Why everyone hates "Harry and Meghan" on Netflix
High ratings for Meghan Markle's lies, Prince Harry's claims of racism and threats fuel viewers to defend the British Royal family
I watched the first three hours of the new reality show slash documentary for which Netflix paid Prince Harry and Meghan Markle over $100 million to sell out the royal family.
Even though the show is a little boring and there are no good reviews of it, I will watch the next three hours that drop on Thursday. The video teaser (below) has already infuriated me with the inaccuracies and entitlement.
So I am hate watching this series. And I’m not the only one.
“Harry and Meghan” is the second highest-rated show on Netflix. Millions of Americans have watched it. It is also a huge hit in the U.K. — double the ratings in one day (2.2 million) than “The Crown,” which is a much better and more accurate fictional show about the monarchy.
Why are millions hate watching this show? I’ll give you three reasons to understand the phenomenon.
Why hate watch
First, we know from the Oprah interview, Meghan lies even when there is no reason for it. That’s typical behavior for a narcissist and enraging for moral people. It’s also riveting to watch her do it.
A second reason is it’s stunning to watch Harry declare openly on global TV that his own people — the British — are all racists, and that’s why they don’t like his wife.
Finally, the show is awesomely hateful in the lack of self-awareness by the couple who make the media out to be evildoers who violate their privacy while at the same time, they have multiple film crews in their home, video cameras in their cars, Facetime recorded in their beds and hours of selfie videos which they’ve sold to the highest bidder.
They don’t see the hypocrisy because they are so self-absorbed.
Why care
The reason we are defensive (and thus engaged in the show) about all this is Americans are affectionate toward the British royals.
We just watched Queen Elizabeth’s incredible 70-year reign and close alliance with the U.S. and don't want to see her grandson muck up her legacy. Harry and Meghan have done everything in their power to burn down the monarchy.
We felt especially protective of Prince Harry and Prine William since their mother, Princess Diana, was killed in a car crash. But all sympathy now goes only to William who has been deceived, treated cruelly, defamed and abandoned by his younger brother.
William and his wife Kate Middleton are much better liked than Meghan — even by Americans, which is telling. There seems very little chance now that the brothers could ever reconcile.
Racism against Meghan:
Harry claimed that Meghan was persecuted in a way the other royal wives were not because she’s half black. “The difference here is the racist element,” Harry declares. He also blames Blexit for Meghan’s victimhood.
Meghan said people only made an issue of her race when she moved to the U.K. “But before that, most people didn't treat me like a black woman,” she claimed. (She said she was not subject to racism as a child like her mother because she’s lighter skin.)
They spend an enormous time on the show making the British Commonwealth, which was so important to Queen Elizabeth, as an “Empire 2.0” and essentially a modern-day slave trade.
Piers Morgan has known Meghan and then got fired from his popular TV show almost two years ago for questioning her stories after the Oprah Winfrey special. I wrote this defense of Morgan at the time.
This go round, Morgan said (watch below) angrily:
Let's be clear Britain's one of the most tolerant and multicultural nations in the world. We celebrated the glamorous modern flair of the new young royals. We eulogized the newly biracial monarchy as the fresh face of 21st-century Britain ...
Sadly millions of people around the world will watch this series, and they'll believe it. They'll believe the smears about Britain and our monarchy — that we're a bunch of bigoted and hateful people.
Pierce is probably right that there is a section of the viewing audience who believe the Netflix “experts” interviewed who supplied all kinds of evidence and history lessons to prove Meghan was a victim of racism. I doubt they read this far into my piece.
The lies:
Meghan is a pathological liar. She lies when she wants to appear better. She doesn’t cover up the past or try to make the new story fit with what she’s already said publicly on other TV interviews. She just lies on top of the lie and leaves the audience texting each other from our couches to try to answer the missing pieces. Meanwhile, Meg’s already on to her next tall tale.
A perfect example is that she says in the Netflix show that she always wore “muted colors” — like camel, white, brown — so that she would not wear the same shade as a “senior royal” and not try to stand out from the family. Then the internet cobbled together this collage:
The fact is Meghan wore neutral colors before she met Harry and still prefers those shades now (she wore white just this week to get an anti-racism award.)
Why the lie about the colors? She came up with the plan because it would make her look reasonable and modest and not the troublemaker she was to the royals.
Meghan’s family
Meghan’s niece, Ashleigh Hale, 37, is interviewed on the show. Ashleigh is the biological daughter of Meghan’s half-sister, Samantha Markle, who is always trashing her in the press. The niece said she was very close to Meghan before she met Harry, and the relationship was important to her on multiple levels.
That’s all changed, and the two seemingly don’t seem to see each other anymore.
Meghan said on Netflix that the palace would not let her invite Ashleigh to the wedding because of Samantha’s troublemaking. The Daily Mail reported, “Palace insiders rejected Meghan’s claims they advised her not to invite her niece to her wedding to Harry.”
Ashleigh, whose mother abandoned her and she was adopted by her grandparents, cried on the show over losing the relationship with Meghan. But Meg had long ago moved along until she needed Ashleigh to be the token allied family member from the Markle side on this show.
Meghan also had a long saga on why she doesn’t talk to her father, Thomas Markle, who raised her. She said she was a “daddy’s girl” but doesn’t explain why she didn’t mostly live with her mother, Doria Ragland.
A journalist would have asked Ragland that question and called Thomas for a response. But this is a Netflix reality show, so there is only one perspective given: Meghan is perfect.
Meet cute lie
Another weird lie was about how they met. The couple has always said that they were set up on a blind date and met at a club. Harry told Oprah: "It was definitely a setup—it was a blind date, for sure...I was beautifully surprised when I walked into that room and saw her...I was like, 'OK, well, I’m really gonna have to up my game!'"
But on Netflix, Harry said he was randomly scrolling through Instagram and found a photo of Meghan with a Snapchat filter dog ears and reached out to a mutual friend about her. Meghan said she looked through Harry’s Instagram (they don’t explain how she got access to his private account to cyberstalk).
Then somehow they connected directly by phone to meet up for their first one-hour drink date. He was supposedly late, and she said she had somewhere else to be.
Meghan said on Netflix their 2017 engagement interview with the BBC’s Mishal Husain was “orchestrated” and “rehearsed.” Meg added: “We weren’t allowed to tell our story because they didn’t want [us to.”]
Husain this week that she recalled it was. “a day that was full of joy.” The BBC team spoke to Megan and Harry beforehand to discuss what they wanted to cover and “what they felt comfortable sharing.”
Once again, Meghan made up a grand lie for absolutely no reason, which is what makes it pathological.
Selfie central
Harry and Meghan spend a big chunk of the Netflix show trashing the media and especially the royal reporters.
While they concede that they are literally paid to be public figures, they also act like the paparazzi have put them in physical danger, like his mother Princess Diana. There is no evidence of this whatsoever.
The Netflix producers used videos and photos of the couple that shows they were planning to do this reality series as long as two years ago. They both recorded themselves in selfie mode and also show videos of them supposedly in private but both are visible. They probably had producers recording them for a long time.
Just look at the main photo used to promote the show, below. If they are in the kitchen of their private home on the palace grounds, who took the photo?
Princess Diana
If you listen to Piers Morgan’s monologue above, you’ll hear he is most angry that Harry kept saying how much Meghan is like his mother, Princess Diana. He said they have the same “empathy”, “warmth” and “compassion.”
Morgan said he knew both women and “can say with absolute certainty, there’s nothing in common whatsoever.”
Even worse, the legacy of his mother was shown to be wanting privacy for her children. Netflix showed that famous time when Diana put her hand over the lens of a photographer while skilling and told him “as a parent”, she just wanted to protect her children.
Now her youngest son is flaunting his toddler children on international TV for a buck.
One of those scenes shows Megahn holding their infant daughter and pointing at a framed photo of Diana on the wall. It struck me odd that they would use a formal portrait that was in magazines of Diana in a gown and tiara as the photo to put in their daughter’s room to recognize her grandmother.
Does Harry not have personal photos of his mother in California? Or did Netflix print the photo from the internet and stick it on the wall for that scripted scene?
Keep watching
The next three hours of this unreality show are dropping on Thursday. According to the teasers, Harry will claim they left England because they were in threat for their lives. He calls the airplane “freedom flight” as if they were political hostages in a dictatorial regime.
Harry also claims the palace lied to protect his brother, Prince William. It’s ugly.
We’ll also get behind the scenes video of Harry and Meghan’s grand wedding. I am sure Meghan will have yet another new lie to share — like the one I wrote about in early 2021 in which the Archbishop of Canterbury was forced to come out and correct her.
Divorce prediction
Piers Morgan hilariously calls them “reality TV stars who haven’t got the charisma to carry their own sob story.” But I think the show is interesting to watch because they are so full of themselves and we know this will not end well for them.
This relationship won’t last. It’s a fantasy. They will….