Love Island USA is currently airing its increasingly messy eighth season, and between Zach being filmed using a tongue scraper, Kenzie doing the splits at least once per episode, so much green slime that I’m genuinely wondering if Peacock has a deal with Nickelodeon, and some truly shocking re-couplings, things are getting chaotic. But the best part of Love Island USA is that all this chaos is happening in real time. Or, as close to real time as possible.

The show is famously filmed as it’s airing (meaning the couples are all currently in the Villa filming, like, right now), but obviously there’s a slight delay. How slight? Per Peacock, Love Island USA is filmed with “a roughly two‑day delay between events in Fiji and episode release, enabled by rapid editing and the time difference.”

The show films almost 24/7 (and will do so for around six weeks total), and Peacock notes that it “leverages Fiji’s 16-hour time difference from ET time to its advantage, as production uses those crucial hours to edit footage and produce episodes in time to drop nightly.”

Not only does the production team have to edit daily footage to create a cohesive episode, they also have to splice in the cast’s confessional interviews, and add in Iain Stirling’s voiceover narration. It’s a lot of work, but definitely a well-oiled machine!