Netflix’s Undercover Docuseries – The Hollywood Reporter

In the third episode of Netflix’s Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex reflect on their first interview since officially announcing their engagement. As they recall, it was a “rehearsed,” “orchestrated reality show” rather than an authentic account of their relationship. “We were never allowed to tell our story,” Harry notes. To which director Liz Garbus (Love, Marilyn), off camera, replies, “I guess that’s why we’re here.”

This docu-series is therefore intended as an opportunity for Meghan and Harry to finally speak their truths – albeit through the lens of Garbus and not necessarily “the way we would tell them”, as the princess noted in a recent Diversity an interview. Not surprisingly, the portrait ends up being flattering, with sympathy for their trials and scrupulous respect for their prospects.

What does not turn out is essential. When a subject declares that they have never been “allowed” to tell their side before, the viewer can reasonably expect what follows to provide unexpected details or new insights. Yet despite extensive interviews with the couple both together and separately, despite never-before-seen footage of their private lives, Harry and Meghan offers too little that seems fresh enough to merit its luxurious six-episode sprawl for all but the most avid royal watchers.

To Garbus’ credit, Harry and Meghan is perceptive enough to recognize that Harry and Meghan’s love story cannot be divorced from what it has meant to the general public. The first three chapters, which premiered on Thursday, chronicle the romance from their Instagram-assisted first introduction to the run-up to their wedding — presumably the other three, arriving on Thursday, October 15, will cover the wedding itself and “Megxit” — as well as an overview of Harry and Meghan’s upbringing with the help of friends and colleagues. (Abigail Spencer, Serena Williams and Lesotho’s Prince Seeso are among the higher-profile contributors.) But they also include interviews with academics outside Sussex’s inner circle to provide cultural context, linking the racist vitriol visited upon Meghan to the 2016 Brexit vote in particular and Britain’s history of colonialism in general.

The problem is that these conversations about Harry and Meghan are not new and Harry and Meghan it is content to revise them instead of propelling them forward. We hardly need a talking head to remind us that Meghan was initially touted in the press as a symbol of a modernizing, diversifying monarchy before she was singled out for her race; anyone who cared about any of this in the first place has witnessed this change firsthand over the past six years.

Perhaps it would have been more fruitful to explore the naïve expectation that Meghan could be, as the historian David Olusoga puts it, “a way of having those difficult conversations” about race that British society has avoided for too long. Or to ask what purpose the British monarchy even serves in the modern age, other than as a perpetual motion machine for the publicity machine.

Likewise, though Harry and Meghan allows the couple to talk about their courtship and family life in exhaustive detail, most of what is shared here is both too specific and too vague to offer much insight. There are sweet moments, like a private video of little Archie watching hummingbirds with his dad, and sad ones, like excerpts from the disturbing video diaries Meghan and Harry began keeping around their retirement from royal duties. But a shaggy anecdote about Harry showing up 30 minutes late for a first date tested the limits of my appetite for celebrity gossip, and I speak as someone who regularly scrolls through DeuxMoi’s Sunday Spotted Instagram stories.

In fact, one of the unintentional true revelations of Harry and Meghan well, let’s put it bluntly, how unremarkable Harry seems as a flesh-and-blood person – handsome, smart and well-intentioned, of course, but in rather mundane ways that only serve to emphasize how much of the enormous attention he’s given , can be attributed to the accident of his birth rather than any particular positive or negative achievement on his part. (In contrast, Meghan’s pre-Harry journey was built around the familiar all-American arc of a middle-class girl who became a TV star, lifestyle guru, and activist through passion, courage, and hard work.) That, in a way, is the goal. : Through the personal story of Meghan and Harry’s romance, Harry and Meghan seeks to tell a story about the institution itself.

The approach has certainly been successful before. Among other things, it made Oprah’s interview even more explosive than the usual telling of celebrities and what’s powerful The crown for five seasons and counting. But Harry and Meghan never resolves the tension between his aim to tell the true and intimate history of Sussex as they lived it and to take a broader, more critical view of the meaning of history.

It’s truly wonderful that Meghan and Harry feel empowered to speak out after years of suffering at the hands of a media more interested in exploiting their trauma than understanding them as people; if docu-series succeed at anything, it’s in showing the celebrity of British royalty for the oppressive gilded cage that it is. It’s just a little disappointing for the rest of us that so much of what they have to say sounds familiar, and that so little of it breaks new ground.