It took some effort, but I did manage to sit through the three episodes—nearly three hours—of the show Harry & Meghan that began streaming on Netflix a few days ago. The remaining three episodes will drop on Thursday.
Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, resigned as senior members of the British royal family in 2020 and moved to California. This show, co-produced by the couple’s Archewell Productions, is a carefully prepared version of their lives and beliefs. Which is that they have endured terrible persecution from all and sundry—the media, the British public and the royal family. But their air of victimhood and self-pity rings a bit hollow.
The central theses are the following. One, Harry was never allowed to have a “normal” life and has been trying to find himself since he left school by working hard to make the world a better place. Meeting Meghan opened his eyes and made him a more mature person. Two, Meghan Markle is a perfect role model for all young women on the planet—she was academically brilliant, extremely talented, goal-driven, filled with empathy and compassion from an early age, and has also been working hard since she was a schoolgirl to make the world a better place. Three, British media and sections of the public made life hell for Meghan because she is of mixed race—her father is white and mother black—and left the couple no option but to leave Britain.
It is a truth that a person born or married into the house of Windsor cannot have the life lived by an average citizen. The monarchy is an institution steeped in mores, traditions, codes of conduct and hierarchies. The media is obsessed with knowing every detail of what you do and say and wear and eat, and for a simple reason—the people lap it all up greedily with a strange mixture of awed veneration and lurid curiosity.
Yet it cuts both ways. These men and women are born into unimaginable privilege and entitlement and few have ever needed to develop any skills that commoners require to earn a living. Their relationship with the hungry media and the people at large is also hardly the black and white one of “prey and hunter”, as Harry describes it at least twice in the show.
As he himself explains, the royal family has a “rota” of “royal correspondents” from the newspapers, which is a sort of extension of the public relations office of the Windsors—they use these journalists to communicate to the people when they feel the need to. But this rota is also the instrument of an unspoken compact between the royals and the people. The royals live their lives in great luxury out of taxpayer money, and in return, as a Harry aide puts it, they are “expected to perform for the public”. The media, especially the tabloid press, records these performances on a daily basis. The royals have to stick to their side of deal duty even if some royal correspondents write nasty things about them once in a while.
Harry and Meghan found this intolerable after some time. Yes, the intrusiveness of media in search of salacious material is a serious problem, and some of the incidents narrated in the show cross all lines of decency. But is this scrutiny so different from what any global celebrity faces—from Angelina Jolie to Cristiano Ronaldo to Jay-Z? And crucially, Jolie and Ronaldo and Jay-Z are not living off taxpayer money.
Markle started getting chased 24/7 by the paparazzi the moment her relationship with Harry became public. The couple claims that racism soon reared its ugly head. Yet among the many sensational tabloid headlines that the Netflix documentary flashes on screen, one can hardly find one that is overtly racist. What one sees actually is frantic journalists trying to pry into Markle’s background, family and roots. This rat-race-on-steroids to break stories—and dig up dirt—led to inaccurate reporting and hurtful allegations, but there is no great racism there per se. However, Harry and Meghan were deeply disturbed.
When Harry’s elder brother William announced his engagement with Kate Middleton, she and her family too had been subjected to a storm of paparazzi fervour to feed public curiosity. The only direct racist abuse that Markle seems to have faced is in comments made by some unhinged people on Twitter. However, the show is intent on pushing the racist angle. The couple talk about this quite a bit, and there is a longish segment on the history of the British empire and its trade in African slaves. But we are also shown extensive news footage which tries to emphasize that the average British citizen—of all skin colours—adored Markle.
It is evident that Markle is trying to cast herself as the 21st century reincarnation of Harry’s mother Lady Diana. She, the subject of perhaps the most intense media glare in British history, died tragically in a car crash while being chased by reckless paparazzi when Harry was only 12. It is evident that Harry still carries the trauma of his loss and finds parallels between his mother and his wife. He felt that those distressful times were back again and he needed to protect Meghan.
While one sympathizes with him, are the two situations really the same? Diana could not have been prepared for the constant surveillance, simply because there was no precedent for it. But Markle would surely have anticipated this and it is clear that Harry had warned her. She would certainly have read up on Diana when she started seeing Harry. And she was already a popular television actor and activist used to being in the public gaze.
On the show, she claims that she did not even know that she had to curtsy when she met Harry’s grandmother, the queen. This is difficult to believe. Surely, if you were dating a British prince, you would at least make it a point to watch The Crown?
A vein of hypocrisy runs through the show. The couple denounce the institution of the British monarchy, yet from the day they declared their decision to abdicate, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have been trying to monetize their royal status to the hilt, including attempting to register “Sussex Royal” as a brand. They were not allowed to do so by the late queen.
In fact, they have nothing on their CV or any hope for their careers except the accident of Harry’s birth into the royal family. Even as they whine about their tough life, they have not given up their royal titles.
They quickly negotiated a massive deal with Netflix—some estimates peg it as high as $100 million, literally a king’s ransom. They talk of changing the world, but do not tell us how they plan to do so. In fact, they have come under fire for using private jets to travel the world to address conferences on climate change. They seem to be super-wealthy would-be-do-gooders willing to lend their names and the royal titles, which they retained, to causes they think are important, but as long as it does not interfere with their comfortable lifestyle in their $14-million nine-bedroom mansion that sits on 7.5 acres of lush grounds and is surrounded by pine and cypress trees. At one point, we see Meghan being helped to put on a new dinner gown by as many as four people.
The show is an expertly scripted and rehearsed image-building exercise—this is how Harry and Meghan want the world to see them, as victims who are working together to rebuild their lives. A clutch of chosen friends, associates and family members who are interviewed are also very much on message. But like all such exercises, many parts of it do not ring true.
At one point, Meghan talks about the official media interview that Buckingham Palace had organized for the couple after they announced their engagement. She laughingly refers to it as a “well-orchestrated reality TV show”. Many viewers will surely spot the irony in that description. For this Netflix show is also exactly that, including pre-vetted questions.
The difference is that in the engagement interview, the two spoke about how happily they were looking at their coming married life. On the current show, much of the time, they are using their resentments against the royal family and the media to project themselves as two young martyrs to the system. One wonders how many in the audience will buy this message.
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