The Bachelor's use of unedited, dual-camera footage was a cruel new reality TV "innovation"

Slate

Last night's finale "made for insanely great and awful television," says Willa Paskin. "The whole episode was beyond canny," she adds. "The decision to use unedited footage would have made this a buzzy episode in and of itself, but it was a choice that fit the material: Only at full length do we get to see the accruing aggression of Arie’s attentiveness, the way his hanging around becomes so unappealingly claustrophobic. It also made the most out of the material, stretching what might have been a five-minute sequence to 20 minutes, while milking Becca’s relative restraint for all it was worth, getting to be unquestionably 'real' and lighting up social media with an 'innovation' in a long-running franchise."

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