REVIEW: ‘Harry & Meghan’

Every nation gets the royal family it deserves. Americans once had Hollywood royalty, but Hollywood has decayed into virtue-signaling and television streaming. Meghan and Harry are pretenders to the throne of American royalty for the 21st century. A second-rate actress and a spare-part prince are parodying a European past for a fanbase that cannot remember it. They are speaking their truth even though parts of it are demonstrably false. Americans must have done something terrible to deserve these two.

The Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan is not so much a documentary as it is a six-hour Instagram post. It purports to be the true story of “Megxit,” their highly premature retirement as working royals, and to give thrilling insights into their new life in a humble mansion in Montecito. But, like everything else the couple says, it doesn’t quite add up. “We know the full truth,” Harry says. So why is it so hard to believe?

They say they want privacy, but they have taken $100 million from Netflix, sold private footage, and allowed cameras into their home at all hours. Harry says the pact between monarchy and media is a “dirty game,” but he is an active player. He complains that his family are now “cold” to him, but he has betrayed them all. He portrays the late Queen Elizabeth II as the passive toy of unnamed courtiers. He claims that the Queen, his father Charles III, and his brother Prince William ganged up on him, that they were “bullying us out of the family.” His willingness to publicize private conversations and impute the lowest of motives shows that they would be mad to share more than a sandwich with him.

Harry keeps saying that the media killed his mother, Princess Diana. He says the media have damaged his and Meghan’s mental health and complains about the “emotional toll.” He says he wants to protect Meghan from Diana’s fate and that his job “is to keep my family safe.” Yet here he is again, seeking public attention and feeding himself, his wife, and his two young children into the woodchipper of celebrity gossip. It makes no sense.

Above all, they tell us that this, as Harry says, is “a great love story.” But most of what they tell us, and almost all of what we see here, has nothing to do with love or its greatness, and everything to