Victoria Beckham ‘humiliates’ Meghan Markle
The former Spice Girl has delivered a blow to the Duchess of Sussex ahead of the upcoming debut of her make-or-break Netflix show.
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This is the tale of two TV series.
Both are made by women who know their way around a spreadsheet and a Louboutin heel and are painfully au fait with the, at times, sharpened claws of the British press.
Both women have previously tried, and only moderately succeeded, at climbing the very greasy Hollywood pole.
And both women have a new Netflix series - but only one has just come in for the golden haloed, VIP treatment by the streamer while the other has just been mocked and overlooked. (Oxymoronic, you say?)
Last week the annual Next on Netflix showcase was held in Los Angeles to hype up their big shiny new releases for 2025 and to tax deduct ahi tuna sliders and top-shelf mezcal.
There, in the city’s famed Egyptian Theatre, in front of bigwigs from the streamer, stars like Tina Fey, Ben Affleck, and a legion of journalists, Prince Harry and Meghan, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were openly mocked - while their former pal Victoria Beckham was enjoying all the cheesy boosterism the streamer had to offer.
The details. We start with comedian John Mulaney who, in front of an auditorium of people who can probably move and shake LA more than the San Andreas Fault, quipped,
“Not since Harry and Meghan has Netflix given more money to someone without a specific plan.”
The line was met with “snickering” and a few “whoa” from the audience, the Daily Mail has reported.
A source who was at the showcase told the Mail: “It was shocking to me that Netflix would seemingly allow Meghan and Harry to be ridiculed at such a prestigious event.
The head honchos were all there. It really felt like Netflix don’t give a damn.”
That Mulaney felt he had licence to go after the former sacred cow Sussexes is newsworthy enough, but it gets worse for Harry and Meghan.
When she took to the stage for her turn, Netflix’s chief content officer Bela Bajara did not mention a single current or former Sussex project, including the duchess’ forthcoming entertaining series With Love, Meghan.
During the portion of Bajara’s presentation where it would have been natural to include With Love, as she was talking up Netflix’s new reality content like a new Eddie Murphy documentary and a show about Dallas Cowboys NFL, it was instead blanked, according to reports.
Nor did the glossy PR brochure put out for the event include reference to With Love, which will be out in a matter of weeks.
However, you know who did come in for some love during the event?
Why none other than Victoria, with Netflix banging on, reportedly, about their “excitement” about her new untitled docu-series including playing the audience a secret squirrel 90-second clip.
If, as Gore Vidal said, “every time a friend succeeds, I die a little,” what about when it’s a former friend?
For all of those playing along at home and who are well and truly abreast of the Sussex multiverse, Victoria was, of course, formerly pally with Meghan until she and her husband David Beckham and the Sussexes fell out.
The scene that played out in LA last week shows just how much the Hollywood ground has moved underneath the duke and duchess in the last 12 months.
It was this time last year when Netflix’s Bajara was doing some very enthusiastic drum-beating about P-plate producers Harry and Meghan.
They had “like a bunch [in] development,” she enthused at the time.
“So all very early development, with a movie, a TV show and a couple of unscripted shows. But yeah, the movie’s great”.
Since Bajara’s ‘excitement’ about the Sussexes’ projects, things have not gone according to script.
Harry’s five-parter Polo was, when anyone actually deigned to watch it, came in for a drubbing, committing the ultimate entertainment biz faux pas - it was boring.
Having sat through much of it I can tell you it was a show in search of a decent plot (in one episode the dramatic arc we, the tired viewer, was meant to care about was the air con breaking down at a baby shower), stuffed with characters who grated with their incessant, trite patter about “winning” and failed to include, errr, women.
Whoever at Sussex HQ, where gender equality is one of their tent pole causes, thought making a series entirely starring male protagonists, and where the only lady folk featured were the fretting-on-the-sidelines wives and girlfriends, needs to be sent to a re-education camp run by Gloria Steinem.
However, Polo committed the ultimate TV sin - it abjectly failed to rate. It never made the top ten and disappeared faster than Prince Andrew when being introduced to age appropriate women.
There were signs that both Netflix and the duke and duchess, who were both executive producers, had an inkling they had a lame pony of a show on their hands given they did precisely zero promotional activity and did not invest a cent in building hype.
As 2024 progressed the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s relationship with the streamer seems to have taken a turn away from the like-so-totally-wow-excited.
After Polo’s belly flop, a Californian source told the Daily Mail that “Netflix are exhausted. It’s so much work with [Meghan] and, bluntly, the ‘deliverable’ does not seem to be worth it.”
So, ominous music played, news stories were clacked out on keyboards, not least mine, about how the Sussexes now had one final go at proving they could actually make something people wanted to watch that did not rely on them trotting out their grab bag of Buckingham Palace bugbears.
When 2025 rolled around, with their current Netflix contract set to expire this year, everything rested on With Love, AKA what looks to be the duchess’ attempt at something like Martha Makes Montecito, being a surefire, bang-up success story.
On January 2 the With Love trailer dropped, including on the duchess’ 24-hour old freshly launched Instagram.
Finally we the people would learn how to ‘elevate the ordinary’.
Finally someone was here to explain to us what to do with those egregiously expensive packets of edible flowers no one ever buys.
Finally we would be “inspired,” as Netflix’s marketing pablum promised, to run kitchen-wards to eagerly spend our precious free time lovingly assembling grazing boards and artfully strewing decorative lemons.
Then came the devastating Los Angeles fires and on January 12 (after the well-meaning Sussexes were branded “disaster tourists”) Meghan announced that the show would be delayed until March 4.
Given this hiccup, you might have thought that Netflix would use their showcase last week to drum up some fresh buzz about With Love, to reaffirm their commitment to working with the couple.
Clearly not. Instead, they chose to share their “excitement” about ol’ VB’s new don’t-call-it-a-reality-show reality show.
At least please let it be called something terribly fromage-y like Spice Of Life. Or Spice Racked. Or Designing Woman.
Or even Queen Victoria.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’
experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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