Prince Harry’s Polo doco about ‘world’s stupidest sport’ roasted
The Duke of Sussex’s latest Netflix show has dropped – and it is being absolutely roasted by pretty much everyone.
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Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex’s new Netflix series, Polo, was released on Tuesday to the deafening sound of claws being sharpened.
The reviews, scant as they are, are in – and if this show was a four-legged creature, it would be destined for the knackery.
With the ever-present tick, tick, tick of Harry and wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex’s Netflix deal winding down, critics have mauled the five-parter.
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The Guardian described it as an “unintentional comedy” about “the stupidest, most obnoxious sport known to humanity”. Their reviewer writes that the show looks “destined to fall … into obscurity at the speed of light. And rightly so. It’s clattering and niche, and feels like a spoof documentary”.
The Telegraph has declared the series “a dull indulgence about a rich person’s pursuit”.
Both papers gave it two stars, meaning that Polo’s direness might be the first thing that the left-leaning Guardian and right-leaning Telegraph have agreed on in modern history and which is surely one of the signs of the impending apocalypse.
In Polo, Harry and Meghan themselves only make brief seconds-long cameos, which have the air of the contractually obliged. The duchess briefly speaks Spanish to uber player Adolfo Cambiaso while the duke and Cambiaso have an interesting conversation about father-son dynamics.
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Harry: “What’s it like playing against your kid?”
Cambiaso: “It’s difficult. And worse when you lose”.
Laughing, Harry responds: “You’re proud, but also angry".
Good luck Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, if they ever get on a horse.
Having watched most of the series, I can say this: Bugger me. It’s nearly four hours given over to a clutch of inherently unlikeable wealthy men who bang on about winning seemingly in between having their teeth recapped.
The cast features an interchangeable roster of generically good looking young polo players with nary one full personality to share between them and a series of women of an indeterminate age whose faces are not their original ones. They are allowed to sit on the sidelines and clap.
Overall, the cast is, generally speaking, an unappealing, unlikeable bunch of self-absorbed men and there is a certain sad grasping for plot lines. One episode’s narrative arc involves a resentful player being forced to attend his wife’s baby shower – and the airconditioning breaks down. In another episode, the player attacks an Esky with a polo mallet after losing a game and then cries on his own.
Interestingly, there are several characters who are traumatised sons who have failed to deal with their daddy issues and take it out on the polo field. No wonder Harry loves playing this sport.
Think lifestyles of the rich, repugnant and tediously over-invested in a sport destined to never go mainstream.
To quote Melania Trump, who lives down the road in Palm Beach where this was filmed, “I really don’t care. Do you?”
The biggest problem with Polo: It’s boring. It’s not glamorous or sexy or delicious trash to be savoured in all its Botox-ed glory TV.
It’s tough having to sit through an untold number of infographics to explain the minutiae of a game that does not work on TV screens and it’s a series where the tension is often so forced, so artificially amped up, it’s liable to pop the proliferation of fillered lips and brows that feature heavily too.
From the parts I have seen, the question of animal cruelty is dodged – interesting given that Meghan remains the patron of a British dog rescue home.
And women? You know, that 50 per cent of the world’s population? (And 49 per cent of Netflix’s subscribers?) They are reduced to such retrograde stereotypes, I want to do a spot of screaming. All women do in Polo is sit on the sidelines and shop and drink and cook and entertain. One gets to ride a horse, once.
None of the players followed by the Netflix cameras are female. (47 out of the 48 players in the tournament the show is about are male).
Sometimes, women are put on camera to express the feelings that their menfolk patently cannot because they are off winning or talking about winning or practising winning or dreaming about winning hostile takeovers or some such.
At one stage, a young player discusses his mother’s idea for a new team strategy at a cocktail party. “What the f**k does she know?” another man says, and they all guffaw. Women! Them and their funny ‘ideas’.
I wonder what their neighbour and Meghan’s friend Gloria Steinem might think?
(Of how much Harry was a part of things behind the camera, showrunner Miloš Balać has told Variety that the duke was “involved … in a pretty incredible way”, so are we to assume he saw no issue with any of this?)
One of the Sussexes’ Archewell Foundation’s pillars is “uplifting women and girls” and yet they have put out a show where women are supporting characters who are generally being ignored or overlooked by their husbands and boyfriends. You know, when they are not supportively clapping from the stands.
Overall, if Polo is the calibre of what the Sussexes can produce, let’s hope they have wisely and very safely invested the tens of millions they have already banked from Netflix.
Along with Meghan’s as-yet-untitled cooking, lifestyle-y show (out next year), this and Polo are the Sussexes’ last ditch, last roll of the dice attempts to establish themselves as producers who can cut it in the sharky waters of Hollywood.
Back in 2020, they said they were going to make “content that informs but also gives hope” and instead have ended up essentially failing to even be able to make a decent Real Horsewives show.
At one point, player Louis Devaleix says of taking to the field against Harry, he “was not relaxing. He wanted to win at all costs”.
With Polo, he has decidedly not, critically at least.
Only time will tell if viewers lap this up.
One last note. The same day that Polo was released also happened to be the 88th anniversary of the day Harry’s great, great uncle King Edward VIII abdicated in favour of Wallis Simpson and living out his days in hollow, pampered idleness.
Both men gave up royalty to forge new, independent lives overseas. Just how is that turning out, do you think?
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 Prince Harry’s Polo doco about ‘world’s stupidest sport’ roasted
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