Harry and Meghan as seen in Harry & Meghan. Photo: Netflix
When Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced their surprise decision to leave royal life to “have room to focus on the next chapter,” you didn’t have to squint to see who was to blame. “The media is a powerful force and I hope that one day our collective support for each other can be stronger because this is so much bigger than just us,” Harry declared in January 2020. After “months of conversations” and “years of challenges ‘ he felt there was ‘no other option’. The couple would give up their royal titles, taxpayer-funded salaries and standing in the world’s most famous family in exchange for a “more peaceful life” tending to their humanitarian work. That’s not exactly how things worked.
From their new home in California, Meghan and Harry have launched a non-profit network and landed stunning media deals. Meghan has a podcast on Spotify. Harry has a telltale treatise along the way. They’ve both given interviews — with Oprah, with this magazine — and this month their $100 million Netflix deal finally bore fruit. Harry & Meghan, the two-part docuseries, is another attempt to put her point of view in her own words. In this up close and personal look into their existence, the media are revealed to be the main villains, and given the couple’s treatment of the British tabloids, you can see why. Still, it’s a bit annoying to complain to your personal film crew about pushy press after you’ve sold your story to the world’s largest streaming service. In six episodes, the Sussexes have revisited the sum of their life together and many of the articles written about it. In their attempt to defend themselves, they stumble into a basic royal paradox: the Crown needs the media to stay relevant. But the more you show yourself out there, the harder it is to look good.
It’s not that her side of the story isn’t likable. Reporting on Meghan has often turned to subtle or explicit racism. Her life in an isolation facility rightly sounds harsh, and the series deserves credit for taking an intimate look at the loneliness of a woman navigating pregnancy, mental health struggles and new motherhood in this environment. Harry, on the other hand, didn’t choose fame. He was born into it, and he says it destroyed some of the most important relationships in his life. Harry’s excessive exposure to the press began when he was a toddler, public interest being heightened by a widespread obsession with his mother, the late Princess Diana. The doctor portrays her as a relentlessly hunted figure. Photographers camped outside her home, hid in the bushes on their vacations, chased her to the end, and then tried to sell photos of the crash that killed her to the tabloids. Harry says of his childhood: “Most of my memories are of being swarmed by paparazzi.”
From the first episode, director Liz Garbus works hard to anticipate the Sussexes’ experience in Diana, largely portraying her as a victim of tabloids. Her reality was more complicated – a symbiotic relationship with the outlets that cemented her superstar status. Even in her earliest days of fame, Diana was known to have orchestrated her own leaks. Sometimes she called the paparazzi. She too tried to publish her own account. She worked with tabloid journalist Andrew Morton on a biography and then with the BBC’s Martin Bashir in an interview for the Panorama docuseries. (William and Harry have since condemned the “fraudulent” means Bashir used to secure her attendance.) That doesn’t necessarily mean she enjoyed being a tabloid target, nor does it make the newspapers’ obsession with her any less disgusting . However, it does tell us something about how the royal family handles the press. If you are a royal, as Harry explains in Episode 4 of Harry & Meghan, “You have been led to believe that your charities can only thrive and your reputation grow or improve if you are on the front page of these newspapers. But the media decides who gets on the front page.” The palace and the press rely on each other, exploit each other, and ultimately you need the other to survive.
As the docuseries explain, each royal household runs its own communications bureau to connect with and feed royal reporters — sometimes to distract from gossip spread by staff, sometimes to turn around, and on rare occasions there are official ones Statements that directly comment on Crown-related stories. These offices form the royal mouthpiece, and as Harry says, “There are leaks, but there are also stories to plant.” The docuseries explains the relationship between palace and press as a marriage of convenience: taxpayers support the royal family and expect a measure in return of access. But the Royals also have their motives. The British royal family wants to maintain their popularity and public support, and that means giving people a behind-the-scenes look. At the same time, the monarchy wants to preserve the mysticism that supports its existence. This is, as Harry & Meghan points out, a family whose ancestors are said to have been anointed by God for leadership. They cannot be like any other family or their justification would fall apart.
That tension has the royals walking a fine line: get attention, but only the right kind and not too much. Reconciling this equation would be difficult even without the involvement of the insatiable British tabloids. In their quest to find sellable stories, these outlets often go too far. Tabloids once hacked William and Harry’s cell phones. Kensington Palace has accused dads of using toddlers as bait to lure baby Prince George into the playground frame. Then there’s Harry’s relationship with Meghan.
When news of their courtship broke, Harry said his family waved his pleas for intervention on behalf of his girlfriend, who was an ocean away in Canada at the time — her home was staked out by photographers who reportedly weren’t even able to walking around her backyard because, she says, the tabloids were paying their neighbors to set up surveillance cameras. Certain members of Harry’s family saw the harassment as a “rite of passage,” he said, which royal wives and girlfriends always endure. But even if the royals couldn’t see it, it’s clear that Meghan’s position as the first woman of color to marry into the monarchy changed her situation. Certain newspapers chose racism, antagonism and harassment, and they routinely did so. As Meghan reiterates in the docuseries, her treatment in the tabloids and the royal family’s alleged lack of concern for her mental health prompted her to consider suicide, fueling the 2020 regression.
For those outlets, Meghan couldn’t do anything right – even when she smiled warmly as the first group of photographers she met on her street played bad. Meghan opened up about the call she received from Harry when the photos were released. He warned her not to acknowledge reporters: “British media say you love it.”
Inevitably, when you publish a behind-the-scenes six-hour look at your life, it’s hard to argue that you wish the media would leave you alone. In Harry & Meghan, the couple willingly offers their camera rolls, home videos and iMessage histories for an estimated 223 million Netflix subscribers to analyze. They call on friends and family as character witnesses, shoot candid footage of parties in their small circle, and read aloud a surprise text from the famously private Beyoncé. They’re restating the intricacies of their lawsuit against the Chron as if they hadn’t already run that winning streak in court – apparently believing their viewers need convincing.
What they haven’t left behind is the old royal impulse to tightly control the narrative. Even before the docuseries came out, Meghan tried to distance the couple from their content, telling Variety, “We entrust our story to someone else, and that means it’s going to go through their lens.” In response to the criticism decision to step back into the spotlight, her rep issued a statement following the release of Volume I of the series. “The Duke and Duchess have never cited privacy as a reason for their resignation,” it said. “This distorted narrative was meant to silence the couple. In fact, her statement making her decision to step down makes no mention of privacy and reaffirms her desire to continue her roles and public duties. Any other suggestion addresses a key point of this series.”
Another, more pragmatic component is certainly relevant here: without the backing of royal accounts, Harry and Meghan are depending on their celebrity for paychecks. Her fame, in turn, depends on her connections to the British Crown. As Vanity Fair’s Katie Nicholl explained in a recent interview, “The fact is, the Sussexes left the royal family to become financially independent. If they go to bed with Netflix, Spotify, and big publishers and get these big-dollar deals,” those companies will “want their pound of meat.” The most valuable thing these two have for sale and what people really want to buy is their inside story. So they tell it over and over again without acknowledging the contradiction.
With so much misinformation swirling around online, it’s understandable that Meghan and Harry want to speak up and stop the cycle. They certainly aren’t the first royals to try to set the record straight. Sometimes this works in a king’s favor (Diana’s approval ratings reportedly rose to 92 percent after the Panorama interview), but more often it doesn’t. King Charles once worked on a lengthy documentary biography, apparently thinking that giving people an honest look at his situation would garner sympathy. In the end, he admitted to committing adultery. Prince Andrew apparently thought he could quash allegations of child sexual abuse with a BBC session – a spectacle that predictably blew up in his face.
Ultimately, Meghan and Harry are more likable characters than Charles and certainly more than Andrew, for whom they have far less to apologize for. But that only makes her justifying explanations for every little thing even more exhausting. You say so much without saying anything new. This is possibly why one of the royal family’s mottos is “never complain, never explain.” Things often don’t go their way when they do.
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