Over the years, Netflix has established itself as one of the biggest hubs for messy, bingeworthy reality TV. FromLove Is Blind to Too Hot to Handle, the streaming giant has TV shows that will have viewers hooked, potentially screaming at their screens, or cringing so much they have no choice but to look away. But while some of these titles have become known around the world, a new addition to Netflix’s catalog is making waves too. Temptation Island, which moved to Netflix in 2025, is surging in the streaming charts (reaching up to #3 in the US, per FlixPatrol), and is quickly establishing itself as one of Netflix’s best reality series to date.
The series, expertly hosted by Mark L. Walberg, moved around a bit before coming to Netflix. Originally premiering on Fox back in 2001, the series also called the USA Network their home for many seasons before pivoting to Netflix. The first season on the streaming platform dropped on March 12, 2025, while the second was released just recently on April 10, 2026. Marking its tenth season in over 25 years, Temptation Island is making reality TV history, and it’s only getting better with time.
What Is ‘Temptation Island’ About?
From the premise of Temptation Island alone, fans of messy reality TV might already be hooked. In each season, the show follows four couples as they split up and are placed into villas where a group of singles try to tempt them into cheating. As the four men and women meet their singles and get to know them, they’re invited to go on dates and develop those relationships further. In the meantime, the eight leads meet with Walberg every few days at “bonfires,” where each of them see short clips of their partner from their time in the other house. These clips can be emotional, like confessional moments where they open up about their relationship, or explosive ones, where they’re seen cheating or crossing a boundary the couple had set for themselves.
For the most part, the series follows couples who are at a crossroads; either they’ve become stagnant, are stuck in a major disagreement, or have trust issues they can’t mend. As a result, they sign up for the show to test their partner, or prove themselves, in order to finish it together and stronger than ever. In reality, however, the show’s setup brings up much more than their one underlying issue, and often shines a light on major issues in their relationships, as well as insecurities they’ve been battling with themselves as well. By the end of the season, the leads are given a choice between three options: either they end up with the partner they started with, leave with one of the singles in the villa, or leave the show alone and single.
Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In? The Pitt · ER · Grey’s Anatomy · House · Scrubs
Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong.
🚨The Pitt
🏥ER
💉Grey’s
🔬House
🩺Scrubs
01
A critical patient comes through the door. What’s your first instinct? Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.
02
Why did you go into medicine in the first place? The honest answer says more about you than the one you’d give in an interview.
03
What do you actually want from the people you work with? Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.
04
You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it? Every doctor who’s worked a long shift has had to answer this question.
05
How would your colleagues describe the way you work? Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.
06
How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure? Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.
07
What does this job cost you personally? Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What’s yours?
08
At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back? The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.
Your Assignment Has Been Made You Belong In…
Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center
The Pitt
You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away.
You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
You’ve made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.
County General Hospital, Chicago
ER
You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.
You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
ER is television about endurance. You have it.
Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, Seattle
Grey’s Anatomy
You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.
You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
It’s messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.
Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, NJ
House
You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.
You’re not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you’d deny it.
You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they’re smart enough to keep up.
The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.
Sacred Heart Hospital, California
Scrubs
You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.
You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that’s not a flaw, it’s a survival strategy.
You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.
‘Temptation Island’ Blends Heart With Heartbreaking
While the structure of Temptation Island is certainly set up to generate messy reality TV, the show still manages to deliver on heartwarming moments too. For starters, while the premise suggests that the show is all about the couples, the series is also designed for the contestants to better themselves too, leading to major realizations of their own toxic patterns, insecurities and doubts. By doing so, it creates a space in which, relationship drama aside, people are actively working on themselves for whatever choice they make at the end. That’s especially the case for the friendships the leads develop with one another, becoming emotional rocks and support systems for each other throughout the process.
That development is certainly aided by Walberg himself, whose therapist-like demeanor and compassion becomes shoulder for contestants to cry on, as well as a wake-up call when they need one. “Mark never sensationalizes the pain — he guides contestants through it,” wrote Collider’s Alexandra Sakellariou when Season 1 of Netflix’s Temptation Island released. “He knows when to pause, let them cry or speak their truth, and then pose a reflective question that somehow moves the plot forward while healing the soul.” After all, with 25 years of Temptation Island under his belt, Walberg is not only a figure contestants look up to, but someone who can help them reflect on themselves, and potentially repair the relationships they came in with.
With that said, while Temptation Island hasn’t received the all-encompassing marketing campaign it deserved, it’s quickly making a case as one of the best reality TV shows on the platform. In addition to providing some shocking, explosive moments with steamy connections and unexpected infidelity, the show also balances the messiness with genuine, heartfelt moments that have viewers rooting for the contestants, whether they end up with their partners or not.
