Hot Picks: Twin Love

ITV Studios’ place in the dating series hall of fame is likely already secured with Love Island, 11 series of which have aired in the UK, but the super-indie has continued to develop formats that beef up its catalogue in the evergreen genre.

From TwoFour’s LBGTQ+ dating shows I Kissed A Boy and I Kissed A Girl to Lifted Entertainment’s My Mum, Your Dad, as well as multi-generational Let Love Rule from ITVS Netherlands and TEP, the producer-distributor is always looking for shows with unique takes or demographics.

Joining this pantheon is Twin Love from ITVS Netherlands. Revolving around identical twins, the series hits the notes of social experiment and dating and, as ITVS Creative Network managing director Mike Beale explains, builds on the distributor’s success with “launching dating shows into new niches of the genre”.

ITVS Netherlands has had previous success in house-based, social-experiment dating series with Let Love Rule.

In Twin Love, 10 sets of identical twins are split up, some for the first time in their lives, into two separate houses of ‘identical’ casts. They then embark on a quest for love on their own terms, without the influence of their twin.

During this period, the series aims to uncover if twins’ inherent similarities extend to romantic desires and impulses – will they pursue the same identical partners as their sibling, or will their choices be dramatically different?

“Following on from the huge success of Love Island, this takes the glamorous and aspirational dating show into a social experiment looking at how siblings might date the same type,” Beale says.

“It adds a real layer of social science to the world of dating. Viewers can enjoy the aspirational dating of young contemporaries but in full stereo.”

Twin Love has already had a splashy adaptation with ITV entertainment, the US unscripted label of ITVS’s US division, ITV America, made for Amazon Prime Video in the US and UK, but Beale suggests other territories are also hungry for more from the genre. And their voracious appetite for dating formats means they require “new ways into the subject”.

“Twin Love’s unique twist offers this, asking the ultimate question of whether they will choose their twin, or love,” he adds.

The US version of Twin Love – hosted by twins and WWE Hall of Fame wrestlers Brie and Nikki Garcia – was originally commissioned for Amazon Prime Video but streamed simultaneously in the US and UK on its then ad-supported platform Freevee, when it launched in 2023. The order came from Prime Video head of AVoD content Lauren Anderson.

ITV Studios’ ambition for the series is to primarily target larger scale free-to-air broadcasters and local streaming services, which can strip the series or play it out weekly.

Sitting among an array of dating titles in the ITV Studios catalogue, Beale points to Twin Love’s unique extension of the genre, which he believes will both complement its “growing success” and take it to new heights.