LONDON — “Harry and Meghan,” the Netflix series released Thursday, has been one of the most anticipated television spectacles of the year — more media event than documentary.
The series starts with an on-screen message stressing its authenticity: “This is a firsthand account of Harry and Meghan’s story, told with never before seen personal archive.” Members of the royal family “declined to comment,” it adds, although people close to Harry and Meghan, including Meghan’s mother, are featured in the first three episodes.
Despite being filmed before Queen Elizabeth II’s death in September, the documentary arrives in a changed royal landscape, with King Charles III — Harry’s father — scheduled to be crowned next May. A further three episodes will be released Dec. 15.
Here are the main takeaways from the first three, which deepen the couple’s complaints about Britain’s news media, reveal details of Meghan’s fractious relationship with her relatives and claim that some royals viewed media harassment as a “rite of passage.”
Harry’s war with the news media continues
The first episode tells the story of how Harry and Meghan fell in love, but it also criticizes Britain’s news media.
Harry said the paparazzi had always had an impact on his life. Although he has few recollections from early childhood of his mother, Princess Diana, he said, “the majority of my memories are of being swarmed by paparazzi. Rarely did we have a holiday without someone with a camera jumping out of a bush or something.”
Harry said photographers continued to hound him when he attended school and began dating. The paparazzi harassed his girlfriends, he added, and as a result, their families’ lives were also “turned upside down.” When he met Meghan, he said, “I was terrified of her being driven away by the media — the same media who’d driven so many people away from me.”
Meghan and Harry have long been critical of Britain’s tabloid culture, and have taken legal action against several British newspapers for intrusions into their privacy.
The couple wants to carry on Diana’s legacy
Harry said that tabloid media harassment of Meghan was reminiscent of the experience of his mother, who died in a 1997 car crash in Paris after being followed by paparazzi. But he also made positive comparisons between his wife and his mother.
“So much of what Meghan is, and how she is, is so similar to my mum,” he said in the series’s first episode. “She has the same compassion, the same empathy. She has the same confidence; she has this warmth about her.”
Harry said he also saw himself as continuing Diana’s legacy. “I am my mother’s son,” he said. Of his charity work, he added, “I wanted to somehow carry my mum’s torch and try and keep her legacy alive and try and make her proud.”
Meghan’s mother said negative reactions to the couple were ‘about race’
Doria Ragland, Meghan’s mother, sat for a rare interview for the docuseries. In the second episode, she discusses her daughter’s childhood and relationship with Harry. When the couple started receiving negative treatment in the British press, Ragland said, she told Meghan that it was because her daughter is biracial.
“I said to her — I remember this very clearly — that ‘This is about race,’” Ragland recalled. “‘You may not want to hear it, but this is what’s coming down the pike,’” she added.
In the series’s third episode, Ragland said that she was “stalked by the paparazzi,” adding, “I felt unsafe a lot. I can’t just go walk my dogs; I can’t just go to work. You know, there was always someone there waiting for me, following me.”
Meghan said Toronto police failed to help when she complained of ‘stalking’
Before she and Harry were engaged, and before she had a security detail, Meghan approached police in Toronto to ask for help coping with the paparazzi who were following her, she said in the second episode.
“I would say to the police: If any other woman in Toronto said to you, ‘I have six grown men who are sleeping in their cars around my house and following me everywhere that I go, and I feel scared,’ wouldn’t you say that was stalking?” she said.
Meghan said police had agreed with her assessment but told her, “There’s really nothing we can do because of who you’re dating.”
So far, the series directly criticizes Britain’s press, not its royals
In the couple’s interview with Oprah Winfrey last year, much of the focus was on the royal family. Harry said he felt “really let down” by his father, Charles, for not supporting the couple when they were considering stepping back from their official roles.
In the same interview, Meghan said that when she was pregnant with the couple’s first child, there were “conversations about how dark” the child’s skin might be.
The first three episodes of the docuseries, which the couple co-produced, features several positive comments about the royal family, including Meghan’s recalling her first Christmas with them. Afterward, she said, she telephoned her mother and told her, “It’s just like a big family, like I always wanted.”
But the series does mention Princess Michael of Kent, a member of the royal family, wearing a brooch of an African man to a lunch with Meghan that critics considered racist.
“In this family, sometimes you’re part of the problem rather than part of the solution,” Harry said. “There is a huge level of unconscious bias,” he added.
Harry also said the royals had failed to understand that Meghan’s race was a factor in her treatment. “What people need to understand is, as far as a lot of the family were concerned, everything that she was being put through, they’d been put through as well,” he said, adding, “so it’s almost a rite of passage.”
Meghan’s family, though, is a focus
Much of the third episode is devoted to Meghan’s challenging family relationships, including her estranged half sister, Samantha, and father, Thomas.
Around the time of the couple’s wedding, Meghan said she believed her father had been taking money from the news media. When Meghan and Harry tried to talk to him about this, Meghan said, he would not pick up the phone. Instead, someone sent her text messages from his number using language that she did not recognize.
“It called me ‘Meghan,’” she said, adding. “I was, like, ‘He’s never called me Meghan any day I’ve lived on this planet.’” The person sending the text messages was likely an impostor, she added.
More revelations may be coming
The series’s final three episodes will be released Dec. 15. A trailer on Netflix’s site suggested that these episodes will focus on the couple’s departure from the royal family and their ongoing problems with Britain’s news media.
In January, Harry is also scheduled to release “Spare,” a tell-all memoir that he has described as a “firsthand account of my life that’s accurate and wholly truthful.”
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