Ready For Love

For three weeks I've been trying to articulate what I dislike about NBC's Ready For Love, the newest foray into reality dating shows. Tonight is my last chance. On the strength (weakness?) of three episodes, the show has apparently been canceled.

Here goes:

1) There's a mindless fun to The Bachelor. It's clearly not reality, but the fakeness is entertaining. Conversely, Ready For Love tries to be everything, and fails. It tries to be a REAL reality dating show, yet it's inevitable that you end up with the same cattiness. Like it or not some people play mind games when they're dating, others are shallow, and still others are melodramatic. Yet they want you to believe that these are real people. They're not. One of the band members a band member from the Plain White T's, the others are various movers and shakers, or people from the bachelors' past. Thus it becomes even more fake.

2) RFL tried to be different by having the female contestants coached by professional matchmakers -- the credentials of the matchmakers apparently being that they're semi-famous and (in one case) that they have a British accent. But all they really do is state the obvious ("Maybe you shouldn't have been so catty and manipulative") and balance that out with vague proclamations about dating ("Romance is really a dance").

3) Instead of one bachelor, there are three. It makes for such rapid-fire scenes and dates and confessional, you feel disconnected from everyone. They blow through an elimination scene in 30 seconds, when it's obvious that the conversation went much longer than that. So we feel like we're missing everything.

4) The hosts -- Giuliana and Bill Rancic -- occasionally pepper the show will silly comments about their own dating life. And it's awkward. And, despite its awkwardness, nobody cares.

I could go on with other reasons, but I'm tired, the show is almost over, and so I won't. The bottom line is, since this apparently is the final episode, I won't get to see who ends up winning. And I can't really say that I care.