable one. Without The Conners (and yes, Roseanne), where else would we see an older white woman with a loving family struggling with this particular addiction? Frankly, little space is offered for it to be done at all.

Roseanne Conner’s addiction resembles reality a lot more accurately than Kevin Pearson’s. The National Institute on Drug Abuse notes that: “The Midwestern region saw opioid overdoses increase 70 percent from July 2016 through September 2017″—40 percent more than the national average. And Scientific American lists “economic insecurity and poverty” as “a major risk factor for addiction… It is no coincidence that the collapse of the white middle class has been accompanied by a rise in all types of addictions, but especially addiction to opioids.”

Roseanne was the perfect place to explore this, and so, consequently, is The Conners. In the premiere episode, Dan harkened back to previous Roseanne episodes, when he first found out the cause of death. “We knew she had a problem,” he said. “She was only on pain pills for two days after the surgery, then it was just Ibuprofen.” He went on: “It doesn’t make any sense. I flushed all her pills.” It is Becky that finds the deadly medication in her mom’s closet, and the family are startled to find it has someone else’s name on the label.

It’s details like these that demonstrate The Conners‘ dedication to reflecting the realities of millions of Americans, just as Roseanne once did. The 2014 National Survey on Drug Use and Health reported that 75 percent of opioid misuse starts with people using medication originally prescribed for others.

The Conners didn’t stop there. Through allowing the woman who gave Roseanne the pills to offer her side of the story, the show offered an indictment of the US healthcare system on a broader scale. “Nobody can afford their meds,” a remorseful Marcy tells Dan. “We all help each other… Roseanne called me… She said that she needed those pain pills to get back to work because you guys were running out of money… I never would have given them to her if I knew she had a problem. I know what it’s like to have that problem.”

By including this scene, The Conners succeeded in painting a vivid picture of what it’s like to live paycheck-to-paycheck, without the luxury of insurance. It showed what happens when people self-medicate and mismanage what are supposed to be legal drugs. Most importantly, it explained just how America got itself an opioid crisis in the first place. A study published earlier this year, based on 2016 spending, found that, while the cost of American healthcare is nearly double that of other high-income countries, it has “the worst population health outcomes.” It was easy to get a sense of that in The Conners’ first episode, in a matter of minutes.

In doing all this in one 22-minute episode, The Conners actually did Roseanne’s original legacy proud. For Barr to miss the point so entirely isn’t surprising exactly, but it is rather frustrating. In the end, it was obvious that Roseanne Conner’s opioid-related death wasn’t really what the real-life Roseanne was upset about. Rather, it was about being excluded from her own show because of her own mistakes. The end of her statement let slip what was really going on.

“After repeated and heartfelt apologies,” Barr said, “the network was unwilling to look past a regrettable mistake, thereby denying the twin American values of both repentance and forgiveness. The cancellation of Roseanne is an opportunity squandered due in equal parts to fear, hubris, and a refusal to forgive.”

The opposite is true. The Conners didn’t squander a minute of airtime. It transformed a much-anticipated plot necessity into something of national significance. It succeeded in painting a picture of just how hard it is for the poorest people in America to stay afloat. It succeeded in demonstrating the ordinariness of the opioid problem in 2018. And it even gave us one or two laughs.

Ultimately, the show managed to overshadow the specter of what Roseanne Barr has become. That might have been too much for her, but having a place to start these difficult conversations is what we as a nation need. In its first episode, The Conners promised to give us just that.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the first season of The Haunting of Hill House.

Netflix’s stunning The Haunting of Hill House immediately prompted a lot of analysis online for good reason. The series is “A haunted house series that is really a sprawling family drama.” One tweet also very wisely suggested it’s “an allegory about a family of grown-up children dealing with the trauma of an abusive childhood.” Either way, there hasn’t been a house this terrifying on TV since the first season of American Horror Story.

But what if The Haunting of Hill House was based on real events? Unthinkable, right? Except, a lot of elements in the show are real-life documented phenomena. Here are all the terrifying things from Hill House that might actually be real.

Sleep Paralysis Demons

Sleep paralysis is explained in the show by Arthur. “During the night,” he tells Nell, “you cycle through different stages of sleep. In the deepest state, your brain switches off the muscles to stop you from acting out your dreams. Some people just come out of that stage quicker than others.”

He goes on to explain that the condition can cause ghostly hallucinations “because of the disrupted boundary between your dream state and your wakefulness.” Nice try, Arthur, but WebMD confirms that “people in countries as diverse as China, East Africa, Mexico, Newfoundland, and the United States have long believed that sleep paralysis is caused by demons.” The Chinese phrase for sleep paralysis means “ghost pressing on body.” The Vietnamese call it “ma đè” which means “held down by a ghost.” In Pakistan, sleep paralysis is literally considered to be a visit from Satan. In Thailand, they believe it’s a ghost named Phi Am.

Nell is being visited by a ghost and maybe, just maybe, so is everyone else with sleep paralysis.

Time Moving in Reverse

In childhood, Nell is haunted by a terrifying entity she calls “Bent Neck Lady.” When the house eventually tricks her into hanging herself, we see Nell slipping back through time and space in reverse, popping up at various points in her own life. It’s clear then that she herself is the Bent Neck Lady. In essence, Nell’s future death literally haunts her whole life.

In the finale, Hugh tells his children: “I thought that time was laid out like a line … It’s not like that at all. Our moments fall around us like rain.” Remarkably, some people theorize that this is possible. “The Ancients had an idea of teleological causation,” author Eric Wargo tells The Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold. “That is to say things in the future causing things in the past. Or events in the future drawing them towards us in some way. That idea is perfectly legitimate in the higher echelons of quantum physics.”

Wargo goes on to discuss the pre-cognitive abilities of Philip K. Dick, Normal Mailer and Morgan Robertson. Robertson, for example, wrote a story called Futility, which described the sinking of the Titanic (though he called it “The Titan”) in detail, a full 14 years before it happened. Scared yet?

Psychic Touch

Theo’s ability to psychically read people and locations by touch disturbs her to such a degree that she wears gloves almost all of the time. In real life, this particular skill—known as Psychometry—has a long and storied history. In 1961, a Dutchman named Gerard Croiset, who assisted in multiple criminal investigations, was able to locate the body of a kidnapped child in Brooklyn, using a picture, map and clothes. In World War II, a Russian psychic named Stephan Ossowiecki helped people locate missing loved ones by holding photographs of them. Self-described “psychic detective” Noreen Renier has successfully assisted British police on multiple occasions, using objects belonging to missing persons for guidance.

Storm-Related Paranormal Activity

Any time the Hill House finds itself in the center of a storm, the paranormal activity kicks up. Like the night Nell becomes invisible to the rest of her family. Or when the blackout introduces spirits that nobody had met yet. (Who was that guy in the wheelchair?) And it’s not all that far-fetched. Investigators have long held a theory that storms increase paranormal activity, and there are reports to support it. After Hurricane Katrina, a National Guardsman named Sgt. Robin Hairston told KPIX he had seen the ghost of a little girl. Two of his colleagues also reported encountering apparitions. In Joplin, Missouri, so many people reported seeing “Butterfly people” during a 2011 tornado, the town now has a mural honoring the ethereal creatures.

Twin Telepathy

In Hill House, twins Nell and Luke can sense when the other is in danger or pain. Stories about twin telepathy have been in the public psyche for hundreds of years, but tales continue to emerge. In 2009, Gemma Houghton rescued her twin Leanne after the latter had a seizure in the bath and fell under the water, unconscious. Gemma sensed something bad was happening and checked on Leanne in the nick of time. Other documented incidents include a twin experiencing chest pains as his brother had a heart attack thousands of miles away, and a twin developing swelling in an uninjured ankle after her sister broke hers.

Evil Houses

“Mom says that a house is like a body and that every house has eyes and bones and skin and a face.” So says Hugh Crane of the vortex of doom they moved into. Cursed houses are indeed a rare but documented problem. Paranormal investigator Zac Bagans found the so-called “Demon House” in Gary, Indiana so overwhelming a place, he wound up demolishing it even though he owned it at the time.

Summerwind in Wisconsin also had issues from day one. The original owner once fired a gun at an apparition, thinking it was an intruder. After he left, the house changed hands multiple times, and quickly. One family who stuck it out for six months described it as “severely haunted.” While residing there, the father had a mental breakdown, the mother attempted suicide and their six children were constantly bothered by phantom voices and doors opening and closing. Eventually, in 1986, the house was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Good!

Happy Halloween, everybody!

Near the end of John Le Carré‘s great spy novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, one of the agents notices that his car’s passenger door is unlocked. He instantly begins wondering how that happened. “Survival,” he thinks, “is an infinite capacity for suspicion.”

That capacity gets put to the test in Bodyguard, a new BBC series created by Jed Mercurio, who’s known for his compelling shows about the dark side of public institutions.

Unfolding over six episodes, Bodyguard is decidedly not a remake of that early ’90s Kevin Costner-Whitney Houston movie. Instead, it’s a high-powered, state-of-the-art thriller about terrorism, political chicanery and the perils of acting in good faith.

The series stars Richard Madden, the handsome Scottish actor best known as Robb Stark on Game of Thrones. He’s actually far better here, playing Sergeant David Budd, an Afghanistan war vet with PTSD and a broken marriage, who now works for the London police as a bodyguard for visiting dignitaries.

When we first meet this tightly wound loner, he’s just learned that a terrorist plans to bomb the train he’s riding. It’s a tense, 20-minute opening that announces the show’s intention to keep us permanently on the edge of our seats.

Sgt. Budd handles the situation so deftly that his boss gives him what looks like a plum assignment. He’s sent to protect Julia Montague—played by Keeley Hawes—the home secretary in the Conservative government who, beneath her good looks, possesses a spine of the purest Thatcherite steel.

The ruthless Julia intends to supplant her party’s prime minister by whipping up fear of terrorism. It’s an approach that her bodyguard despises. And, as if that weren’t tricky enough, someone is trying to kill Julia. But who could it be? Islamic militants? Renegade elements of the security apparatus? Her Conservative Party enemies?

Before he’s even settled into the job, Sgt. Budd is dodging assassins’ bullets, being ordered to spy on the woman he’s protecting and discovering that he finds the home secretary kind of, well, hot.

When Bodyguard aired in the U.K. a couple months ago, it became a national obsession. Not only does the show offer more shocking twists than a tank full of electric eels but its hero is, in many ways, the male version of Homeland‘s charismatic Carrie Mathison: a devoted but psychologically fraying officer who’s susceptible to the allures and manipulations of those he should know better than to get entangled with.

Sgt. Budd must find his way through a minefield of unreliable characters, including his ex-soldier pal who’s hellbent on vengeance, the head of the London police force’s anti-terror squad who’s at war with MI5 and the Conservative Party’s nasty chief whip.

While all of this makes the series gripping, it doesn’t make it serious. Like Homeland, Scandal, House of Cards and their spiritual godfather, 24, Bodyguard taps into big issues like terrorism and government snooping but only to keep us guessing. More concerned with being a good ride than exploring character or politics, the show is awash in a timely cynicism.

The paranoid thrillers of the ’60s and ’70s—Seven Days in May or Three Days of the Condor or All the President’s Men—were made for an audience that assumed a stable, law abiding political system. Such thrillers took their sting from the cautionary suggestion that we didn’t know what’s really going on, that the system was being threatened by conspirators—rogue generals, rogue spys, even rogue presidents.

These days, in both Britain and the U.S., those on both left and right, believe that the state itself has gone rogue. Lawless conspiracy has come to seem so normal that ’70s paranoia now seems almost innocent.

Without the ballast of a stable world to keep the action anchored, anything becomes possible on today’s shows—a corrupt politician shoving a reporter in front of a train in House of Cards, a sleeper-cell marine murdering the vice-president in his own office in Homeland. And so it is with Bodyguard, a finely tuned series whose delirious improbabilities reveal themselves like clockwork.

The show doesn’t seek to alert us to the dangers of terrorism and government malfeasance—by now, we’ve had all the warnings we need. Instead, Bodyguard reduces the things that scare us to shamelessly white-knuckled entertainment with a neat resolution. Don’t worry, it suggests: It’s just another thriller.

Copyright 2018 Fresh Air. To see more, visit Fresh Air.

For years, America has been fond of picking up British television shows, editing out the cultural quirks and making them look a bit shinier for U.S. audiences. The Office, Shameless, Queer As Folk, House of Cards, Being Human … all British originally. The newest import coming our way is Love Island, thanks to CBS snapping up the rights to the summer-long dating game that just wrapped up its fourth season in the U.K.

Picking up Love Island is a no-brainer. Not only is it a ridiculously huge hit overseas, but its essential structure is also that of beautiful young people, living in a gorgeous villa and trying to find love while perpetually wearing swimwear. What’s more American than that?

A potential problem with adapting this particular show, though, is that you can get away with a lot more on British television than American audiences are used to. Remember Dating Naked? It was a VH1 show that ran between 2014 and 2016, and was ultimately forced off the air by advertising boycotts prompted by campaigns by conservative groups including One Million Moms and the Parents Television Council. If Dating Naked didn’t work on American TV, there’s a good chance Love Island won’t either. The contestants aren’t completely nude, but little is left to the imagination, and naked butts are a frequent sight, thanks to a combination of tiny swimsuits and the fact that, like Big Brother, there are cameras in the bathroom.

One of the things most objected to in Dating Naked was the sexual nature of many of the conversations, but Love Island‘s language is even more graphic. Swearing is uncensored, there are too many penis-related conversations to count and contestants sometimes very casually say things like (brace yourselves): “I don’t like a guy who just wants to have his willy up as many girls as he wants.”

The most popular American dating shows have always been rather chaste affairs, by comparison, drenching themselves in symbols of traditional romance in an attempt to steer clear of trashiness. Even Bachelor in Paradise—certainly the least uptight of the primetime looking-for-love shows—has a rose-based system to make all of the hooking up more palatable for viewers. Love Island offers no such niceties.

In the early stages of each season—and, please note, the last season was a whopping 57 episodes long—Love Island is about as close to Tinder-swiping as you can manage in real life. It is not a gentle show. People are initially separated up into couples via the medium of a bathing suit line-up. Some of the contestants get sent to a “subs bench” if no one chooses them. This process can be so brutal, it makes The Bachelor‘s rose ceremonies look like Sesame Street.

Even after the couples have paired off, the public can vote on who should go on dates with whom, and new men and women are brought into the house to shake things up all the time. Season 4, for example, started with 11 contestants and, by the end, had seen 38 people come and go. What this means is, partner-dumping happens repeatedly—sometimes to the same people over and over again. To make matters worse, all of the contestants sleep in the same room, couple-by-couple. This means that sometimes, someone who’s just been swapped for someone new, then has to sleep alone next to a bed containing the person who just dumped them and their new partner.

Then there are the hosts. There couldn’t be a greater contrast to the incredibly serious, dramatic tone of Chris Harrison on all of the Bachelor franchise shows. Love Island has a sarcastic voiceover that makes frequent cheeky jokes and actively makes fun of contestants. The host who shows up to handle “re-coupling” ceremonies and the finale is Caroline Flack—most famous on this side of the pond for dating Harry Styles when he was 17 and she was 31.

The reason Love Island gets away with all of this is because of how incredibly nice everyone on the show is to each other. On the women’s side, there are no mean girls, no drama and no passive aggression—just women supporting other women and doing each other’s hair. Similarly, for the men, there is no macho posturing and peacocking. They may put on brave faces and false bravado in front of the female contestants, but with each other, these dudes aren’t afraid to talk about their feelings and comfort each other in times of woe. This supportive environment is basically the antithesis of American reality television. Over here, the more conflict, the better.

Sure, there are occasional blips and issues between contestants, but the couples all seem genuinely happy for each other when they find the right partners. By the end, one gets the sense that no one even particularly cares about winning the £50,000 prize; they’re all just happy to be happy. American television hasn’t produced a reality show with no villains since the first couple of seasons of The Real World. It’s unlikely to start now.

Despite all of this, the end of each season of Love Island is tailor-made for U.S. TV. The final couples offer romantic declarations to one another as if they’re taking vows, they take part in a mini prom, complete with a dance routine, and the public decides who the winning couple should be.

The non-sexual conversations in the house also line up with what America already likes about reality television: fluff. Even when there are super-smart contestants taking part (Season 4 had an ER doctor and a nuclear systems design engineer), there is almost nothing of substance spoken about in this show whatsoever. When a passing reference to Brexit recently occurred, one 21-year-old had no idea what it even was. She also thought the English town she lived in was “a continent.” This kind of content might beg belief, but it also makes for the kind of absurdly entertaining TV that America has loved ever since Jessica Simpson’s “Chicken of the Sea” moment.

Love Island, as it stands right now, is a gift. A sunny, vapid, shockingly unfiltered, yet ultimately heartwarming gift. If CBS can figure out a way to keep its current formula without succumbing to pressures from conservative watchdogs and the standards usually adhered to by the networks, it’ll be a refreshing alternative to our current batch of dating shows. If its cruder edges get polished away, along with the dominant sense of contestant camaraderie, the heart of the show will be gone. Without it, we might as well just stick with The Bachelor.