Will Love Island Australia follow in the UK's footsteps to become a new feminist favourite?

With its mandatory swimwear policy, strict limits on alcohol consumption and constant, watchful cameras, Love Island sounds more like a mixed-gender beauty pageant than a feminist sleeper-hit. In the UK this year, thanks to strong casting and progressive choices in the editing booth, it was a full-blown cultural phenomenon.

On Monday night, Love Island Australia, now in its second season, will premiere on prime time for the first time. For the local version of the show to hit the same highs as its source material, the producers will have to make choices that are counter-intuitive for a reality TV dating show.

For those unfamiliar with the premise, Love Island is a show about love … on an island. Ten hard-bodied young hotties are locked in a tropical villa for eight weeks, blocked off from the outside world, tasked with coupling up and forbidden to talk about anything but each other.

Finding an opposite-sex partner, whether it’s a platonic alliance or a genuine romance, is the only way to avoid elimination from the villa. At the end of the show there’s a cash prize and, potentially more lucratively, hundreds of thousands of new Instagram followers.

The rules of the game are loose. New contestants are introduced, men and women are split into separate houses, expulsion can be at the hands of the public or your cast mates. Whatever makes for the most entertaining telly, basically.

Unlike gender-segregated shows like The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, Love Island’s unpredictable format is more like a hot-housed microcosm of dating in the real world. That’s where the feminism comes into it. This year’s UK edition paired a particularly strong female cast with some fairly terrible men (and one true prince, Ovie Soko) then let the romantic machinations play out in a way that felt largely sympathetic to the women involved.

Outspoken Irish contestant Maura shut down a cast mate for slut-shaming her. When heartbroken Amy left the show to allow her ex to move on, it let audiences reflect on whether women pay too much mind to the emotional needs of men. Then Michael, a man whose behaviour was so poor it prompted an open letter from a former cast mate, had to watch in close proximity as the ex he spurned, Amber, moved on with someone who actually treated her well – and won the show.

In what may be the most gripping five minutes of reality TV ever recorded, when Kardashian-lookalike pharmacist Anna Vikali found out her newly minted boyfriend Jordan was trying to ditch her for another woman, she schooled him with righteous fury, backed up by her friends Amber and Maura who were there to throw cold tea on his every attempt to gaslight and deny.

The producers of Love Island had substantial amounts of footage of a woman yelling at a man, and they chose to cut it this way. They made her actions look like a reasonable response to unreasonable behaviour on his part, rather than hysteria. They chose to give more airtime to narratives about female friendship than catfights. The largely female audience responded with loud approval.

When Love Island aired in Australia last year, it was on Nine’s digital channel Go! where it garnered just over half a million views each episode. This year Nine is throwing the show into the spotlight with an 8.45pm time slot (“After The Block!” its ads declare, repeatedly) five nights a week on Nine’s main channel.

In a show about hook-ups, break-ups and make-ups, it is easy to fall back on lazy tropes and stereotypes – especially if you only have 24 hours to turn around an episode. The UK edition of Love Island was far from perfect, but it did allow its contestants some emotional depth.

Now that Nine has taken Love Island prime time, it will be interesting to see whether it thinks Australian audiences are ready for that kind of complexity; whether it might rate better than a parade of one-dimensional ditzes, psychos and good girls. Five nights a week is a lot of time to spend on cardboard characters, and while the casting plays a big part in the outcome of any reality show, the decisions made in the editing booth can have just as much impact.

In the UK, Love Island lured in a young, female audience (eyeballs that are often lost to streaming services) by showing them contestants who made them feel good about themselves. In Australia, Love Island is produced by ITV Studios Australia, the local branch of the network who make the UK iteration. The British version showed that dating can be complicated and nuanced, even when you’re trapped inside a villa. It worked. The producers have the formula now. Will they let Australia taste it?

• Love Island Australia is showing on Monday night at 8.45pm on Nine