Joey Essex was raised by television, his mother a camera, his father a boom microphone, the midwife John Logie Baird himself. He was left at the doorstep of a production company in a basket, sucking on a dummy and wearing a bonnet and bootees but otherwise looking much as he does now. Because Joey Essex doesn’t change. He is Tarzan of ITV Studios, totally acclimatised to the televised life. “Reem!” I imagine him calling as he swings from network to network – “reem” is his self-invented catchphrase – looking all beige and hunky.
The general public first saw Joey Essex on The Only Way Is Essex, a long-running scripted reality show set in the magical land of Essex. (It isn’t explicitly stated that Joey Essex invented Essex, but it’s implied by his name.) To the average youthful TikTok viewer these days, The Only Way Is Essex probably seems as impenetrable as a Victorian novel and is the sort of thing only their grandparents and hipster nerds watch. (“Ooh, watching The Only Way Is Essex, are we? Well get you, professor.”) Joey Essex, on the other hand, remains comprehensible to the average viewer, if not science or the laws of God.
He is the type of heavily mediated telly person who started existing at the dawn of this century and who lives and flourishes in the channels high up on your remote control, clinging to the skin of television stations with 3 and 4 in their title like a hunky barnacle on a whale. I doubt Joey Essex even has an agent. I’d say he just turns up on TV sets like a swallow in summer, to be documented by camera operators who dreamed of being David Attenborough.
Joey Essex is now on Love Island (Virgin Media Two). I probably should have said that at the top. I’m pretty sure even Joey Essex doesn’t know he’s on Love Island. He probably thinks he’s just on holiday with his family, the camera equipment. He finds himself, as is the way of that accursed atoll, involved in a love triangle with a sad woman (Samantha) and a wary woman (Grace), all two of the types of women who are attracted to Joey Essex. He has spent some time holidaying in Love Island’s mirror kingdom, Casa Amour, where he has been snogging Grace in a swimming pool while Samantha waits nervously at home in the villa. Ultimately, Joey is a little hurt that Samantha is upset with him after she discovers the Grace-snogging. Yes, Joey Essex makes poor decisions.
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Rivals: The thrusting bum is intercut with spurting soap and overflowing champagne. We are in safe, if filthy, hands
I picture a show called What’s the Worst That Could Happen? with Joey Essex in which people have to reckon with Joey Essex at the worst moment in their lives. It’s probably coming soon to ITV3
They are not the only people here. There are many other Love Islanders who are also engaged in ritualistic heterosexual pair-bonding while working out, grooming, sleeping all together in a one big dormitory like Tory children or sipping from golden goblets filled with delicious ambrosia. They gather in conspiratorial huddles by pool and fire pit, romantically carving up the island as though it were the world and they the Allied leaders at Yalta. (Joey Essex is definitely Stalin.) Occasionally they must “re-couple”, which involves saying a housemate’s name but only after an excruciatingly long pause. I do something similar when answering a question. (I presume the person who edits my life adds dramatic music in later.)
These are some of the hunks: Ronnie Vint is the type of Englishman who has the head of a Beano character on the body of an Action Man. He is confused by love. There is a person called Wil who has tattoos and an incongruous chin beard. The chin beard is, in many ways, a triumph (a triumph of the Wil?), though he is also confused by love. A sagelike woman named Jess observes and provides reflective narration: “You can’t control how anyone else behaves or reacts. You can only control how you do.”
She says this to Samantha, who is dealing with ongoing gaslighting from Joey Essex and, ultimately, eviction from the island, so needs Stoic philosophy to get through the day. Essex has a Stoical mindset, too, occasionally emerging from public snogging sessions with Grace to say things like, “What’s the worst that could happen?” I picture a show called What’s the Worst That Could Happen? with Joey Essex in which people have to reckon with Joey Essex at the worst moment in their lives. It’s probably coming soon to ITV3. This episode of Love Island ends with the sound of a sad man wailing over some piano chords, and that feels apt.
House of the Dragon (Sky Atlantic and Now) is not, sadly, a home-makeover show for property-speculating dragons. Nor is it what Dermot Bannon secretly wanted to call Room to Improve (even though “the Dragon” is his street name). It is, in fact, a prequel to Game of Thrones, a show that amazed us all with its complexity and sprawl before it annoyed and confused us all with its complexity and sprawl.
The creators of the prequel series have, thankfully, reined the stories in to focus on one feuding family – incestuous white-haired dragon-farmers the Targaryens – but it’s still a familiar show featuring courtiers scheming Love Island style when they’re not murdering one another over who gets to sit in a big spiky chair made of swords.
There is no Ikea in Westeros. I imagine the reason so many of the kings of Westeros end up going tyrannical or mad is related to having poor lumbar support and literal sword wounds. Fans of the recent local elections will be pleased to hear that there are a number of council meetings in House of the Dragon, including one in the debut episode of the new season. Sadly, there’s very little detail on bin charges, street lighting or dragon-related traffic-calming measures, so I’m still not sure who I’m going to vote for.
The Boys (Amazon Prime) has no business being as good as it is. The bar wasn’t high. It was adapted from a cartoonishly violent superhero comic by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, which was grand. But its showrunner, Eric Kripke, has spent the past few years transforming the adaptation into something more compellingly clever and fun. Yes, it still features grisly body horror, but it somehow also has some of the best-written characters and plot lines on television while being a savvy satire of celebrity culture, corporate entertainment and right-wing edgelord tropes.
In recent seasons the show’s pettily amoral Superman analogue, Homelander, played terrifyingly by Antony Starr, has become a populist Donald Trump substitute. (His trial for murder maps very neatly on to Trump’s recent court case.) This has been deeply upsetting to some fans who thought this was a delightful show about the simple joy of exploding heads and genitalia (this sort of thing happens regularly on The Boys) and that the aforementioned vain fascist-adjacent blond psychopath (Homelander, not Trump) was not an obvious villain. “Stop making my superhero stories political!” they cry, like lovelorn, digital Joey Essexes, lost in the cold byways of cyberspace, where they will, ultimately, evaporate with loneliness and the strain of thinking.
