Harry & Meghan: it’s not what you think

Meghan and Harry's Netflix special has garnered widespread criticism - but it is worth exploring what they are trying to achieve.

If you’re part of mainstream media, you are more or less duty-bound to slam the Harry & Meghan show on Netflix. Spoilt, entitled, naive, self-serving: pick your adjective and go hard and often against the rogue royals now trying to re-create themselves as social media thought leaders. And the duo certainly are making it easy to question their characters.

Yet the first three episodes of Harry & Meghan suggest a more nuanced reaction might help us understand that what the couple is trying to achieve is not all bad

Yes, H & M are on a trajectory that could see them burnt for leaping so close to the sun of celebrity. Yes, it’s fair to question their judgment in deserting – and dissing – one of the biggest brands in the world and trying to set up their own secular court. Worse still are their well-documented disloyal statements about their family members.

But the three episodes of the documentary released so far (another three are released on Thursday night and we will see then just how far they go in their criticisms of the other royals) show a more interesting couple than the media, especially the British media, often depict. Stupid and vacuous, they are not.

Harry and Meghan further distanced themselves from the Royal Family in the docuseries - which came as a shock to Buckingham Palace.

For years now, Harry has been seen as a patsy, so in thrall to an American actor that he can’t think straight and foolishly exited his family and country in a move he will surely come to regret. The not-very-smart spare. But Harry emerges here as reflective, articulate and showing no real desire to return to the fold.

His wife has been called every name known to Fleet Street. Meghan’s glamour, her career in a television series and her outspokenness have made it easy to write her off as shallow and grasping.

The Netflix show reveals her, however, as a high achiever, intelligent, interested in the wider world, the big issues and, in her own words, a bit of a nerdy kid.

There are moments too when you see Meghan Markle’s vulnerability, the little girl from a broken family, with a great black mother and a pretty ordinary white father with whom she nonetheless spent every weekend growing up.

The point is that both these people have some substance and their documentary is arguably no more self-serving than many other authorised biopics or Netflix series.

I think here of the engrossing series on basketball, The Last Dance, and the sympathetic portrait it paints of US star Michael Jordan, whose own production company, Jump 23, was co-producer. It’s a terrific series but has been rightly criticised because Jordan and his team had some control over the product. (Don’t get Australians started on the way Luc Longley was simply written out of The Last Dance).

It’s the same here: obviously H & M had a big say in the series. But that doesn’t mean it’s fiction. Apart from anything else, we learn a lot from the production choices that have been made, the decisions on what to put in and what to leave out. And in both these cases we know quite a lot of what has been left out.

In the case of the Sussexes, the choices define the issues they will likely campaign on as they create a role on social media platforms – the public square of our times. And boy, do they have a big public square, with stratospheric brand awareness across the globe.

Meghan may have indeed asked “Who’s that?” when Harry’s name came up in 2016, but it’s unlikely anyone around the globe would be unaware at some level of the couple, thanks to that massive media attention.

Meghan’s behaviour on the special was no more self-serving than Michael Jordan in his acclaimed series The Last Dance.

The awareness offers huge potential for the couple to campaign on their two chosen issues: the right to privacy; and unconscious racism.

The series invites us to look at both through their lens but also through the lens of history and sociology. The couple’s complaints are interspersed with reflections from expert commentators and academics who address the issues in a more general sense. Strip out the first meeting in Soho, the romantic African safari, the roast chicken meals in the flat in Kensington Palace, and we can see in Harry & Meghan an effort to shift the dial on big issues.

Bringing in historians and cultural commentators to frame the couple’s experience within questions about empire, whiteness, and the so-called contract between royals and British taxpayers (and thus the media) gives the series a cachet the Kardashians, for example, could not conjure.

The criticism of the clearly awful behaviour by some paparazzi is well made in the documentary and some viewers will surely find some of the footage and revelations (and yes some of this is old footage and old news) reprehensible. Not everyone believes pursuing Diana or Kate or Meghan down the street for no other reason than to get yet another shot of them walking down the street is important for free speech or a good use of anyone’s talent and time.

But, as many others have pointed out, the problem with H & M’s plea to the media to lay off is that without the media they don’t have the global brand that has landed them multimillion-dollar contracts to talk about themselves or their projects.

It’s a loop, and those who depend on personal brand awareness must understand the rules if they are not to go bonkers. It’s pretty simple: the bigger the brand, the greater the media intrusion; the greater the media intrusion, the bigger the brand; and so on and so on and so on.

Even so, seeing what intense media attention looks like from the perspective of the subject, rather than from the perspective of the journalist or photographer or the reader or viewer, is unusual and useful, even while acknowledging some of the details are distorted or exaggerated.

The lives of the Sussexes have not been ruined by media intrusion but the lives of other have been damaged, even if the intrusion has been warranted. It’s not so bad for the profession to hear this stuff from the horse’s mouth once in a while. Self-serving on the part of H & M? Sure. But so, too, is some of the reaction from sections of the press.

The Netflix series is on firmer ground when it comes to unconscious bias towards white people. We don’t have to believe the royals are racists to see the value in a high-profile prince speaking thoughtfully about his own journey of understanding of what it means to be a bi-racial person – in Britain or anywhere.

There are few more important messages to the world right now than the need to understand the power we attach to colour.

The documentary shows Meghan and Harry grappling with this issue. They are inviting millions of Netflix viewers to do the same – to engage with the questions, with our inherited prejudices and indeed our instinct that modern men and women can do better on all this than they have in the past.

Take a look at the show. It’s more interesting than you think.