The new trailer for Harry & Meghan, director Liz Garbus’s long rumored and now confirmed Netflix docuseries, opens with delicate piano music and a question. A voice asks the royal couple: “Why did you want to make this documentary?”
Even for me—a royals writer with a near-lifelong, often morbid fascination with the family—I’m not sure there’s a compelling answer. Why would the couple who has been targeted and picked apart by vicious tabloids, had their private correspondence illegally published, and been subject to endless racist, sexist vitriol online open up the last vestiges of their private life—their love story—to the prying eyes of the public?
“No one sees what’s happening behind closed doors,” Prince Harry offers—a canned, unconvincing reply—as the teaser flashes to a black-and-white photo of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex seated behind Prince William and Kate at that tense Commonwealth Day church service shortly before they stepped down as senior royals in 2020, followed by a stoic portrait of Meghan beneath a wide-brimmed black hat, head held high, on Remembrance Day 2019.
“When the stakes are this high, doesn’t it make more sense to hear our story from us?” Meghan says a few moments later.
It would, except that she and Prince Harry already shared their side of their break from the monarchy in their blockbuster Oprah sit-down last year, and a few weeks after Harry & Meghan premieres this month, Prince Harry will drop his strikingly titled memoir, Spare, on January 10. All this comes on the heels of Meghan’s back-to-back The Cut and Variety cover stories. “When the media has shaped the story around you, it’s really nice to be able to tell your own story,” Meghan told the former, but how many times, and in how many forums, do they plan to do that?
Maybe trumpeting the triumph of their whirlwind romance is an act of defiance, leveled at their haters and critics, besides serving up a dose of holiday fuzziness: The trailer certainly conjures the myth and magic Meghan and Harry have created since they started dating in 2016, with sentimental shots of them dancing at their royal wedding and Meghan clutching her pregnant belly on a beach. (Fans and voyeurs alike are already devouring these, as the series promises to explore “the clandestine days of their early courtship and the challenges that led to them feeling forced to step back from their full-time roles in the institution.”) Maybe it’s about business: The Sussexes have a #content deal with Netflix and their love story is the most coveted content they could ever hope to produce. (Pearl, an animated series from the couple’s Archewell Productions, fell through earlier this year.)
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