‘Last chance’: Massive Meghan TV blow ahead of Netflix launch
The Duchess of Sussex has one “last chance” to salvage her ailing career – and she has just been dealt a devastating setback.
Royals
Don't miss out on the headlines from Royals. Followed categories will be added to My News.
There’s an old Yiddish proverb: “We plan, God laughs”.
The Almighty must be having a horribly callous chuckle this week as he, from on high on his cloudy perch, peers down at one particular Montecito estate.
Let’s be really clear about one thing: With their house 150km away from the devastating Los Angeles fires, Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex firmly number among the very lucky ones today. The disaster is far from over, the full extent of the crisis yet to be known.
However, the fires look set to scupper the duchess’ long-planned, long-mooted relaunch.
This week was meant to be the acme of a years-in-the-making rebranding and reframing of Meghan from royal dissident to lifestyle guru, one part Gwyneth Paltrow yogalates earth mother, one part motivational Martha Stewart-y jam-making with a healthy dash of Bezosian-entrepreneurialism thrown in.
MORE:‘Fake’: New Meghan Markle lie exposed
There was to be the TV show – With Love, Meghan – and a reported, at some point, product line, potentially released by her stalled American Riviera Orchard (ARO) brand.
Instead, early in the hours of Monday morning AEDT, with less than 72 hours before With Love was set to be duh-duh-duhhhhhh unveiled by Netflix, the duchess announced that she had asked the streamer to delay its launch given the ongoing disaster.
Really, she – and the streamer – had little if no choice here.
Forging ahead with With Love’s debut would have been so clinically tone deaf that pitchfork-wielding digital villagers would have been on her doorstep in no time, metaphorically speaking of course.
Against the backdrop of events and the prevailing mood, if Meghan’s show had come out this week, it’s hard if not impossible to see it working. Bad taste and only bad taste would have been left in untold mouths.
However, the entirely sensible and tactful decision to postpone the series could ultimately come at the expense of not only its success but the Sussexes’ future career prospects.
January 1 this year brought with it le grand return of Meghan to Instagram after a five-years-long social media hiatus. Then, just a day later, she used her freshly launched account to post the With Love trailer.
MORE: Get out: Neighbours slam Meghan and Harry
For nearly two weeks now, the anticipation, the interest and the conversation around the show has been building, building, building, with nearly 9 million people having watched the teaser via @meghan alone.
With under two minutes of footage of the duchess in host-mode, the Zeitgeist had been captured, maximum buzz achieved: All of this was meant to reach a crescendo with its release on Wednesday, and all that was left was for the mother of two to watch this cranked-up degree of public interest translate into a heady number of streams and views.
Instead of riding that wave of social media momentum all the way to the top of the most viewed charts, all of that velocity will now go to waste given that Hollywood and the world has bigger things on its mind right now than creating whimsical canapes.
Whenever With Love does premiere, it will now have to start from nearly square one and to undertake the whole PR push again.
And that’s another tricky part here – the when bit. When can With Love be rolled out, in order for it to not seem all a bit insensitive? All a bit tasteless?
Unfortunately for Meghan, there could be few concepts harder to make fly in the near future than a TV series about the joys of sun-dappled West Coast homemaking.
Now, it will be that much harder to sell audiences on aspirational So-Cal lifestyle programming when the world knows the reality is not so much idyllic shangri-la as charred hellscape in many places.
Realistically, even once the fires are long out, it will be months before a show revelling in the many splendours of a Californian garden with lush, large homegrown veggie patches and expanses of verdant greenery and grass will be palatable.
Even without the horror of the LA fires to contend with, the Duchess of Sussex’s plans for her rebirth as a cashmere-swaddled arbiter of hearth and home were facing an uphill battle.
On Saturday, the Sussexes visited the Eaton fire, meeting first responders and as People put it, “discreetly supporting wildfire relief efforts” (yet not so discreetly that the entertainment mag wasn’t able to cover things). And on the very same day, The Hollywood Reporter ran a story asking if With Love “will be Meghan’s ‘Last Chance at Netflix’ and if it would be her
‘Last Stand’.”
As the Reporter piece points out, of the Sussexes’ content-creating forays, “never in the history of streaming has so much been paid to so few for so little”, pointing out their string of “royal flops”, including Polo, which they brilliantly describe as being about “aristocracy’s pickleball”.
The Reporter argues of the duchess’ upcoming eight-parter of drizzling and dicing, “For Harry and Meghan, the stakes couldn’t be higher; their Netflix contract is almost up, and it’s hard to imagine a renewal if With Love, Meghan doesn’t deliver”.
All of which is both painful and embarrassing. In under five years, the duke and duchess have gone from being the hottest box office property imaginable to clouded by industry-wide doubt that they can reliably offer anything more than grand titles that can be slapped on the opening credits.
The Reporter did offer some good news for the Sussexes, saying that there was “optimism” about With Love inside Netflix HQ.
“There will be future opportunities,” a streaming company insider has said of the royal duo’s future.
“This isn’t the end. This is just the beginning.”
Here’s hoping the a/the/some God is looking the other way when these “future” plans are being made.
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
Originally published as ‘Last chance’: Massive Meghan TV blow ahead of Netflix launch
Harry and Meghan’s apparent TV snub
Harry and Meghan were spotted meeting victims and emergency crews in LA in a bid to provide relief amid the fires, though appear to have been snubbed in a news report.
Revealed: Queen Mary’s year of power with King Frederick
King Frederik X of Denmark and his Australian-born wife Queen Mary are marking the first year of their rule with some major milestones. But an expert thinks they have one weakness.