Sasha was always going to win Sam's heartFans' fury over Bachelorette spoilerNetwork Ten takes Daily Mail to courtSasha's red shirt gave it away
According to rival TV executives, The Bachelorette was destined to be a fizzer. No wonder Channel Ten ordered a truncated five-week season, they sniggered. By flipping the format of the original Bachelor - and having one woman choose from a group of blokes - you relinquish the things viewers love most: catfights and mascara-streaked meltdowns.
But those executives were wrong.  
In Thursday night's finale, Sam Frost picked 30-year-old construction manager Sasha Mielczarek as her prince. A perfect TV ending after last year's saga, in which Frost was chosen - then dumped - by bachelor Blake Garvey, who soon revealed he was in love with second runner-up Louise Pillidge. 
Mielczarek is not the only one smitten with Frost. Ten's bosses have good reason to love her, too. 
More than six million capital city residents - that's more than one-third of Australia's metropolitan population - watched at least some of The Bachelorette. Every episode has been the top-trending topic on Twitter, and the show easily out-rated the first two seasons of The Bachelor. Once time-shifted ratings are added to its current metropolitan average audience of 981,000, it will almost certainly top this year's Bachelor, too.
Far from being turned off by a lack of women bitching about each other, Australians have embraced the series.
Of course, fewer women does not equal less tension, despite the archaic mindsets of certain TV executives. Indeed, the most compellingly bitchy contestant we've seen - on any version of this show - is David the international model. Wherever he trod, he left a trail of dropped jaws and promo-ready drama in his wake. 
Granted, there has been less sniping among the male contestants in The Bachelorette. This has nothing to do with any Mars-Venus nonsense, though. Frost herself set the standard. Right from the start, douchebag behaviour (especially David's) was called out and punished. Her suitors quickly learned they'd be shown the door if they acted like tools.
"She's not going to laugh off something that offends her," Ten's entertainment boss Stephen Tate said when the series launched. "She's going to put the person in their place straight away, and it makes a great show."
Compare this with Garvey, who was so absorbed in himself he failed to notice the minor crises erupting around him. Often, he'd whine about how his multiple girlfriends were mysteriously reluctant to declare they loved him - right before he'd send one packing. Gosh, what could possibly be stopping them? 
In The Bachelor, viewers were most interested in the female contestants. The male protagonists were essentially Ken dolls around which the action unfolded. In The Bachelorette, however, it was Frost who captured our attention. She was decent and likeable. Viewers were on her side, hoping she'd get her happy ending.
This is not to suggest we blindly accept the entire premise of the program. Most of us think that auditioning potential life partners on TV and evicting the losers is a little strange. As is an all-white cast in 2015. 
Yet The Bachelorette doesn't depend on the hoary old "women at war" trope to succeed. Its appeal, in part, stems from its comical magnification of everyday dating mishaps. Richie, for instance, is actually not the kind of guy who favours naff phrases such as "cool bananas". But when he first met Sam, he blurted it out, twice. And who among us hasn't humiliated ourselves in front of a crush by saying something dumb, then instantly repeated it - at which point the only option is to poke our tongue back into our mouth with our fingers?
More importantly, The Bachelorette worked because it does what reality shows are supposed to do: it entertains its audience. 
Curiously, this makes a lot of people mad, often because they deem these programs to be "trivial". Undoubtedly, many of them are. But grown men chasing a ball around a patch of grass while people yell at them is equally trivial. We don't get cross at sport, though. We accept it as a legitimate diversion. 
To its fans, The Bachelorette is a wonderfully trivial diversion. We post on Facebook about that thing Sam said to Richie in the park, while chuckling at the music the producers used to dial up the drama - a score that belongs in a scene from a David Attenborough documentary in which an arctic wolf is closing in on a doomed caribou.
We take a swig every time someone is chastised for Keeping Their Walls Up, or interrogated about whether they are Here For The Right Reasons. 
And the candles. All those candles. Once you learn there are literally 10,000 of them, they leap into the foreground and become the real stars of the show.
Sure, The Bachelorette rated without having women at each other's throats. Happily, those network executives were mistaken. Before we ascribe its success to certain theories of gender or power, however, it's worth remembering the basics. 
Ten broadcast a show that viewers liked. It was undemanding, yet engaging. It offered ample opportunity for smart-arse jokes on social media. Much of the fun was in pretending to take it seriously.
The Bachelorette was, by turns, trivial, hilarious, utterly enraging and surprisingly sweet. That's why we loved it. And that's okay.
Twitter: @Michael_Lallo
mlallo@fairfaxmedia.com.au