‘Don’t have the skills’: Awkward revelation rocks Meghan and Harry’s career comeback plans

Netflix has given the Duke and Duchess of Sussex a multibillion-dollar helping hand as the royal couple’s careers hit crisis mode.

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Let it never be said there is much of a dull moment when it comes to Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and their ongoing attempts to make it in America.

The big news this week is that they are set to be the shiny producers of the screen adaptation of the best-selling Meet Me At The Lake, a book that shifted more copies in the first week than I’m guessing a new chapter of the Bible would.

While initial reports suggested it was the Sussexes’ Archewell Productions that had forked out a figure believed to be about $4.5 million ($US3 million) for the rights to the book, Page Six subsequently popped up to knock that one on the head. Rather, it was Netflix who had ponied up the seven figure cheque for the Carley Fortune hit, “for them to produce under their Archewell Productions arm”.

Thus we get to the crux of things – is this Lake development actually good news for Harry and Meghan? And where does this leave their careers after a hurly burly couple of months?

For one thing, have you ever heard of any of the other big name, big budget content creators and producers tied to Netflix getting – or needing – this sort of leg up from the entertainment company?

Author Carley Fortune with her book Meet Me at the Lake. Picture: Instagram

Sure, maybe it happens, but as far as anyone knows, the Shonda Rimes and Ryan Murphys of the world have never needed what looks like the equivalent of a Hollywood booster seat.

Which, if you step back and think about it, is hardly a shock.

Harry is a man who is very good at soldiering, flying helicopters and making 30-something men question whether they should chuck out their man beads. Meghan is a woman who is unquestionably one of the most stylish titled women in modern history and knows her way around the more difficult yoga asanas. They are both very good at taking private jets.

None of this would, on paper, qualify anyone to be paid a reported $153 million ($US100 million) to make TV shows if it weren’t for those darling words: the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

After all, the duo might be superlative at sitting through, say, a dullsville Westminster Abbey service, but at creating TV shows or movies? They have as much experience at making successful small screen content as they have at brain surgery or running the European Central Bank, and yet no one is considering putting Aitch in charge of the Euro now are they? (Small mercies and all that).

An entertainment insider recently told People, “Meghan’s very smart, but she still only was involved in one very small slice of the industry being on Suits,” while another source said the duo “won’t listen to experienced experts”. (Incidentally proving that the concept of a tautology is yet to reach Hollywood).

Yet none of this would appear to have blunted their unsinkable ambition.

The Sussexes' careers have hit the skids.

According to Page Six this week, “Meghan’s not doing a Reese [Witherspoon] or making acquisitions for herself. She doesn’t want to direct or act”.

Rather, “someone who knows the couple” says that the duchess wants to be “a bit of Reese, a bit of Gwyneth [Paltrow, founder of Goop] a bit of Princess Kate, a bit of Gloria Steinem”.

So … Meghan wants to be an award-winning, commercially successful producer, an entrepreneur with a business worth hundreds of millions, a princess slash devoted do-gooder and a feminist icon. Simultaneously.

Which sounds like something a seven-year-old would jot down in a purple pencil when asked what they want to be when they grow up.

La La Land would seem to be finally clocking that promising to dump truckloads of cash on the couple’s Montecito lawn in return for their talents might not be the safest and best of bets.

“People threw money at them with hopes and dreams that it would translate into success”, a Hollywood insider has told People. “But I think it’s been a rude awakening for everyone — it’s like they built a house with no foundation”.

In April, Meghan signed on with la creme de la creme of agents Ari Emanuel, owner of WME.

Said one insider to the celebrity mag: “They can actually put them in touch with actual filmmakers and creative people and producers and people who actually know how to make a TV show or a film”.

The question in all of this is, if Harry and Meghan don’t have the skills, expertise or contacts to get a TV series made, even though they have an entire Archewell production wing staffed with seasoned industry professionals, what the dickens do they bring to the table?

Netflix gave the royals a multimillion-dollar helping hand. Picture: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP

Because I really don’t think the Sussex name is worth what it might have been worth, back before they started essentially dishing family secrets and getting wodges of cash for doing so.

In 2020, when the duke and duchess signed their Spotify (RIP) and Netflix deals, the couple represented a bold and audacious break with tradition; they were two people who were standing up for what they felt was right; and their leaving was a bold, historic repudiation of a vaunted institution.

They were, totally understandably, hot property.

So much has changed since then.

What they have done is make “Sussex” a byword for family dysfunction such that it would make the Borgias look like a peaceable lot.

Meanwhile, their Archewell Foundation has done great work – but no greater work than any of the reams of two-a-penny charities started by A-listers or Wall Street types who develop consciences.

The duke and duchess are not leaders who have been eagerly embraced by Washington and they have failed to make any real inroads as changemakers or exciting new voices on the American social, cultural or political stages.

What the Sussexes have done is take a 2018 story alleging that Meghan made Kate, the Princess of Wales cry at a bridesmaid dress fitting and ensured that we are still talking about it in 2023. (Meghan has obviously denied this and instead has claimed it was Kate who had her in tears).

The pair aren’t the hot property they once were.

What they have done is unintentionally ensured that smashed dog bowls and Harry’s frosticle of a “todger” are now the stuff of late-night TV sketches and stand up routines.

And the problem is that this reputational shift, combined with their dearth of content-making skills, experience and, reportedly, listening capabilities, is starting to make them look about as appealing a commercial proposition as the Fyre Festival 2.0.

What wasn’t priced into all those eight and nine-figure deals was the Sussexes transforming themselves into lightning rod figures.

But they’re not out for the count yet, no siree. A “rude awakening”, as People put it, might just have been had by bigwigs and a particular duke and duchess, but think of this as the interval.

So, get your snacks, race to the loo. The second half of the Great Sussex Show is about to start, and no one actually knows where things could end up.

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.