Alex Cooper's Love Overboard cancelled as creator audience fails to translate to TV (update*)

Alex Cooper's reality dating series has been cancelled after one season, highlighting the limits of how far a creator's built-in audience can carry projects beyond the formats that made them famous.

Love Overboard, a reality series following contestants competing for love aboard a luxury yacht, failed to draw the same attention as other Hulu unscripted originals, and will not return for a second season, Hulu confirmed. The show marked Cooper's first major move into unscripted television, arriving with the built-in audience of her Call Her Daddy podcast behind it.

That audience did not necessarily carry over, according to social media consultant Matt Navarra. Speaking to The Daily Influence, he said the cancellation reflects a shift in how the industry should be judging creator-led projects.

“Follower count is a marketing advantage, but it's not product market fit,” he said. “The question will increasingly be: does this creator's audience actually translate to this format?”

The cancellation comes as streaming platforms increasingly turn to creators for programming. Netflix and Hulu have both added creator-led formats to their slates, including Jay Shetty's On Purpose, Sean Evans' Hot Ones: Extra Heat and Emily Zhang's ExtraEmily: Creator Essentials, as platforms look to tap talent with audiences already built elsewhere.

Navarra does not expect the cancellation to slow that push.

“I don't think this slows that trend down at all. If anything, creators are going to become even more important to entertainment companies, and we're seeing that all of the time. But I do think the industry will become less impressed by raw follower numbers,” he said.

His views were echoed by Gary Orellana, SVP of influencer marketing at Dentsu Creative.

“I also would not take one cancellation as a sign that streamers have lost interest in creators. If anything, they are learning the difference between something that is creator-backed vs something that is truly creator-led,” he told The Daily Influence.

Orellana said the projects most likely to succeed will be built around what audiences already value in a creator, rather than simply attaching their name to a new format.

“Attaching a creator’s name can help generate initial interest, but long-term success still depends on the strength of the show itself.”

Navarra meanwhile noted audience conversion is also only part of the equation.

“Love Overboard was also competing in a very crowded dating reality market, where the format itself has to be strong enough to generate characters and moments and memes and conversation,” he said. “Social media can generate attention very quickly, but television has to generate habit, and I think that's the distinction.”

Cooper served as executive producer rather than host of the series, a distinction Navarra said mattered.

“This wasn't really asking her audience to watch Alex Cooper. It was asking them to watch a new format that carried her endorsement. That's a much tougher sell,” he said. “The parasocial relationship is typically with the creator. It doesn't automatically transfer to the IP that they produce, and that's the big lesson of the streamers.”

Despite the cancellation, Disney is said to remain committed to working with Cooper, with sources telling Page Six the studio is developing several other projects with her.

Cooper is no stranger to expanding into new formats. She is producing an adaptation of Hannah Grace's bestselling novel Icebreaker for Netflix, announced earlier this year through her production company Unwell Productions, run alongside her husband Matt Kaplan.

Not every venture has landed. Unwell's beverage line, Unwell Hydration, launched with Nestlé in 2025, is shutting down this autumn.

*The article was updated on 2 September 6pm GMT to include comments from Gary Orellana, SVP of influencer marketing at Dentsu Creative.