Meghan and Harry downgrade to Real Housewives of Suburban California in new Netflix reality show
Tiana Lowe
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England was first united in 886 A.D. under Alfred the Great, the 32nd great-grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II. Since then, Alfred’s successors have turned his kingdom into an effective empire. The current monarch is not just the king of the United Kingdom, the head of the Commonwealth, and the supreme governor of the Church of England, but also the head of a 1,136-year-old family business.
That business features a long string of second, spiteful sons. They ranged from George, the Duke of Clarence, who was sentenced to death by his own brother, King Edward IV, for repeatedly committing treason, to Prince Andrew, who was forced out of royal and public life by his mother and brother for his disastrous defense of his alleged sex crimes committed with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
ROYAL FAMILY HAS ‘NO TRUST LEFT’ FOR PRINCE HARRY AND MEGHAN AFTER NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY: REPORT
And now there is Prince Harry, also known as the Duke of Sussex. The second son of King Charles III has finally published what should theoretically be his magnum opus, the product he abandoned his entire family, country, and king to produce. And it is a reality television series.
The production value is on par with Netflix’s other riveting documentary series, including Bad Vegan and The Tinder Swindler. The dramatic narrative constructed is slightly less interesting than Hulu’s The Kardashians. The protagonists are certainly more self-absorbed, and the real star isn’t the spare to the millennium-old monarchy. It’s the social climber who downgraded to become a real housewife of the Southern California suburbs.
Theoretically, I am interested in Harry. I am interested in what he thought of vacationing with Dodi Fayed on his father’s yacht just before Princess Diana’s death. I am interested in what he and the rest of the royal family knew of Andrew’s alleged sexual exploits with Epstein, and I am, of course, interested in his relationships with the past, current, and future monarchs of the United Kingdom.
Unfortunately for viewers, Diana’s observation that the schoolboy Harry “wasn’t so bright” proved correct, as the reality television character Harry Mountbatten-Windsor is as dull as a doornail. This Harry, the castrated Wife Guy playing second fiddle to a fading, B-list actress, has nothing to say about the institutions of the monarchy or the military in which he served. Instead of complaining about the Prince of Wales or the king of the U.K. for any real reason (either monarchist or republican criticisms of a public figure paid by the taxpayer dime), Harry whines about “my brother” and “my dad.” Andrew isn’t even mentioned, presumably because of the couple’s close relationship with Princess Eugenie, who actually makes a brief cameo in the series, and Harry’s own mother is reduced to the sexist caricature of a victim with no agency over her own life or celebrity. But worst of all is the treatment Harry gives the late Queen Elizabeth.
In her own grandson’s telling, Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, is reduced to a senile old woman controlled by courtiers rather than her own demonstrable will and intellect. Harry would have us believe that this formidable woman, the second-longest reigning monarch in human history and one who literally stood up for the job just two days before her death to ask former Prime Minister Liz Truss to form a government in her name, would let a team of middle-aged men and, worse, commoners, coerce her into doing anything before hell freezes over.
In his telling of the so-called “Sandringham Summit,” his grandmother actually wanted to see Harry and Meghan alone, but those scary men in suits stopped her from doing so. Then, when Harry actually did sit down (without Meghan, who was appalled that she wouldn’t be invited to a conversation about a 1,000-year-old family business) with the senior royals, she was silent as Charles (then the Prince of Wales) and Prince William yelled the obvious at him: You cannot represent a taxpayer-funded institution while shilling speeches for JP Morgan.
But this is Meghan’s story, not Harry’s and certainly not the monarchy’s. And thus, the Netflix series is a dud.
I know more about Thomas Markle, Samantha Markle, and the whole middle-class mess than I ever wanted to long before the Oprah interview, and nothing Meghan says here makes viewers sympathize with her more. In fact, her malice for her family means that the royal family is actually malleable in her telling. The king, whom Meghan and Harry would later retcon into a bully and bigot, is actually the hero who saves the day, proudly walking his daughter-in-law down the aisle at her wedding. Both the nation and the royal family are supposed to be so racist that they browbeat Meghan out of the country as a whole, but the evidence provided by Harry and Meghan themselves belies that narrative. According to Meghan, the Crown welcomed Meghan’s modern wedding, including a gospel choir, and lily-white well-wishers lining the streets celebrated the diversity Meghan brought to the Windsors’ lackluster gene pool.
What really went wrong? Obviously Meghan didn’t want to do the work, and Harry was over playing second fiddle to the Cambridges. The problem is that neither do their homework.
“It has always been a bit of a royal thing to go on a tour with your child,” Meghan says of her South Africa tour with baby Archie. The problem: It has absolutely not always been a royal thing to include young children on professional trips. Charles, who was left alone in England for months on end, only to greet his returning mother on the tarmac with a handshake as a childhood, went out of his way to make sure his children weren’t left behind. When he and Diana brought William on their Australia tour, the media largely recognized it as a form of modernizing, yet Meghan and Harry seem to illustrate the whole-family tours as evidence of the monarchy’s stoicism, not newfound family values.
The real royal bore comes in the last episode of the six-part series, when Meghan cries on her $1,625 Hermes blanket in her $15 million mansion and Harry laments how much he misses the U.K. and his friends. Save for Harry’s assertion that the media are responsible for Meghan’s miscarriage (and not that a 39-year-old woman has nearly a 1 in 4 chance of miscarrying any given pregnancy), the pair provide no new revelations. The only thing evident from their series? They, just as much as any Kardashian, need the media as much as they claim to hate them.
Nearly two years after the Oprah interview, one reality TV series, and a memoir later, Harry and Meghan may finally run out of things to say. After all, there are only so many times you can rehash the story of why you quit an entire family without reminding people that you’ve made that family your entire identity. So, will they finally find something new to talk about? If they do, it’ll be a Christmas miracle.
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