Andrew Palmer has watched a decade of The Bachelor(ette) and confesses in earnestness that the show has "taught me as much about myself and the world as all other TV shows and Edmund Spenser combined":
No TV show is sadder than The Bachelor(ette). I think we can say that after these ten years. It’s not just the commodification of love, though there’s that. It goes beyond all those shots of men and women alone on balconies, leaning on railings, gazing into the distance, wondering about where they fit in the world.
We enter every season ready to laugh and have fun. There are drinking games. We know better than to believe these people will find love. But then, usually around the fourth or fifth episode, provided the Bachelor(ette) is sincere-seeming enough ("It really can work," says Emily, "you just have to be open to it"), we start to wonder if maybe these people might, in some meaningful sense of the word, actually be falling in love—a love less real than the love we’ve known, premised as theirs so obviously is on self-delusion and cliché and the conventions of society and reality television (stale dichotomy), but love nonetheless. … I challenge you to watch all of season 15 of The Bachelor and not believe that both Emily and Brad feel their love is real, which can be the only measure of love’s reality.
The Dish 