On the latest season of the Bachelorette, Clare Crawly and Dale Moss became engaged after a whopping three and a half episodes and left to start their lives together, but the reaction from viewers has been less than warm. A program normally committed to pumping out the perfect love story with the perfect lead has seemingly created one of the most disliked Bachelorettes in franchise history. Although fans have said good riddance to Clare and her new fiance, I believe the hate that she has received is unwarranted and a gross result of a bad edit and producer instigation.
In episode 3, we see the men who have been cast as possible suitors for Clare waiting around for their bachelorette for what seems like hours while she talks to former Bachelorette DeAna Pappas. Their conversation appears to revolve around Dale Moss, but later on Instagram live, DeAna reveals, “We talked for probably two and a half hours and unfortunately, you see two minutes of us just talking about Dale, Dale, Dale… But really, we talked about everything. We talked about all of the guys.” Of course, the producers can’t keep the full conversation in the final edit of the episode, but there was a clear agenda behind what parts they did leave in.
After this, Clare tells the guys that the date is cancelled, news that bums them out, and consequently paints Clare as a flake. After all, it is her call whether dates happen or not, right? Well… yes, actually. What we don’t see is that the producers had planned for the group date to be a game show where the men demonstrated their knowledge of… ahem, gynecological topics. According to DeAna, Clare felt uncomfortable doing this following the strip dodgeball situation, where the men had expressed feeling humiliated. The producers leave out the part where Clare advocates for the men, yet again painting her as the antagonist of the season.
If we take La Quinta into consideration, the filming ground for the season during the pandemic, all contestants reportedly quarantined on site for two weeks preceding their appearances. How long did Clare film before her and Dale decided this was it? According to Us Weekly, this figure is close to two weeks. Interestingly enough, Tayshia Adams, the new Bachelorette stepping in for Claire, also needed to quarantine. This would mean that Tayshia had to have been called in to quarantine somewhere around the very beginning of Clare’s filming. It may have even followed the night Clare and Dale met for the very first time, and she says, “I definitely feel like I just met my husband.” Could it be that producers saw this as an opportunity for drama, and called in Tayshia while they schemed to hook the two up for an early exit? It is speculation, but the timelines are too similar.
While I don’t believe Clare to be the perfect lead, it’s my opinion that production heavily portrayed her in a way that would make viewers favor the men of the season. It seems sinister, but the producers may have felt the need to manipulate the situation so that we had the mens’ backs during the Clare-to-Tayshia transition and eventually make us huge Tayshia fans (which could have been done by Tayshia alone). To believe that she was a bad Bachelorette is to fall for the production’s extensive efforts to make her the antagonist of the season. Clare came onto the show to find love, and that’s exactly what she did.