Why Netflix overpaid for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle documentary – Maureen Callahan

Netflix overpaid.

As with nearly everything Harry and Meghan do, ‘Volume I’ of their Netflix docuseries is pompous, mean, self-aggrandizing, and yet more of their specialty: Over-promise and under-deliver.

The much-ballyhooed ‘Harry & Meghan’ has landed with a thud. The reviews have been scathing: The Hollywood Reporter rightly says the show ‘takes a lot of time to reveal very little.’ The Atlantic asks if Harry and Meghan ‘really want to spend the next 40 years as small angry planets trapped in the gravitational pull of the Windsors?’ And Variety says, ‘The Sussexes surprise us yet again with just how narrow their vision of fame is, how pinched and unimaginative their presence on the world stage has become.’

Finally, the karmic wheels of justice are turning towards these two self-pitying, untalented, ungrateful hypocrites. No one deserves it more. Let’s savor it, shall we?

There’s nothing scandalous here — except, of course, the casual cruelty Harry and Meghan, World’s Greatest Bleeding Heart Philanthropists and Humanitarians, mete out to their nearest and dearest.

It’s stunning. It’s heartless. And, as is their trademark, it’s utterly lacking in self-awareness. As Harry marvels late in Episode 3: ‘It’s amazing what people will do when offered a large amount of money.’

You mean like selling out your family, who have loved and supported you, financially and otherwise, your entire life? Like publicly accusing them of racism? Like secretly filming yourselves behind palace walls, long before you claimed you had any idea you’d be Megxiting and monetizing, videotaping and photographing your most private, intimate moments — like Harry’s marriage proposal, which Meghan seems to have secretly recorded on her phone without Harry’s knowledge — and saving all that ostensibly sacred stuff for a $100 million Netflix deal?

Like that?

Or like the moment when Harry says of Meghan’s father — a man who raised Meghan largely on his own, who contributed to the cost of her private elementary school and college — ‘She doesn’t have a father’ — ?

This is as cutting a remark as Harry’s deeply implied accusation here that his brother, the future king, couldn’t marry for love.

If there was any hope of reconciliation with William, Harry just torched it.

And what has Kate ever done to deserve such bile from her brother-in-law? These are the parents of his niece and nephews, his children’s cousins — but as we know, Harry and Meghan play checkers, not chess, and they play with cold hands and even colder hearts. They don’t think or strategize long term. They’re all about the twisted, short-term dopamine hits they get from acting out their never-ending victimhood.

To watch this series is to witness a Hitchcockian folie à deux minus the wit, élan or sophistication. It’s like a soft-focus Oprah interview padded out with historical B-roll meant to support H&M’s claims of racism within the monarchy — claims that go nowhere and B-roll that bores.

Nearly three years after the Oprah sit-down and three hours into this Netflix series, we still have no smoking gun about which senior royal is racist or bullied Meghan or didn’t care that she was suicidal.

Meghan contradicts herself a fair amount here, in one case backpedaling on her original story that she didn’t really know much about Harry before they met.

Initially, she said they met on a blind date, now she says they met through Instagram.

You can watch the wheels turning in Harry’s head as he tries to square this circle. He surely has practice, living as he has in this alternate reality for years now.

As for the tea spilled here, it’s cold, weak and bitter. Let’s listen as Meghan, sitting in an enormous room sheathed in pastel draperies and soft lighting — a halo effect, if you will, for our greatest living saint since Angelina Jolie — talk about having to dim her light, her beauty, her overpowering star wattage, so as not to outshine Kate or the Queen.

Reader, brace yourself: Meghan Markle couldn’t wear bold colors in public.

The much-ballyhooed ‘Harry & Meghan’ has landed with a thud. The reviews have been scathing. (Above)  ‘Rotten Tomatoes’ shows poor critic and audience reviews for the Netflix series

Well, not so much couldn’t — wouldn’t. Meghan is just that much of a humanitarian. Allow her to explain, in an interview clearly shot before the Queen’s death (not that her advanced age or Prince Philip on his deathbed ever stopped these two mercenaries).

‘To my understanding,’ Meghan says, ‘you can’t ever wear the same color as Her Majesty if there’s a group event. But then you also shouldn’t be wearing the same color as one of the other more senior members of the family. So I was like’ — and here Meghan tilts her head back and looks heavenward, as if grasping for some earthly solution to this conundrum so clearly beneath her — ‘Well, what’s a color that they’ll probably never wear?’

Faint exasperation creeps into Meghan’s voice as she re-enacts her epiphany. Cut to a still photo of Meghan dressed in dull brown walking alongside Kate, resplendent in a jewel-toned, gold-buttoned coat.

‘Camel, beige, white,’ Meghan gripes. ‘So I wore a lot of muted tones, but also it was so I could just blend in.’

Strap yourselves in for this one: ‘I’m not trying to stand out here,’ Meghan says. ‘There’s no version of me joining this family and trying to not do everything I could to fit in.’

Says our own Woko Ono, sticking to her story that she didn’t understand what a big deal the royal family was.

There’s one moment here where we see that Harry maybe — just maybe — realizes what a sadistic person he’s married to. As he sits on a sofa to Meghan’s right, he watches as his loving wife recounts her first meeting with the Queen, and in so doing insults Britons, Americans, the monarchy, Harry and his family, and everything his grandmother, who served her country for seventy years in a role she neither asked for nor wanted, stood for.

‘I mean, Americans will understand this,’ Meghan says, because ‘we have Medieval Times, dinner and a tournament. It was like that.’

Even those of us never invited to Balmoral to meet the queen can confidently say: No. It’s nothing like that.

But Meghan needs to bring Harry down to her level in order to elevate herself. Hence the leaning into forced casualness, hosting William and Kate for dinner, their very first meeting, Meghan barefoot and in ripped jeans.

Strap yourselves in for this one: ‘I’m not trying to stand out here,’ Meghan says. ‘There’s no version of me joining this family and trying to not do everything I could to fit in.’ 

Reader, brace yourself: Meghan Markle couldn’t wear bold colors in public. Well, not so much couldn’t — wouldn’t. Meghan is just that much of a humanitarian. Allow her to explain, in an interview clearly shot before the Queen’s death (not that her advanced age or Prince Philip on his deathbed ever stopped these two mercenaries). 

Seriously: Do better.

Back to Meghan reenacting her introduction to the queen, performing a theatrically deep curtsy and wiggling her eyebrows mockingly as she laughs and says, in a sickly-sweet fake voice, ‘Pleasure to meet you, your majesty.’

Harry looks nothing short of pained.

He should consider this a preview of the rest of his life until the woman he’s left everything and everyone for will surely train her venom, her victimhood, and her penchant for publicly tearing down close family members squarely on him. 

There’s no doubt it will happen or that Harry will deserve it. The Meghan Markle we see here — and she really believes she’s showing us her best self — will discard anyone once they no longer make her look good, feed her narcissistic supply, or are of any practical use.

Consider her adult niece Ashleigh, the daughter of Meghan’s estranged half-sister Samantha. Meghan rhapsodizes about seeking out and cultivating this relationship, how important her niece is to her, and in turn her niece describes Meghan as ‘all the things’ — an aunt, but also a sister figure and a mother figure, one who took Asleigh on vacations and talked to her about anything and everything.

Then Meghan got engaged to Harry and, well . . . their phone calls got less and less frequent.

Can you guess who got disinvited to H&M’s wedding?

Yes, poor Ashleigh, who doesn’t seem to buying Meghan’s vague excuse here that nameless palace ‘advisers’ forced her hand. Ashleigh sits in this docuseries tearful, confused, humiliated and skeptical, yet still kind enough not to openly wonder why her beloved aunt invited celebrities she had never even met before — Oprah, the Clooneys, David Beckham — instead of her own flesh and blood.

Ashleigh (above) sits in this docuseries tearful, confused, humiliated and skeptical, yet still kind enough not to openly wonder why her beloved aunt invited celebrities she had never even met before — Oprah, the Clooneys, David Beckham — instead of her own flesh and blood.

Or maybe Ashleigh did. Maybe Meghan demanded final cut. Who really knows what goes on in H&M’s house of mirrors?

We get a small look at Harry and Meghan’s everyday life, such as it is. We see Harry and Meghan in the back of a chauffeured SUV, being driven through Manhattan and freaking out over a lone paparazzo on a scooter. One guy. Cue an over-the-top reaction: panic, fear, forced calm.

We see Meghan feed into Harry’s post-Diana trauma as she leans in and says to him ‘Safety first’ — e.g., there will be no speeding away from the non-existent hordes of photographers — you know, the ones we saw in the trailer for this vanity project. Meghan’s gone full Hollywood here, now a cliché with her ‘make-up artists and friend,’ her ‘personal assistant and friend.’

We listen as Harry, painfully and obviously, explains what royal reporters do.

Care to hazard a guess?

‘It’s like, this family’ — meaning the royal family — ‘is ours to exploit,’ Harry says of the royal rota. ‘Their trauma is our story and our narrative to control.’

Hey, let’s get one thing straight — if anyone’s going to exploit anything around here, it’s going to be Harry and Meghan.

See you back next week for Volume II!