These days, few Iranians have not heard of the internet show Eshgh-e Abadi (“Eternal Love”). A group of young Iranian migrants gathers in a seaside villa in Turkey to choose a partner or lover from among each other. They compete, and their daily routines generate content that draws astonishing numbers of views online. The show’s success, statistically speaking, is undeniable: the first episode racked up millions of views on YouTube, and the official channel quickly attracted hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

Very soon, this show became a cultural battleground where some of the most fundamental notions about identity, modernity, morality, and human relationships in today’s Iranian society are challenged. Its fans describe it as “an unfiltered account of the new generation’s relationships” and consider watching it essential for providing the most realistic, uncensored, and direct portrayal of human connection among contemporary Iranians. To them, the program serves as a firsthand report, a window into a reality systematically ignored or distorted by official media—a report that, due to its raw information and production method, cannot be easily dismissed.

Its staunch critics, however, see it as promoting superficiality and recycling vulgar clichés. They describe the show’s treatment of relationships, concepts like love, family, independence, self-worth, and even participants’ clothing or style of speaking Persian as shallow. In their view, the program is not a mirror of reality but a distortion that poisons young audiences’ expectations with shallow portrayals of human connection.

What Is a Reality Show?

Eshgh-e Abadi is the Iranian adaptation of the famous reality show Love Island. Reality TV is a genre focused primarily on entertainment, dealing with non-scripted content that usually features ordinary people instead of professional actors. Rising to global popularity in the 1990s, it includes sub-genres such as competition shows, dating programs, lifestyle makeovers, and social experiments.

Despite claims of being “real,” these programs heavily rely on production techniques to construct narrative and enhance dramatic appeal. These include strategic casting to maximize potential conflict, misleading editing to create narrative tension, and placing participants in artificial and high-pressure situations to elicit strong emotional responses. These shows are often tightly orchestrated to deliver controversial and entertaining moments—since unscripted situations can quickly become boring. Thus, “reality” in this genre is always a constructed and edited product designed for maximum viewer engagement.

Forbidden Love as Spectacle

To understand the appeal of Eshgh-e Abadi, one must consider the media constraints in Iran. Love—as a lived human experience—has been hidden for decades behind ideological red lines in official Iranian media. The most basic signs of intimacy between men and women—physical contact, dancing, or open expressions of affection—have faced strict prohibitions.

This systematic suppression—including strict hijab and dress code rules for women in films and TV—has effectively erased realistic portrayals of love and emotional relationships from public discourse. This absence has created a deep “representation hunger,” especially among young people who access global media via the internet and VPNs and are well aware of what they’re missing in domestic media.

Ironically, the Islamic Republic’s censorship apparatus has significantly contributed to Eshgh-e Abadi’s success. By banning everyday interactions—such as casual conversations between men and women or open displays of affection—ordinary behaviors have been transformed into something extraordinary, exciting, and politically charged. In economics, scarcity increases value; by creating artificial scarcity in the representation of normal relationships, the regime has inadvertently inflated their commercial and cultural value. Eshgh-e Abadi fills this market gap with a product whose value is guaranteed by state policy. By outlawing local competitors, the censorship system has effectively created a monopoly for the show.

Sociological Analysis of Eshgh-e Abadi

Performing Reality: Erving Goffman’s Theory

Erving Goffman compares social life to a stage where individuals are always performing for others. He distinguishes between the “front stage,” where people perform roles for an audience, and the “backstage,” a private space where one can drop the act and prepare for the next performance.

The seductive power of reality shows lies in their erasure of this boundary. In the Eshgh-e Abadi villa, with 24-hour surveillance, no backstage exists. Even the most intimate moments—romantic conversations, angry arguments, or private confessions—become part of the front stage, displayed to millions. In this atmosphere of constant surveillance, participants are in a state of uninterrupted performance, where every word, look, and gesture matters.

Under these conditions, participants’ behavior cannot be considered spontaneous or authentic. Instead, it becomes a tool in the process of impression management—a concept Goffman defines as the conscious or unconscious effort to influence how others perceive us. In Eshgh-e Abadi, the primary goal is not genuine human connection but the construction of a compelling fictional persona. Exaggerated emotions, dramatic outbursts, intense crying, and theatrical behavior are encouraged. Tears, shouting, aggression, threats, betrayals, love triangles, and physical confrontations all become tools for attention. This performance has two main goals: first, to win votes and stay in the competition for the $30,000 prize, and second—and arguably more importantly—to build a personal brand for social media fame after the show ends.

In reality TV, the expected role is to “be yourself.” Viewers seek “real emotions” and reward participants who appear “authentic.” This creates a paradox: the most successful contestant is the one who best performs authenticity.

In Iran’s cultural context, the performance gains an extra layer of complexity. Contestants are not only performing for a general audience but specifically for an Iranian audience. This means their impression management must operate on two levels simultaneously. They must appear modern and cosmopolitan, while also adhering to unwritten cultural red lines to remain relatable to domestic viewers. A male contestant may declare himself progressive, but criticize women’s clothing with a tone rooted in traditional norms. A female contestant may emphasize freedom and independence, yet elsewhere insist on domestic roles or equate possessiveness with love.

This dual performance—trying to balance conflicting identities—is one of the primary sources of drama and tension in the show, allowing Iranian viewers to see their own cultural conflicts reflected on screen.

Commodifying Love: Guy Debord’s Theory

In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord argues that in modern societies, “everything that was once directly lived has moved away into a representation.” In the logic of the spectacle, anything representable becomes commodifiable.

In reality shows like Eshgh-e Abadi, an intimate, lived experience such as love is extracted from the private realm and turned into a media product. Emotional relationships are assessed not by their human value but by their market value. A “successful” relationship on the show isn’t necessarily healthier or more profound, but one that produces the most spectacle. This value is measured by media metrics: dramatic content, visual appeal of the couple, and their ability to generate viral moments.

A calm, stable relationship—desirable in real life—is worthless in this context and quickly eliminated. Conversely, a relationship filled with tension, jealousy, betrayal, and dramatic reconciliations is highly valuable and guarantees the show’s profitability.

In this structure, love and intimacy are raw materials—recorded by cameras, shaped by editors, and served as entertainment narratives. Key moments in emotional relationships no longer belong to the individuals but become scenes in a larger drama meant to generate excitement and engagement. Love is transformed from a lived, internal experience into a visible, packaged, and salable spectacle. Success is no longer measured by emotional depth but by the ability to produce drama and attract clicks.

The viewer becomes a passive, alienated consumer—watching a polished simulation of other people’s relationships instead of living and experiencing their own. This spectacle offers a safe, low-risk substitute for real-life emotional engagement.

Debord views this as a deep form of alienation: “The more you watch, the less you live; the more you recognize yourself in images, the less you understand your own life and desires.” Watching reality shows becomes an endless consumption of others’ emotions, potentially deterring people from engaging with their own emotional realities.

In Iran’s context, the product Eshgh-e Abadi offers is no ordinary commodity—it is a forbidden commodity. This amplifies its commercial and performative value. By banning public displays of love, the Iranian state has created enormous demand. The show satisfies this hunger with a “contraband cultural product,” delivering the thrill of witnessing the forbidden. Consumption of such content becomes a symbolic act of rebellion, giving Eshgh-e Abadi a political-cultural dimension.

Copies Without Originals: Jean Baudrillard’s Theory

Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality describes a world where the line between reality and representation dissolves, and media simulations become more real than reality itself.

Baudrillard outlines several stages of representation, the final being the simulacrum: a copy that has no reference to any original. The love portrayed in dating reality shows is a perfect simulacrum. Contestants, raised in a media-saturated world, consciously or unconsciously reproduce romantic clichés they’ve seen in movies, TV series, and pop fiction. Their behavior doesn’t stem from internal feelings but from genre-based expectations. The result is a “copy without an original.” Viewers think they’re watching the formation of a real relationship, but in fact, they’re watching a recreation of media clichés.

Eshgh-e Abadi performs this function with a unique twist in the Iranian context. In a country where the portrayal of love in official media is nearly non-existent or deeply distorted, the simulation offered by the show becomes the most “real” reference available for much of the audience. It creates a hyperreality where behaviors suppressed in real society are displayed as norms.

For viewers exhausted by cultural restrictions, this hyperreality is more appealing than their lived reality. Contestants construct models based on global media romantic tropes, offering something the Iranian audience can identify with and project their repressed desires onto. The show becomes an alternative reality—more desirable than the one they inhabit.

Thus, Eshgh-e Abadi becomes a practical (if distorted) guidebook for a generation deprived of realistic relationship models. This has profound implications for how real-world relationships are shaped. Baudrillard warns that in hyperreality, the model precedes reality. For many young Iranians, there are no accessible public or cultural models for emotional relationships: the traditional one is rooted in religion, and the Western one feels culturally alien. Eshgh-e Abadi offers a new, hybrid model that appears both “Iranian” and “modern.” As a result, viewers may unconsciously adopt its dysfunctional communication styles and romantic definitions. Over time, a generation’s expectations for love, conflict resolution, and commitment may be shaped not by real experiences or healthy models but by a hyper-dramatized TV simulation. In this way, Eshgh-e Abadi does not reflect reality—it actively shapes the future.

Conclusion

Regardless of the creators’ intentions or the show’s content quality, Eshgh-e Abadi has become a cultural and social arena where Iran’s deep struggles with love, freedom, tradition, modernity, and censorship are reflected. It illustrates how the suppression and absence of honest representations of emotional relationships in official media has created the perfect conditions for the explosive success of a marginal product—one that, by depicting the “forbidden,” becomes both more attractive and more politically charged.

The core importance of Eshgh-e Abadi lies not in what it presents, but in the reaction it provokes. The show reflects a profound generational confusion: one that finds traditional relationship models inadequate yet remains hesitant to fully embrace global modern norms. With all its flaws and exaggerations, the program has impact precisely because it offers—even in a commercialized and imperfect way—a response to this identity crisis.

The real danger is that the boundary between spectacle and reality becomes blurred for younger viewers, and that this media simulation, rather than lived experience, unintentionally becomes the roadmap for defining love and commitment in the real world.