Well, here we all are again. Ready for three more hours of expensively lit retribution? I hope so, because the second half of Netflix’s documentary Harry & Meghan dropped today, covering the four and a half years from the couple’s wedding to the present day.
The final three episodes of this six-hour series—Ken Burns needed just three times as long to get through the entire Vietnam war—focus on the Royal Family’s relationship with the press (again). Over and over, Harry and Meghan’s departure from Britain is presented as a missed opportunity for racial healing, for generational change, for a new social awareness in a stuffy institution. It was, as the British journalist Afua Hirsch declares, “the death of a dream.” This recurrent motif gives the whole documentary the unfortunate air of a late-night message left on your ex’s voicemail, insisting that you are happy to have moved on, and are having a great life, actually.
The Royal Family’s approach to the media has been to “never complain, never explain.” This is very much not the Harry-and-Meghan way, and so they have taken to the media to settle their scores with the media. I can’t help but suspect that, deep down, they know they will never have as good an opportunity to monetize their fame again, and so litigating their beefs with the Windsors and the press in spectacular fashion is their equivalent of a 401(k). Harry’s brother, William, who has a kingdom to inherit one day, has so far not commented in response.
The backbone of the story is Meghan’s invasion-of-privacy suit against the Mail on Sunday, the London tabloid that published excerpts of a letter she had written to her father, urging him to stop selling stories about her. At one point, Harry suggests that the stress over this court case led Meghan to miscarry in July 2020. “Now, do we absolutely know the miscarriage was caused by that? Of course we don’t,” he says. “But bearing in mind the stress that caused, the lack of sleep, the timing of the pregnancy, how many weeks in she was, I can say, from what I saw, that miscarriage was created by what they were trying to do to her.” Harry already blamed media intrusion for his mother’s death, and now he blames it for his unborn child’s death, too.
This is, to be fair, an enormous burden to carry—all the more so because he seems to believe that his brother is complicit in his treatment by the press. The other headline accusation in today’s episodes is that staffers for William, now the prince of Wales, fed the British media gossip about Meghan in exchange for burying damaging stories about their own boss. (What kind of stories might those be? Harry declines to speculate.) This is entirely believable; various households within the Royal Family have been at loggerheads forever. In the 18th century, the rift between George II and his son Frederick was so deep that the king cut off his heir’s allowance. Frederick, who had wanted to marry an English aristocrat named Lady Diana Spencer—yes, time is a flat circle—then settled down with a German princess. When she got pregnant, they lied about the due date so that the king and queen would not be present at the birth. Nearly 300 years later, Harry and Meghan did exactly the same to outwit the British press. Instead of announcing that she had gone into labor, they waited until their son, Archie, had been born to release a statement.
Sometimes I wonder if Harry would benefit from reading more royal history; it might help him understand, the way literature often does, that his problems are not unique. I found these episodes more tragic than the first three, because they raise doubts about whether the Windsor brothers’ rift can ever be repaired. In the fifth hour of the series, Harry describes the meeting in January 2020 to decide the terms of his departure from Britain; Meghan had already flown to Canada, so he went alone to a summit with his family at Sandringham in Norfolk. Harry explains that he wanted to be “half in, half out,” pursuing his own career while supporting the royal brand. The Queen; his father, then-Prince Charles; and William had other ideas. “It was terrifying to have my brother scream and shout at me,” he says. “And my father say things that just simply weren’t true, my grandmother quietly sit there and take it all in.”
These episodes repeat the assertion in the first three that Meghan and Harry have never had a real chance to tell their story. Never mind that, in addition to sitting for a prime-time interview with Oprah Winfrey last year, Meghan also cooperated with the writers Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand, the authors of a sympathetic biography of the couple. In the course of her privacy litigation, she falsely told a court that she “did not contribute” to the book. After a member of the royal household revealed that he’d had multiple meetings with her to agree what briefing points to share with Scobie and Durand, Meghan said she had forgotten about doing so and apologized to the court. The Netflix series does not discuss this.
Omissions like this make me think a less hagiographic treatment would have served the couple better. Harry & Meghan is a perfect blend of love story and quest for vengeance, and moment-to-moment it is extremely compelling. But its lacunae mean that if you know anything about the royal soap opera, then from the minute you stop watching, awkward questions begin to bubble into your mind. The relentlessly one-sided narrative makes you feel manipulated.
Not coincidentally, manipulative is a word that Meghan-haters (who are legion) frequently apply to her, alongside variations such as calculating, narcissistic, self-dramatizing, fake. The Netflix documentary is the case for primarily her defense—Harry, despite being a literal prince, feels very much like the supporting cast. The friends Meghan calls up in pivotal moments are her friends. She is the one who gets a text from Beyoncé, who, Meghan reports, says “she admires and respects my bravery and vulnerability and thinks I was selected to break generational curses that need to be healed.” (This was a moment of culture shock; as a Briton, I have wonderful, lifelong close friends who wouldn’t say anything this nice about me if taken to a CIA black site.) Remember the Oprah sit-down, where Harry was brought on halfway through? Or the recent Meghan interview in The Cut where he plays a walk-on part to say she’s beautiful like a model and burble about the plumbing at their house in Montecito, California? The title of Harry’s upcoming autobiography is Spare—as in “the heir and the spare”—but I wonder if he hasn’t exchanged one type of superfluity for another.
Sometimes the documentary’s willingness to let Meghan and Harry complain at length almost feels cruel. After their wedding, Harry notes, they lived in Kensington Palace—well, Meghan corrects him, not in the palace, but on “palace grounds.” Nottingham Cottage was “very small” with low ceilings, on which Harry would bang his head. Sure, but it was also a beautiful house with a garden in the middle of ultra-prime London real estate. Shortly after this discussion—whether by un-self-aware accident or sly sabotage by the production team—the documentary cuts back to the terrible 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, which killed dozens of people and left other residents living in hotels for 18 months. Meghan became a champion for the survivors, although hopefully she didn’t try to bond with them by telling them—as she told the documentary crew—about Oprah’s surprise at the modesty of their lodgings.
These are the Meghan moments that make me wince. Another is the time, unmentioned in this documentary, when she visited a charity for sex workers and wrote inspirational messages on bananas with a Sharpie (You are loved). The shots of guided meditation and yoga here are no less cringeworthy. One of the interviewees talks about the press campaign against Harry and Meghan as a “symbolic annihilation” of “people who are symbols of social justice,” and my brain screamed at me to remember that she was talking about a duke and a duchess.
We also get the fact that a friend loaned them a private jet for their “freedom flight” out of Britain—the best kind of friend, one whom “we’ve never met, but who believes in us and wants to help.” This turns out to be Tyler Perry—yes, that Tyler Perry, famous for dressing up as his mother—who lets them use his Los Angeles house for as long as they need it. This section of the documentary elicited the most sympathy from me, because once again their refuge is discovered by the paparazzi, and baby Archie is awakened at 5 a.m. by helicopters flying overhead. Who would want that for their kids? Meghan tears up when she recounts the death threats faced by the family, and wonders: “Are my babies safe?”
Once again, this documentary contains little that won’t already be familiar from the book by Scobie and Durand, the Oprah interview, or the recent BBC program The Princes and the Press—which, in retrospect, echoed many of H & M’s talking points, making me skeptical afresh that they are innocents who experience media machinations solely on the receiving end. From Harry & Meghan, we do learn that Harry doesn’t know whether an avocado is a fruit and that he objects to filming in portrait mode, but otherwise he is a peripheral presence, haunted by his mother and hoping to exorcize her tragic story by giving his wife’s encounter with a prince a happier ending.
The final shots are of the California sunshine, with Harry saying that he has lost friends but gained a new purpose, because he had “outgrown” his old life and his old country: “My wife and I, we’re moving on, we’re focused on what’s coming next.” For all our sakes, let’s hope so.
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