Why ‘Love Is Blind’ and ‘The Ultimatum’ Are the New Standard-Bearers for Romantic Reality TV (Column)

variety.com:

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticA great frustration for me as a critic of television, and a viewer of television, has been the ongoing dominance of “The Bachelor” franchise — a series that requires herculean endurance on the part of the viewer to find moments of genuine oddity.

Over the course of punishingly long episodes, “The Bachelor” tends toward the most rote sorts of provocation, placing contestants who have been cast for their ability to approximate normalcy into extreme situations.After all, “The Bachelor” runs on happy endings, and so we must be rooting for its leads (the Bachelor or Bachelorette, and the credible options for them to pick at the end) to really find love.

The outcome is preordained, and the show exists to force its contestants toward the proposal. But in order to keep us interested, the gauntlet of humiliation contestants must go through on the way to the altar gets amped-up: These basically level-headed people must be destabilized more and more by a show that seems consistently unclear as to how to balance the search for love with the search for attention.

Which is why Netflix’s booming Lachey-hosted empire is so welcome. Nick and Vanessa Lachey emcee “Love Is Blind,” the smash dating series; they now take on “The Ultimatum” (launching Wednesday), a series from the same creator, Chris Coelen, that inverts the “Love Is Blind” formula to great success.