Reality TV royalty
Daniel Ross Goodman
Three generations ago, King Edward VIII stunned the world and scandalized his family when he abdicated the throne to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, causing a rift between his mother and niece, the eventual Queen Elizabeth II, that never truly healed. Two generations ago, Elizabeth and her sister Princess Margaret had a near-falling-out over Elizabeth’s refusal to sanction Margaret’s marriage to the divorced Peter Townsend. One generation ago, Prince Charles angered his parents by being unwilling to make things work with Princess Diana and instead desiring to marry the divorcee Camilla Parker Bowles. And now, in this generation, Prince Harry has instigated what appears to be an irreparable rift between himself and his brother Prince William, and possibly between himself and his father as well. At the center of this latest royal family sibling schism is yet another divorcee — the American actress Meghan Markle.
Despite the basic similarities between this royal sibling rupture and those of the prior three generations, this one feels different — more fraught, more disappointing, and more baffling, in no small part due to Harry’s decision to leave the United Kingdom, as well as his role as a “working royal.” To explain his and his wife’s drastic decision to depart from royal life, Harry and Meghan have taken to traditional media platforms, such as the high-profile, prime-time interview — the sort that Diana went to in her infamous 1995 interview with the BBC’s Martin Bashir.
Their March 2021 interview with Oprah, watched by nearly 50 million people, did not calm things down. Instead, it produced a new spate of controversies. Harry’s most recent prime-time interview took place this past week with Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes. And Harry is now also using an even more traditional media form, the book, to do further damage to his family and the British monarchy.
As if all these media were not enough for the couple that claimed to have wanted to escape the media spotlight in England, Meghan and Harry have also recently resorted to a newer and more uniquely American media form to capture more eyeballs and grow their brand: reality TV. Their six-part Netflix documentary Harry & Meghan purports to tell their side of the story without any intermediaries or other media filters. In the documentary, they still talk in an interview format. But in Harry & Meghan, they use their own narration and a lot of their own recorded footage, plus clips from interviews from their friends, celebrities, sympathizers, and the few members of their families still on their side.
We see selfies they took of their meet-cute in 2016 and texts they exchanged from around that time, and we learn about why Meghan’s relationship with her father became nearly as strained as Harry’s relationship with his father and brother. Meghan’s mother and friends fill us in on what Meghan was like as a child — very smart, they repeatedly tell us. It is absolutely imperative that we know that Meghan Markle isn’t just yet another empty-headed American actress. And, from some of the samples of her schoolwork that we see, including a rather poignant poem, she does seem to have been an especially intelligent person.
This makes it all the more difficult to understand how, as she recounts in this docuseries, she was so completely taken aback by the media swarm in England and the steps she needed to take to steer clear of the paparazzi. Was she not aware of Diana, who was only one of the two or three most famous people in the world when she was growing up, and of how the paparazzi hounded her? Are we really supposed to believe that someone as smart as Meghan knew next to nothing about the royal family before she met Harry? And are we really expected to accept so gullibly, as this series seems to want us to do, that Meghan and Harry ended up in Southern California — the media and entertainment capital of the United States, if not the world — simply by accident?
As for how they ended up in California: The series explains that they had originally intended to live out a quiet existence in Canada until they were harassed there during COVID by the paparazzi. This forced them to flee, whereupon they were taken in like waifs off the street by none other than the benevolent Tyler Perry, finding refuge in the Los Angeles mansion of one of the wealthiest and best-connected entertainment moguls in the country.
Thus we learn another truth of their lives, as they want us to see them: They are somehow normal people who fall in love and have feelings like all the rest of us. Their love may very well be true and deep, and after watching their series, it is hard to deny that. And who wouldn’t be affected by fallings-out with fathers, brothers, and other family members? Falling in love with another person and falling out of affection with a family member are wonderful and painful elements of human life that the great majority of us experience at some point or another. But how many of us, after we’ve had a difficult time of it, can go and recuperate in Tyler Perry’s mansion? How many of us have Serena Williams in our phone contacts? How many of us can ever casually drop a line as preposterously incredible as “and so when Beyonce texted me …” as Meghan does in this series? And how many of us can start a website, business, and brand with the word “royal” in it? There can be no illusions that Meghan and Harry are anything other than extremely not normal people who are privileged in ways that few actually normal people could ever even fathom.
Indeed, it is the way in which they continue to assert their privilege while protesting against it, enjoying the benefits of still calling themselves “royal” and “the Duke and Duchess of Sussex” while absconding from the duties that come with being members of the royal family, that has so many people around the world so affronted by them. If any royal had reason to rebel against the royal family and undermine a monarch, it was Margaret after the way her sister jerked her around before ultimately refusing to let her marry the love of her life, thereby condemning her to a wandering and somewhat tragic existence. In this generation’s iteration of the Margaret-Peter Townsend relationship — Meghan and Harry — no one in the royal family stood in their way. On the contrary, they welcomed Meghan with open arms, throwing Harry and Meghan a spectacular royal wedding at Windsor Castle not very different from the one William received in 2011. While the justly aggrieved Margaret maintained her dignity and continued to serve her family as well as her country, the millennial versions of Margaret continue to cry to the media about their troubled lives, to the tune of $30 million from Spotify, $35 million from Penguin Random House, and $100 million from Netflix. They’ll spill any and all details about their feuds with members of the royal family for a few dollars more. And “H” (as Meghan refers to her prince-husband) and Meghan actually wonder about why so many people around the world are so disgusted with them?
Enough with this revolting “reality” TV. I want fictionalized drama. I can’t wait for what The Crown does with them.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema and the novel A Single Life.