In their new Netflix series, the ex-royal couple know exactly who their audience is.
London
Fame at last! Two minutes into Netflix’s Harry & Meghan documentary, the headline of an article I wrote in January 2020 flashed on the screen. “Harry and Meghan Won’t Play the Game,” it said. Observing the departure of the duke and duchess of Sussex from the Royal Family—and from Britain itself—the story declared that “no royal has ever taken on the press quite so directly, much though they might have wanted to.”
By that, I meant that Harry and Meghan had rejected the traditional bargain between the British royals and the media: The press follows you around, and you have to put up with it, because it’s part of the job. Now, three years later, we can see the new rules by which Harry and Meghan are playing.
This six-part documentary is the tentpole of their reported $100 million multiyear production deal with Netflix. The director, Liz Garbus, is notionally independent, but the show makes frequent references to the couple telling “our story.”
The interviewees in the first three episodes, which were released today, are mostly personal friends.
Above all, Harry & Meghan is a story about the media, and about the modern belief that everyone has their own truth, derived from their lived experience. Harry brings up the idea of consent, and that is what separates this documentary from the standard tabloid treatment of his mother and his wife.
The couple are not averse to giving up their privacy—this documentary includes a blurry photograph of the moment Harry proposed, and video diaries of their departure from Britain—but they want to be in control of what they reveal.
Being part of the Royal Family meant submitting to a media machine that was not run solely for their benefit. (In the trailer for this series, Harry complains that his family is a “hierarchy,” which suggests that the whole concept of a monarchy might have eluded him.)
Everything here is about rejecting the royal narrative of their lives and building a new American fairy tale. The couple’s softball engagement interview in 2017 on the BBC was an “orchestrated reality show,” Meghan says in the third episode—a complete contrast to the casual, authentic chat she is now having in full hair and makeup with a documentary filmmaker.
“We were never allowed to tell our story,” she adds, as if her sit-down with Oprah Winfrey last year were a collective hallucination. Later on, Harry recounts in amazement that some people will accept huge amounts of money “to hand over photographs to create a story.” So true. How about $100 million?
Harry and Meghan have a rare talent—pointing out things that reasonable people would agree with, but doing so in the most annoying way possible. Racism is real. The tabloids were out of control during Harry’s childhood. Women marrying into the Royal Family undergo an extended misogynistic hazing.
The trouble is that the couple’s complaints are by now very well aerated, and Harry’s memoir, Spare, hasn’t even arrived yet. I could have predicted before watching this documentary which cherry-picked headlines and quotations would make an appearance. At least one of them—the reference to Meghan’s “exotic DNA”—was a ham-handed attempt to contrast her favorably with the pale and stale Windsors.
The first three episodes focus on the couple’s childhoods and courtship, along with the press coverage of Meghan before the wedding. If you watched the Oprah interview—if it even happened, because after all, Meghan has never told her story before—you learn very little new information here, except that Meghan is friends with her half sister Samantha’s daughter Ashleigh.
This is relevant to fans of the Markle Cinematic Universe, because Samantha nicknamed her half sister “Princess Pushy” and wrote a tell-all book in which she dramatically overstated their closeness. Ashleigh is here to back up Meghan’s version of events.
The documentary contains a lot of this stuff—evidence for the defense, you might call it. We get five minutes on how smart Meghan was at school, and how she wasn’t lying when she said she’d had no idea who Harry was before they met (she didn’t Google him, duh—she looked at his Instagram feed, which was full of pictures of elephants, and that is what made her agree to go on a date with him).
Unless you have a gaping void where your soul should be, you will notice that the couple do seem to be genuinely smitten with each other. Yet—and this is where it gets tricky—they also appear to be in love with the idea of being “Harry and Meghan” (or, as they might put it, “H and M”). There’s an uncomfortable Bonnie-and-Clyde, John-and-Yoko, folie-à-deux undercurrent throughout, as if taking on the Royal Family’s racism and the British press’s lack of scruples has become their mission.
Us against the world. That is a noble intention, but it has the side effect of centering their entire lives on two institutions that they despise.
Do they really want to spend the next 40 years as small, angry planets trapped in the gravitational pull of the Windsors? And have they not heard of diminishing returns? This plotline might sustain Harry’s book sales and one or two forgettable Netflix projects after that, but it ends with them delivering $150 birthday messages on Cameo by 2030.
