The Bachelorette

The premiere of The Bachelorette was good!...Appealingly, Trista is also filled with desire herself. Nothing about her is aloof; she's upfront about her lifelong loneliness, her wish for a husband, her fantasies of motherhood. [9 Jan 2003]

I disliked the two editions of The Bachelor intensely -- those tacky 'rose ceremonies' and the intellectual nullity, the sheer conversational sliminess of both the bachelors! However, I am enthralled by The Bachelorette, and why should I try to excuse my change of heart and mind with fancy critical justifications? It's because I think Trista is pretty hot and very cool in the way she controls her own little corner of the TV universe.

Based on how sleepy and slurry the men become, it took a loooong time for producers to get enough usable footage from the opening-night cocktail party to fill the premiere. But the drunker the dudes get, the funnier they become. [31 May/7 Jun 2013, p.130]

Socially, that reversal is a profoundly stupid idea. There's too much sexual stereotyping around, too much of a lingering sense that what makes a man a playboy makes a woman a slut. And The Bachelorette is hardly trying to explode those cliches. With its hokey title (a word no one ever uses) and its smarmy attitude (viewers are going to be looking for signs of sluttiness), this gimmicky series plays right into those stereotypes while pretending not to...The show also promises to be as irresistibly entertaining as "The Bachelor."

Without Bentley;s cruel cunning, the rest of the show has played out predictably. [1 Aug 2011, p.39]

Women will like the show because it's empowering and because television, for once, presents guys to ogle. Men will like it because Trista's pretty attractive herself. [9 Jan 2003, p.8]

The final minutes of the show, when the rejects got to display their disappointment, were the hour's best, but that was only the beginning. [9 Jan 2003, p.91]