With the final three episodes of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s Netflix docuseries, the couple doesn’t ruminate about distancing themselves from the royal family so much as explain — in further depth than has already been reported — what they were thinking and feeling at the time.
After the table setting of the first half, “Harry & Meghan” from director Liz Garbus becomes more of an extended sit-down interview in the second half. The couple describes the growing hostility to their presence in the U.K., so they proposed stepping back from full-time royal duties. Key members of Harry’s family finally agreed to sit down in early January 2020 — a meeting that notably excluded Meghan. “It was terrifying to have my brother scream and shout at me and my father say things that simply weren’t true — and my grandmother, you know, quietly sit there and take it all in.”
This is the most direct Harry has come, here or anywhere else, to naming names and specific actions. This is also the limit to his disclosures. At six hours in total, “Harry & Meghan” may be long, but it is far from thorough.
What stands out about the phrase “scream and shout” is that it echoes another phrase that often shows up in reporting about Prince William’s emotional state when the topic turns to Harry and Meghan: He is forever “incandescent with rage.”
But it’s also striking to hear Harry call out the queen’s inertia, even as he justifies it moments later, explaining it away as duty and responsibility.
A story ran almost immediately after that meeting laying the blame at William’s feet: He had bullied the couple out of the family. A joint denial from the brothers was then issued — but sans Harry’s involvement. “I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “No one had asked me permission to put my name to a statement like that.”
He then called Meghan and told her what had just happened. She “burst into floods of tears,” Harry says, “because within four hours they were happy to lie to protect my brother. And yet for three years they were never willing to tell the truth to protect us. So there was no other option at this point. I said, we need to get out of here.”
That Meghan was the manipulator pushing them to leave has been a common refrain in much of the press coverage in the U.K. The nasty shorthand became “Megxit,” a play on “Brexit,” the term of art used to describe Britain’s exit from the European Union. That sneery nickname “is what happens when you have a press devoid of journalism, that lives on outrage and monetizes anger,” says David Olusoga, author of “Black and British.”
But Harry is blunt about setting the record straight and calling out the misogyny: “How predictable that the woman is to be blamed for the decision of a couple,” he says. “In fact it was my decision. She never asked to leave.”
Harry also describes the constant “briefings” that would take place, of palace sources anonymously planting stories. He explains the process in general terms, careful to not point a finger at anyone in particular. “Comms teams” are the communications professions; the “principals” are the people they work for, i.e., King Charles, Prince William, etc. Each principal has their own office: “If the comms team wants to be able to remove a negative story about their principal, they will trade and give you something about someone else’s principal. So the offices end up working against each other. It’s this kind of weird acceptance or understanding that this happens.”
He and his brother saw that happen in their father’s office and “we made an agreement that we would never let that happen to our office.”
That didn’t last. “I would far rather get destroyed in the press than play along with this game or this business of trading,” Harry says. “And to see my brother’s office copy the very same thing the two of us promised that we would never, ever do, that was heartbreaking.”
There’s an extended portion about the social media aspect. Bot Sentinel is a company that tracks and analyzes social media activity among bots and other dubious accounts, with a focus on various types of content, “from QAnon to MAGA to COVID disinformation to climate change disinformation,” says founder and CEO Christopher Bouzy. All of that pales in comparison to the activity around Harry and Meghan: “We’ve never seen anything quite like this.”
Safiya Noble, author of “Algorithms of Oppression,” breaks down the Bot Sentinel findings: “A handful of accounts weren’t just bots, but they were people who were highly coordinated and deeply networked and responsible for the vast majority of hate propaganda against the couple.”
Of 114,000 tweets analyzed, 70% of the hateful content came from 83 accounts, largely driven by middle-aged white women. Those efforts had a reach of 17 million people, says Bouzy. “So this is not your everyday trolling.”
In the episodes of “Harry & Meghan” that premiered last week, Meghan spoke of her own naivete around racism, informed by her experiences in the U.S. as a biracial woman: “Most people did not treat me like a Black woman” until her relationship with Harry. What you notice is that her naivete persists even years later, after the scales have fallen from her eyes. After the broadcast of their interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021 — wherein they disclose an unnamed member of the royal family wondered how dark the couple’s children would be — she expresses surprise that this, rather than her suicidal thoughts, would be the detail to generate so much interest and focus.
(Not long after that interview, we see the couple together and Harry shows Meghan his phone. It’s a text from William, but we learn nothing about what it says and it’s unclear why Garbus even included this moment, if only to be so coy about it. So Prince William sent a text. What conclusion are we meant to draw from that?)
What’s clear is there really was (and still is) a smear campaign. They really were under siege. They really did fear for their safety. You get a window into Meghan’s can-do approach venturing into this new life: If you make the effort, there’s a good chance things will work out. But things were never going to work out here: “I tried so hard and that’s the piece that’s so triggering because you go, and it still wasn’t good enough — and you still don’t fit in.” You understand how visceral that rejection feels for her. Or would feel for anyone.
But the docuseries is also vague about so much. What role did Garbus, the director, play in terms of the project’s content? What were the parameters she was working under? What uncomfortable questions did she avoid — what follow ups did she not ask? Image management is always a part of these endeavors, but how much was shaped by Garbus and how much was shaped by the couple?
“We always (envisioned) Archie running around the garden at Frogmore Cottage and maybe jumping in the queen’s pond — that was all part of our future,” says Harry.
The couple left because the treatment they encountered had become odious and untenable. That’s a good reason to leave. But it’s worth taking that logic a step further: Had the Windsors been nicer, and had the press not lodged a full-on campaign against them, would they have been happy to stay and work on behalf of the monarchy?
That’s not a gotcha but a legitimate complexity to bring to a documentary that talks about the destructive effects of the British Empire on other nations, specifically with respect to the Commonwealth. Why were Harry and Meghan so willing to represent that?
It’s a persistent dissonance underscoring everything. They are clear on how racism negatively affected them personally. But they are unable to connect that to the broader form of racism-through-empire that they were willing to endorse by “doing the work, in the name of the queen,” as Harry puts it, if only the Windsors hadn’t been so awful to them. Harry literally says as much.
Garbus takes this at face value and it’s unclear if she had more probing questions for the couple — or if it even occurred to her that there’s something amiss with this mindset.
Afua Hirsch, who is interviewed in the series, wrote a piece for The Guardian in 2018 with the headline “What is the Commonwealth if not the British Empire 2.0?” and she points to Britain’s interests in Africa. “British companies control more than $1 trillion worth of Africa’s key resources: gold, diamonds, gas and oil, and an area of land roughly to four times the size of the U.K.” As a result, “Africa loses 30 billion pounds more each year than it receives in aid, loans and remittances.”
Harry and Meghan were willing to use their considerable dazzle to prop up this? They’re so thoughtful about so much else. Not here.
You can go further. The docuseries pointedly does not, instead glossing over the colonial undertones of Harry’s conservation work in Africa, which can serve as a “pretext to dispose of local communities for imperialist expansion and capitalist development,” according to a report that came our earlier this month.
I think this is far more interesting to analyze and talk about, rather than what Harry describes as “living through a soap opera” or any of the lifestyle content, much of which has fueled critiques that they’re self-absorbed. It’s a pointless complaint because it’s true of any celebrity documentary made at the behest of the celebrities themselves. But also, if we’re really going there with these criticisms: The royals themselves are the original influencer family, they’ve just always pretended that was too gauche to ever acknowledge.
What if Harry and Meghan had received actual support from the royals rather than stony silence — what if the royal family fought to defend Meghan but maintained the status quo in every other respect, what does that say? That only people of color who are spouses of the royal family are deserving of different (better) treatment? “The only wrong thing to say is to say nothing,” Meghan says at one point and she’s referring to issues of social justice. But does that apply here as well?
Harry and Meghan don’t want their story to only be about the tumult. I think that’s fair. They have a loving relationship and they’re cute together, with their black lab and beagle always underfoot. Sitting side by side in their home office in Montecito, Meghan glances down at her phone: “Beyonce just texted.” Harry looks up at the camera and makes a playful and exaggerated surprised-excited face: “Shut up!”
But on the whole, the series contains almost no introspection on some of the thorniest questions that aren’t about others’ choices, but their own.
Does Harry realize how empty it is to leave the royal family but maintain its overall outlook on places like Africa?
Looking back, how does Meghan feel about her belief that the monarchy’s documented history of racism didn’t apply to her? Why wasn’t she more concerned about marrying into that environment and aligning herself with it?
Why was she so willing to represent it?
The tragedy isn’t that they left, but that they wanted to be part of the institution in the first place.
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'HARRY & MEGHAN'
2.5 stars (out of 4)
Rating: TV-MA
How to watch: Netflix
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