Opinion | Meghan and Harry Will Never Be This Interesting Again
It’s possible to hold two contrasting views about why Meghan and Harry sat for their interview with Oprah Winfrey on CBS Sunday night without appearing illogical. The couple had a list of legitimate grievances against their family and the hectoring British tabloid press, not to mention the bigoted treatment by some toward Meghan, and they wanted to air those complaints to their best advantage. But having recently signed a “megawatt” production deal with Netflix and a separate one with Spotify last year, they also needed to launch their new media brand in a way that would flatter and publicize them and shame their critics, even if it did expose their vulnerabilities.
Saying the couple’s image needed maintenance would be an understatement. A December YouGov poll found that almost 70 percent of respondents declared themselves “not very interested” or “not interested at all” in Meghan and Harry. Men and women answered the question about their interest in similar percentages, so it wasn’t a matter of one sex expressing apathy. And it wasn’t just the United States turning its back on them. A recent United Kingdom YouGov poll showed a long-running and steep decline of Meghan and Harry’s measured favorability. The other Windsors have not suffered such a dramatic drop, excepting, of course, Andrew, who occupies the sub-sub-basement of favorability.
So what better place to repair the pair’s likability than a CBS special hosted by Winfrey and broadcast after the highly rated 60 Minutes? All the pieces fit together to create event-scale ratings—the media buildup to the show, the showstopper quality of Winfrey’s questions, and some ultra-buzzy reveals, including news about Meghan’s suicidal ideation, Charles not returning Harry’s calls, and family questions about their baby’s skin tone. About 17.1 million tuned in, which is more than the average NFL game viewership in the peak 2019 season. Public relations professionals everywhere must be studying how Harry, just a normal bloke who happened to be born into a notable family, and Meghan, who achieved B-list celebrity by breaking into Hollywood (no easy feat), made themselves into international luminaries with so few extraordinary assets.
Haters of monarchies would have you regard “royal” families as marrow-sucking parasites on the public treasury. And they would be right. The Windsors being the exemplars of such parasitism, believe ancestry and divine endorsement gives them an automatic right to an opulent life and deference from commoners. We should probably give Meghan and Harry an attagirl and an attaboy for turning their backs on “The Firm,” the widely used nickname for the “royal” family, and striking out to earn their own keep through production deals. The taxpayers who funded Meghan and Harry’s lifestyle were victims. The media consumers who will partake of their films and podcast will be paying accomplices in the first season of The Liberation of Meghan and Harry.
But the media face through which the two will now encounter the world is not radically new for them. Instead of “the Firm” pulling the puppet strings on their bodies, they’ll do their own yanking as they switch from being human products of a company that markets their lives to the world to human products that they control. It’s just the same unscripted material moved to a new location. The biggest difference is how they’ve disintermediated the Windsors from profit participation and assumed complete image creation for themselves.
Having unbridled themselves from family and tradition, and having moved their act to an international stage, Meghan and Harry have not obliterated their publicity and autonomy problems. In order to stay commercially relevant, they’ll have to produce great content for Netflix and Spotify before their novelty wears off. That’s no easy feat. They’ll be competing against the most brilliant filmmakers and podcasters in the world now, and conjuring content from nothing ain’t nothing. Not even Steven Spielberg can deliver what the public wants every time, and he’s the greatest mass entertainer of our times. Also, neither Meghan nor Harry have much experience in producing media. If not for their relationship with the “royals,” they couldn’t have gotten a meeting with a Netflix flunky, let alone a deal.
The couple’s most durable assets are the ones they created by leaving the Buckingham Palace cocoon for La La Land. This season, for example, the couple portray the aggrieved and sympathetic “royals” in exile, self-styled underdogs who want to show the world they can be media moguls. But like Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Madonna and others have shown, an entertainer mustn’t operate too long under one persona. The audience says it wants more of what the entertainer produced, but they really crave something fresh and new. Stirring the publicity pot by picking fights with the Windsors and suing the British tabloids won’t sustain their novelty forever.
In the absence of creating astonishingly good media, Meghan and Harry might need to re-create many aspects of the British environment they’ve just fled to keep audiences interested. For starters, they’ll need a steady supply of villains to battle, additional causes to champion, unique heroes to partner with, and fresh personal revelations to uncork. It’s an unceasing, demanding spiral.
We’ve gotta wish Meghan and Harry good luck for making a courageous, one-way flight out of the Windsor family. But has anybody warned them that they’ve merely left one cruel plot for one that is even more merciless? The Meghan and Harry biopic will be a very filmable story, but one doubts that they’ll have the vision to capture it.
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Send Windsor scuttlebutt to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts admired The King and His Court softball team. My Twitter feed enjoyed Queen. My RSS feed still enjoys spinning “God Save the Queen.”