The British royals have entered a new flop era. We’ve been here before.
But while the 1990s were beset by scandals and the death of a princess, even Princess Diana’s sure-footed and damning 1995 Panorama interview about her life in the royal family was just an hour long. The Netflix docuseries “Harry & Meghan,” from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, is an even more ambitious project at six times that length. To its credit, it’s hard to compare it to anything — and it’s trying to do everything: Pull back the curtain, right some wrongs and reframe the conversation.
The first three episodes premiered Thursday; the final three will premiere a week later.
“Books have been written about our story from people I don’t know,” Meghan says. “Doesn’t it make more sense to hear our story from us?” Left unspoken: Plenty of others have profited and continue to profit from telling their version of Harry and Meghan’s story. It would be odd to criticize the couple for doing the same.
Charting the early, heady days of their romance, as well as the gradual realization that they were considered an unwelcome presence — by the hyperventilating British press and by the royal family itself — the series at times feels padded with biographical asides. A sharper editor might have encourage the trimming of previously reported information that ultimately isn’t relevant to what appears to be the broader goal: Assessing the system itself.
The series doesn’t fully solve this dilemma, of servicing the intentions of its two primary subjects, while also telling a larger story about the intertwined interests of the monarchy and tabloid media, all of it shaped and informed by xenophobia and racism.
Director Liz Garbus weaves together a combination of home video and personal photos — we get glimpses of Harry and Meghan’s sun-filled home in Montecito, California — as well as interviews with the pair’s friends, professional associates and Meghan’s mother Doria Ragland. Additionally, we hear from experts who have written on race in Britain and how that relates to empire.
There are also more formal sit-downs with Harry and Meghan guided by Garbus (a longtime American documentary filmmaker whose credits include “Ghosts of Abu Ghraib” and “Bobby Fischer Against the World”). “All interviews were completed by August 2022″ appears on screen at the start and it’s a disclaimer of sorts: The project was completed prior to Queen Elizabeth’s death in September.
Together and separately, Harry and Meghan come across as personable and friendly, straddling the line between glamorous and approachable. Intimate moments at home show two people delighting in their little family. Of watching hummingbirds buzz around a feeder and dogs sacked out on the couch. You can see the care with which they’ve created this life for themselves — a cohesive and stable home that neither of them fully had as children of divorce.
They talk about their respective childhoods, and for Harry that largely pertains to his mother and the years after her death in 1997. But there’s also old footage of King Charles as a young father, playfully mugging for his baby son to get him to look at the camera. It’s a moment that can be taken one of two ways: Charming or the opposite, done not to amuse his child but for the specific transactional purpose of satisfying a roomful of photographers.
We get a summary of Meghan’s accomplishments as a young girl as well, and it’s in this section that she shares a memory of being in the car and hearing someone call her mother a racial slur. “She was just silent the rest of the drive home. We’ve never talked about it.”
Conversations around racism and Meghan’s proximity to whiteness as a biracial person were not something they discussed when she was growing up. “It’s very different to be a minority but not treated as a minority right off the bat,” she says. “Obviously, now, people are very aware of my race because they made it such an issue when I went to the U.K. But before that” — she pauses — “most people did not treat me like a Black woman.” She uses one hand to put air quotes around those last two words. “So that talk didn’t have to happen for me.”
It’s a statement made complicated by an observation from her friend, the photographer Misan Harriman, when he says her marriage to Harry made a lot of Black people in the U.K. “feel seen for the first time.” There was a lot of expectation and the weight of “making history” that Meghan was suddenly shouldering. It’s hard to wrap your head around it and I suspect there will be discussions and analysis around that quote: “Most people did not treat me like a Black woman.” What does that mean — to Meghan, but also to the world at large?
Is this why she was under the misapprehension that the British monarchy — an institution with a long and well-documented history of racism — would make an exception for her?
The larger question neither Meghan nor Harry have yet to grapple with publicly: Why did they think the royal family was a safe place for her if such an exception were even required? Looking back, Harry acknowledges his own ignorance: “Wow, here you are just blissfully, I guess, sleepwalking through life.”
When my kids grow up, he adds, “and they turn to me and say, ‘What did you do in this moment?’ I want to be able to give them an answer … (and what’s) most important for the two of us is to make sure we don’t repeat the same mistakes that perhaps our parents made.”
Ragland hasn’t given interviews in the past, so her participation here is notable. “As a parent, in hindsight, absolutely I would like to go back and have that kind of real conversation about how the world sees you,” she says. Later, when the press coverage got ugly, Ragland recalls: “I said to her — I remember this very clearly — this was about race. And Meg said, ‘Mommy, I don’t want to hear that.’ And I said, ‘Well, you may not want to hear it but this is what’s coming down the pike.”
In her own interview, Meghan says: “I wasn’t thinking about how race played a part in any of this. I genuinely didn’t think about it.”
David Olusoga, the author of “Black and British,” calls the racism of the tabloid press “brutal but also in some ways unsurprising.” Black people make up 0.2% of journalists in Britain, he says. “So people who come up with these headlines are doing so in newsrooms that are almost entirely white and they get to decide whether something has crossed the line of being racist. And anyone who steps into the public eye — particularly someone who is female and someone who is Black — is fair game in their minds.”
In the days since the first teaser for “Harry & Meghan” was released, the British media has been on something of a frenzied run, presuming the series would include all manner of insults aimed at the royal family and their staff. And yet, three episodes in, Harry and Meghan have very little to say about the dynamic within the royal family itself.
Garbus includes moments like the now notorious blackamoor brooch debacle, but neither Harry nor Meghan speak on it. Instead Garbus lets others do the heavy lifting: “One of the realities of life in Britain is that if you go into a palace or stately home or anywhere that represents tradition, you are likely to be faced with racist imagery that depict enslaved people in a way that glorifies the institution of slavery,” says the British writer Afua Hirsch. “These are the skeletons in the closet that frequently make an unwelcome appearance in daily life.”
So far, the focus of “Harry & Meghan” has centered on the press rather than the royal family. “Someone can just call themselves a royal expert?” someone asks while Meghan is getting ready for an event. It’s just as meaningless as “royal correspondent,” Harry explains: “That press pack of royal correspondents is essentially an extended PR arm of the royal family. It’s an agreement that’s been there for over 30 years.”
During the early months of their relationship, when Meghan was still shooting the TV series “Suits” in Toronto, she talks about being hounded. After a death threat, the studio hired security for her and it’s clear how scary and overwhelming this became — and quickly. Ragland also talks about feeling unsafe and being followed by paparazzi. One photographer told her: I’m just trying to get a story — you know you get a lot of money for this. “And I just looked at him and said (shaking her head baffled), ‘This is my child. I have nothing to say.” (It was a different situation with Meghan’s father and one of his adult children, which is also addressed here.)
Listening to Meghan describe the walls closing in, it’s impossible to not think of Princess Diana. Did Meghan think of her, too? She was 16 when Princess Diana died — old enough to remember and understand what happened. Did she wonder what might be in store for her — and was she wary as a result? That’s not something she talks about, so far at least. She and Harry are also silent about corruption and wealth extraction that sees the monarchy buttressed to this day. Instead, Garbus calls on others (including the aforementioned Hirsch as well as Kehinde Andrews, author of “The New Age of Empire”) to spell some of that out. It’s smart to spotlight their expertise, but also conspicuous that neither Harry nor Meghan are involved in these conversations.
Those are the kinds of things worth talking about, but because Harry and Meghan have been maligned in ways both subtle and overt for the crime of simply existing, there’s little room to assess them apart from that. They seem like nice people! I don’t think they’re immune from critique, either. They are public figures and their public works should be analyzed — including this series, Markle’s podcast or any other endeavor they put out into the world. And yet too often conversations around the pair are reduced to a binary: You’re either “for” or “against” them, instead of something far more interesting and complicated. This is not a path to healthy media analysis.
Watching the series, I was reminded of this recent observation in The Guardian: “They may be presenting a highly stage-managed version of themselves to the world, but isn’t that what royalty has always sought to do? It’s just that, lately, the slick Sussex brand looks rather better at it than the established market leader.”
Much has happened since the queen died three months ago — three months, in fact, to the day of the show’s premiere. King Charles was caught on camera acting peevish about pens. People have thrown eggs at him during public events. Season 5 of “The Crown” reminded everyone of the shambolic royal scandals of the 1990s. Then came footage of Camilla, the queen consort, awkwardly interacting with a Black child. Last week a Black guest at Buckingham Palace was subjected to “but where are you really from” racist hectoring by Lady Susan Hussey, a member of the royal household — which was followed, in turn, by apologists shivering with horror that, one time, an aristo had been called out on their racism.
Let’s not forget — though the palace surely wishes everyone would — that earlier this year the queen was likely the one forking over millions to settle the sexual assault lawsuit against her son, Prince Andrew. This is far from an exhaustive accounting. There’s also William and Kate’s dismal spring tour of Commonwealth nations in the Caribbean — a cringeworthy effort that, according to at least one British newspaper, “may have accelerated moves to ditch the Queen as the head of state.” It’s been an ignominious few months, PR-wise, for an institution that would seemingly prefer unquestioned deference. That’s worthwhile context here.
The royal family doesn’t need “Harry & Meghan” to sully its public image. They’ve proven adept at doing that all by themselves.
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'HARRY & MEGHAN' PART I
2.5 stars (out of 4)
Rating: TV-MA
How to watch: Netflix
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