Dejana

I felt there was a bit of a "vibe" between Future Deja and the guy she asked to cover for her, when she excused herself from the group. Maybe he's the father? In real life, several celebrity relationships/weddings/pregnancies/births have slipped under the radar during the pandemic. Especially if a star wants to keep their private lives largely to themselves, it's been much easier to do that for the last year. The celebs who want to be seen still manage it, of course. The paparazzi exclusives of new celebrity babies fresh from the hospital seems very much out of the aughts; the more respectable outlets don't run those sorts of photos of children now, and even the Daily Mail would blur the kids' faces. Even before Covid, paps are not nearly as prevalent in LA as they were 10-15 years ago.

Why Clare Crawley "Finally Caved" and Reunited With Dale Moss After Their Breakup Dale is so desperate to talk to Clare again and get back in her good graces, but she's flying across the country to see him? *sighs* He just wants to rehab his image after the signed Instagram breakup post and totally spontaneous paparazzi Q&As didn't go over well.

His relationship advice book had a rule about holding off on sex for 90 days. I don't think a whole Bachelor Season takes that long to film. His commentary on Fantasy Suite Week would be interesting, to say the least...

Wow, BBC coverage of the controversy. Talk about a damage control interview backfiring! Truly, the most dramatic season ever... The Bachelor Diversity Campaign is calling for Chris' permanent ouster from the franchise: https://www.instagram.com/p/CLSPVKhjGuh/?igshid=1ahkoip38pekc

A lot of those past contestants are only issuing statements because they're getting called out by fellow alumni who do regularly post about social issues, and also the segment of the fanbase that demands activism from Bachelor Nation influencers. I don't mind knowing where people stand on issues, but I don't see the value of bullying bystanders into empty words on issues they couldn't care less about in actuality, and that don't directly involve them. Here's another Chris interview from 2015, where he's promoting a romance novel he "wrote" and gets asked about the franchise's track record with racial diversity, and well... There's too much to quote it all here, but he said Juan Pablo being a Venezuelan who "didn't really speak English all that great" was "as diverse as you could possibly get". While the show does aim to improve with diversity... The franchise did this to themselves. If they'd just been more open-minded all along and had their first minority Bachelor in the aughts, or anytime before 2017, really, you wouldn't have had fans looking up the lead's voter registration and coming at TPTB with a 10-point diversity initiative that must be addressed, or else, or saying this guy isn't the representation we wanted. Meanwhile, a big segment of the viewers couldn't care less about any of these issues and resent people who try to "politicize" the show. The Netflix dating shows are examples of how they can be diverse in a variety of ways (race, sexuality, different abilities, etc) while still being fluffy reality at their heart, but TPTB here have been on top a long time and gotten pretty entrenched in their ways. I don't think either side is ultimately going to get everything they want out of the show.

Twenty years of media training out of the window, just because he saw Confederate cosplay and social media likes being attacked and couldn't simply say, "We should hear from Rachael, but the franchise doesn't condone her behavior." Now he's on timeout from his gig and has likely caused a big problem for his girlfriend at her job. Lauren Zima continuing to be Entertainment Tonight's top correspondent for the franchise and hosting a weekly recap show despite dating the host has always been a conflict of interest, but no one really took The Bachelor seriously enough to care. I wonder if "Roses and Rosé" is also going on hiatus, or if we'll be grabbing our glasses for a Very Special Episode this Tuesday... * The Bachelor Data Instagram account has a lot of interesting info/stats about airtime and social media growth of the contestants. It's mostly focused on this season, but also does historical comparisons on things like how far a person has gone if they get the First Impression Rose or the "Pretty Woman" shopping spree date.

Haven't his health problems coincided with his school becoming embroiled in controversy? * Ma'am, you are not going to win a settlement for emotional distress. You're not even going to win the court of public opinion...

After the Final Rose was going to be awkward anyway, given Matt's F1, but before Chris made himself part of the story, he would have largely steered the conversation away from the elephant in the room. Now, whomever they get to host this thing will ask much tougher questions of Rachael and Matt, should he stick with her. Also, I wonder if Katie as Bachelorette is still happening? It hasn't officially been announced and picking someone who finished eleventh or whatever, when most of the Top 10 runners-up this season are BIPOC, is not a good look for the show right now. I thought they would go with Abigail, who did make a strong first impression and goes far into the season, and would also (cynically) check off a couple of diversity boxes for TPTB (deaf and also half-Asian).

Whoa, they're putting Chris Harrison on hiatus! Can't get his Instagram post to embed, but here it is: https://www.instagram.com/p/CLPmjrFgEv8/?igshid=12y4tw9cim63l I thought they would just have him tape some apologetic intro for next week's show and that would appease the majority of the fanbase. Wonder who's going to host After the Final Rose now...

All Chris had to do was say that Rachael attending the plantation ball was bad, but he wants to hear what she has to say for herself before writing her off completely. Harrison has a long history of questionable racial comments about the franchise through the years without really being called on it, and I guess he thought this interview would be more of the same. Reality Steve has implied Rachael has wanted to address the controversy for weeks but the show wasn't letting her and/or wanted to limit her to 100 words and it had to be approved by TPTB first. Other ex-contestants have said nothing in the contract would prevent them from addressing things that happened before the show. Whatever the truth is, Rachael released her apology and it undercuts the Chris Harrison "nobody knew racism was bad 5 years ago in 2018" defense. I wonder if she went rogue? The women of color from the season also released a statement about Chris and broader racism in the franchise (they've posted it to their individual social media accounts). It's one thing for Bachelor Nation alumni to comment but another for people still in the farm system, hoping for spots on Paradise. I guess TPTB can't sue them all... I wonder if all this media controversy surrounding Rachael makes it more obvious to the non-spoiled that she is F1 (even more than Matt telling her that he was falling in love halfway into the season, lol). If she'd just been Top 9, they would happily throw her under the bus, instead of trying (and failing) to sweep her racist history under the rug. Somewhere, the UnREAL writers are saying, "I told you so!"

There have been "celebrities" with dubious claims to fame for many decades, but now there are more outlets for them to be thrust into the limelight, and far more moneymaking potential than in years past. The Diet Coke Guy or Rula Lenska would be the face of a product for a huge corporation, but now people on social media can rake in the millions for themselves. Fabio parlayed being a model for romance novel covers into years of endorsements and becoming a household name. The pageant winners and "socialites" of yore morphed into the "celebutantes" of the aughts and influencers of today (though social media stars come in many ages/forms). D-listers of old were relegated to game ahow panels or Love Boat guest spots or maybe Playboy, for the women, but now there's little shame in doing direct-to-streaming movies, and you can add a social media presence on top of it. There are a lot of avenues to fame, and when media outlets care about getting traffic above all else, it matters less whether the person generating clicks is a movie star or a TikTok sensation.

John David Washington has already had to defend the age gap with Zendaya for Malcolm & Marie and the movie isn't even out yet. He points out that she has been in show business much longer than him. Also, the movie was her idea, so if anything, she picked him. The story is about a director and his aspiring actress girlfriend, so it's not like the age difference is unrealistic. It apparently gets addressed in the movie. Another thing is that Zendaya got her big break as a Disney kid and still plays a teenager on a TV show now, so some people can't deal with her playing an adult (I guess this is why there wasn't a huge objection to Zendaya/Zac Efron in The Greatest Showman, because he's also an ex-Disney kid). People say she looks like a child next to JDW, which I think is ridiculous. The near-ubiquity of twentysomethings playing teenagers in TV shows/movies for decades has skewed ideas of how teenagers actually look in real life. It's also funny to see the Zendaya fans saying, "No one complained about Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook!" I guess some of them really are too young to remember the years of people saying JLaw was getting roles that should have gone to older women, bless... I get that large age gaps in films, if they only go in one direction, can be indicative of a system that easily discards women while endlessly propping up men. OTOH, adults in different age ranges can have a good rapport and even find love, if they want. Maybe they'll work as an onscreen couple; maybe they won't. Frankly, more annoying (to me, anyway) is the subset of social media which, I swear, is "disturbed" and "uncomfortable" with any age gap greater than 2-3 years. I mean, good for you that you personally never ever want to date anyone that you couldn't have theoretically attended middle school with, but that does not mean every relationship with an age gap is grooming or has a troubling power imbalance. Do you want to raise the age of adulthood to 25 or what? And IMO not enough people entertain the idea that maybe it's the men who are too old for some of these roles. For the last decade or two, Hollywood has treated men like they are boys until they are 30, so no wonder onscreen (and offscreen) pairings work out how they do. Even in the Golden Age, you would get the 50+ men with a woman in her 20s, but they still let guys in their 20s play actual adults in mainstream, big budget movies.

It's probably a screenwriting thing; exchanging goodbyes would be considered wasted words/time that could go to some other thing that moves the story forward.

The trailer is even better (worse?), though it depends on your perspective, I guess:

The tabloids moralizing about The Crown now were the ones who gleefully spilled all the sordid royal gossip back in the day. The papers are probably worried about being depicted poorly in upcoming seasons and how that may affect their own bottom line. More and more British celebrities are speaking out about how awful and unethical the tabloids are over there, and any examination of the shady press in the 1990s will remind people that little has changed, and the reasons why Harry and Meghan bolted. The show is fictional but all the bellyaching only makes viewers want to seek out books and documentaries, and people on Twitter who lived through this era are more than happy to fill in the gaps of things the show didn't mention. In the past three weeks, so many sweet, summer children just learned about what was delicately called Camillagate (which actually occurred during the S4 timeframe). Yes, Diana had her affairs and her own leaked embarrassing phone call, too, but she’s not here now, and it's not so much her side trying to convince everyone that the show is exaggerating everything. Monarchy is an old-fashioned institution by nature, but even within its framework, some people are better than others at adapting to the times. A savvy PR person would tell Charles and Camilla and their defense brigade to shut up and take the L about Season 4. Let social media vent for a few weeks and then people will be preoccupied by the next outrage. Some people will never forgive Charles and Camilla or like them very much, but complaining about a TV show being unfair to them isn't going to help with that.

The Bachelor does have a bigger budget (it gets higher ratings, generally), but I think The Bachelorette being their first attempt at filming in a bubble put it at a disadvantage. TPTB probably weren't sure how smoothly filming would go, if/when it would be disrupted, and stuck to Southern California out of an abundance of caution. Then, as things turned out okay at the La Quinta (in terms of pandemic safety at least), they could take stock of what was working and what wasn't, and feel more comfortable branching out to another part of the country for the next Bachelor bubble. The timing sucks for the season first out of the gate. * Bekah was 21 when Arie's season was filming and it was big thing some of the other women in the house held against her, as someone that age was "too young" and "not ready" to settle down, especially with Arie being 36 at the time. It was played like this shocking secret and threw Arie for a loop when he found out. The funny thing is that Bekah entered a relationship shortly after that season and she’s now a mother of two. * There was the lingerie pillow fight on Peter's season, women riding tractors in bikinis on the Chris Soules season, and on Ben H's season, there was a stage performance date where the "villain" of the house ended up in a costume that was just a thong on the bottom. IIRC, she was not comfortable with it. On Hannah's Bachelorette season, there was the so-called local tradition of nude couples bungee jumping (online, people familiar with the region were saying, "Yeah no, that is not a thing there."). The strip dodgeball was degrading; bad sexual politics are the norm for this franchise.

Yes, it's a family picture from Archie's christening that includes Diana's sisters Jane and Sarah. This is Tiggy nowadays: In her younger days:

Princess Diana Confessed That She Would Have Gone Back to Prince Charles "In a Heartbeat" Princess Diana and Prince Charles Were Past the ‘Ugly Stage’ of Their Relationship at the Time of Her Death

Conspiracy theories are scandalous and exciting (not to the people implicated, obviously), so they persist. I'm mildly surprised the theories haven't evolved to Philip somehow being Hewitt's father... On the Squidgy tapes (recorded circa 1990), Diana worries about getting pregnant and references a soap opera where a woman has a baby resultung from an extramarital affair. I know people aren't always careful about these things, but I always thought that if she'd been down that road already and "gotten away with it," so to speak, she'd be on industrial/triple strength contraception going forward. There wasn't social media back then but the old-school press was plenty pervasive, and the risk of being caught was very high. The same people who insist the Firm murdered Diana don't seem to think they would have bumped off Harry Hewitt one way or another (obviously not advocating this!), and have arranged it in a way that made the Windsors sympathetic in the eyes in the public.

Definitely, seeing the 1980s rehashed dredges up a lot of fresh anger for people who watched it unfold the first time. I also think a not-small share of the social media outrage happening now is from people too young to remember Charles/Diana when it happened, or they started paying attention to the Royals when Kate or Meghan married into the family. They might know that Charles was in love with Camilla but married Diana, there was a public, bitter divorce and Diana died when William and Harry were young. Seeing it play out, how 32-year-old Charles was still emotionally involved with Camilla and wanted her to be friends with his 19-year-old fiancée...this is a generation that cares about age gaps and power dynamics in relationships, so the particulars of Diana/Charles/Camilla are going to go over especially badly with the younger set. I cannot count how many tweets I've seen from people who cannot believe Charles really said, "Whatever in love means," during his engagement interview, and thought the writers had to have made that part up. They are probably familiar with the William/Kate, Harry/Meghan engagement interviews and the notion of either prince: 1) being in his early 30s but engaged to a 19 year old, and 2) openly noncommittal about actually being in love with their future wife, on camera... To contemporary eyes, it would not only be an unfathomable PR disaster, but a terrible way to treat someone. It would get the guy "cancelled", at least temporarily. It's one thing to read about what really happened on a season in an article but another for viewers to see the real Charles saying, "Whatever in love means," or hearing Diana in her own voice, talking about this period of her life. It greatly undercuts all the protests that the show is fiction. It is, but no more than any previous season and before, it felt like we could go five minutes without being constantly reminded that what we are watching isn't real. I bet Season 5 will show a less flattering side to Diana, but to some, whatever she did later is a result of how Charles (and Camilla) treated her first. Is that the entire truth? Is it fair to Charles and Camilla? Maybe not, but the people looking at the Charles/Diana marriage from a fresh perspective in the 2020s might not be in the mood to handwave how it played out as things being different then, and let's let bygone be bygones.

Camilla's great-grandmother was a mistress to Edward VII, which Camilla supposedly mentioned to Charles IRL when they met in the 1970s. That's probably how she saw their relationship going in those days, and didn’t want anything more. As much as Charles may have loved Camilla as a young man, by all real-life accounts, he also very much enjoyed being an eligible bachelor. People point out that Elizabeth got her way in marrying Philip even when he wasn't thought to be "suitable", and Charles could have done the same with Camilla. However, in a lot of ways, Elizabeth was tougher than Charles, and it helped that Philip wasn't averse to the proposition or its timing. Elizabeth also wasn't brought up thinking that she was entitled to have lovers if she wanted, so it was either marriage to Philip or nothing. Charles and Camilla both knew they could still have a relationship of a sort, even if they both ended up marrying other people--family history told them so. It makes for a more dramatic show if Charles is daydreaming of marrying Camilla in the late 1980s, regardless of whether he was actually known to have felt that way at the time.

Diana hugged the child with AIDS in front of the media and her New York tour in general led to enormously positive personal press (many of those "man on the street" interviews featured people saying Diana was different/better than the rest of the Royal Family). Camilla saw the reports and had the mini-freakout to Charles that she could never measure up to Diana's image in the eyes of the world. This led to Charles blaming Diana for "hurting Camilla", because he viewed his wife's public displays of compassion as a showy thing solely done to make herself look good and the Royals/Camilla seem like unfeeling monsters in comparison. Charles (at least the version on the show) was so wrapped up in his own self pity and jealousy of her popularity and Camilla, that he couldn't fathom Diana having sincere motives for anything that she did. Diana and Charles also had very different personalities in general: he's presented as unable to wrap his head around the way she could connect to the public and sees it as unbecoming for a royal, besides.

I guess the writers just wanted to streamline it all: Charles loved Camilla but was pressured to marry Diana, so there was need to complicate the story beyond that. Mountbatten here is primarily a de facto paternal figure, so pushing his granddaughter on Charles, though historically accurate, maybe makes him less sympathetic to unfamiliar audiences. Plus, the cousin aspect has the potential to needlessly weird viewers out, when their failed relationship is not really that important to the show's overall narrative. I think there could have been at least a montage about the "playboy prince" days, but that would undercut the show's version of Charles desperately pining for Camilla the whole time. They have ten episodes to cover 11 years, so there's no time for the other women he proposed to before Diana or his other married friend in this era, Lady Tryon aka Kanga.

‘Charlie’s Angels’: Who did Prince Charles date before Lady Diana Spencer? A short history and gallery of some of the prince's reported exes: This incident was mentioned in Diana, Her True Story: Charles ignoring the "official" woman in his life for Camilla was a well worn pattern. The Queen Mother's birthday was August 4, so Charles and Anna Wallace split in the summer of 1980. Prince Charles Proposed to Another Woman Before His Engagement to Princess Diana—And She Turned Him Down: I wonder if the show ever considered introducing Amanda as a character? It's smoother narratively that they didn't, even without the second cousin aspect.