‘Sickened’: Netflix move divides Prince Harry and Prince William

Feuding brothers Prince Harry and Prince William have been divided further after a Netflix move left William “sickened”.

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Just in time for Halloween, Buckingham Palace is facing ghost problem. Sadly, it’s not the spirit of the Queen Mother returned to retrieve her favourite cocktail shaker (or to give grandson and useless potato Prince Andrew a scare) but that of Diana, Princess of Wales in the new season of The Crown.

Soon, the final season of creator Peter Morgan’s lavish production will land on Netflix after seven years of tantrums, tiaras and a wig budget to rival the GDP of Luxembourg.

Now it has been revealed that this, the sixth season of the Buckingham Palace telenovela will feature the ghost of the late princess talking to, in different scenes, the late Queen and the current crown owner, King Charles.

Like a red rag to a bull (or the Bullingdon Club) elements in the UK media nearly immediately began their censorious clucking over the controversial scenes.

However, there are only two people whose opinion really matters: Diana’s sons. Prince William, just another Dad doing the school run these days in Windsor, and Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex and the only person who has probably tried to order a chip butty at Nobu.

Turns out one of them is reportedly “totally sickened” by the spectral scenes while the other is on the payroll of the company producing the palace pantomime. No points for guessing which is which.

Speaking to the Daily Beast’s Tom Sykes, a friend of William’s has revealed: “It’s incredibly hurtful to have his mother exploited over and over again in this tawdry fashion by Netflix. He won’t watch it, but he will be totally sickened by it.”

All of which must be hard enough for the 41-year-old climate crisis warrior and (probably) carpooling soccer parent. While William has never publicly commented on the Netflix series, he has form when it comes to vociferously speaking out against those who have leveraged his mother for their own ends.

In 2021, he put out an unprecedented video statement after the BBC’s Dyson report found that journalist Martin Bashir had tricked Diana into giving her infamous 1995 “three of us in the marriage” interview, railing against the interview having created “a false narrative” and said that it “should never be aired again”.

And Harry? Well, in a sentence that I don’t get to write all that often, the duke would seem to be comparatively, and outwardly, unruffled by it.

Thus, if the royal brothers did not have enough kindling to keep their feud alive and vigorously burning, enter the streaming giant. That very same company which has produced this ‘sickening’ content is Harry and his wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex’s biggest corporate paymaster.

That the Duke of Sussex has seemingly merrily gotten into bed with the same company that is now using their mother’s ghost to entertain the masses is just another reason that the Prince of Wales is seeing red when it comes to his sibling, the friend told Sykes.

“William is angry about a lot of things in connection with Harry. His decision to work with Netflix, who have ruthlessly exploited the family, is certainly one of them,” the pal told the Beast.

Harry has proven unusually sanguine, again, a word rarely used in conjunction with the pugnacious duke, about Netflix having repeatedly taken his grandparents and parents’ (and with this season, his own) lives and put them through the TV sausage-making mincer.

In 2021 he defended the Emmy and Golden Globe-winner, saying it gave a “rough idea” of the demands of “putting duty and service above family and everything else”.

“I am way more comfortable with The Crown than I am seeing stories written about my family or my wife,” Harry said. “That [The Crown] is obviously fiction, take it how you will.”

(His uncle, Earl Spencer, has a totally different view, saying in 2020, “The worry for me is that people see a program like that and they forget that it is fiction … I find Americans tell me they have watched The Crown as if they have taken a history lesson. Well, they haven’t.”)

More recently, in January, when The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert asked the Duke of Sussex whether he watches the show and fact checks it: “Yes, I do, actually. Which by the way, by the way — another reason why it is so important that history has it right.”

It’s a surprisingly laid-back attitude from the same man who has taken repeated umbrage over the press using his own life for commercial ends.

Let’s just pause here and imagine for a minute how Harry might react to the Diana ghost situation if he and Meghan did not have a reported $77 million on the line. Would we be seeing such a nonchalant approach to The Crown?

The Duke of Sussex has staked his post-palace career on a certain crusading bent, taking on Fleet Street over allegations of phone hacking and unlawful information gathering (with three separate cases currently wending their way through the UK legal system) and trying to reduce the harms of social media, especially on young people. (That one deserves large and repeated rounds of applause.)

Given all this, if the House of Montecito was not intertwined with Netflix – if the company had not piped tens of millions of dollars their way (and will supposedly keep piping tens of million their way) – in another universe, would Harry be right now taking a vocal stand against his mother’s memory being used for entertainment purposes?

We will never know for sure because this is the golden muzzle, if you will, that Harry clapped on himself when he and Meghan signed on the dotted line with the company back in 2020.

Where things go from here for the duke and duchess and Netflix is one of the great unknowns right now.

We’ve now passed the three year mark of the Sussexes’ commercial union with the company, during which time they have produced three series, only one of which stormed up the viewing charts. (I’ll give you a hint – it’s not the one about leadership that former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern distanced herself from or Harry’s deeply moving series about the Invictus Games.)

In June the Sun reported that “Netflix is unlikely to renew the Sussexes’ megabucks contract,” with a source saying “the feeling is that the lemon has been fully squeezed.

Later the same month, the same paper also reported that the couple had “been told to come up with more must-watch shows for Netflix if they want to be paid £40 million [$AUD 77 million] in outstanding fees”.

We have only gotten the occasional crumb of a detail about what the Sussexes might in the pipeline.

In August, Page Six reported that the company had spent a reported $4.75 million on buying the rights to the best-selling novel Meet Me At The Lake for the couple to adapt for the screen, though no official announcement has been made.

There have also been reports that Harry might have a doco about conservation in Africa in the offing, which sounds like a project that can be best categorised as ‘fine’. I’m guessing if it goes ahead the end result would be heartfelt, touching, feature lots of shots of Harry reverently stroking elephants’s trunks and that the whole thing would ultimately be watched by three people and the producers’ mums. Total.

Whatever the current health of the Sussex/Netfix marriage, robust or limping alone or somewhere in between, one added consequence of the royal renegades’ deal is that it has reportedly added another wedge to the teetering pile of other wedges that now stand between Harry and William.

The question that comes to mind here is, has it been worth it for Harry?

Maybe the answer is a loud and proud ‘yes’, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex having told their side of the story and earned tens of millions in the process. Or maybe it’s a quieter, less sure answer, in a world where he has gotten so much of what he wanted but has also lost so much too. How much harder might repairing, somehow, the

Anyone else thinking what I’m thinking? This would all make for one hell of a TV show.

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 ‘Sickened’: Netflix move divides Prince Harry and Prince William