Here are some things I think we can confidently say King Charles and Queen Camilla won’t be doing on New Year’s Eve: starting a TikTok account about their Jack Russells, letting Princess Anne get close to the sherry for cooking too early in the piece. , or watching Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s latest Netflix project, Live to lead.
After two years of announcing content deals followed by tumbleweeds, it’s been a relatively whirlwind five months for the Duke and Duchess, with the launch of their first Spotify podcast, the well-received Archetypes, two Netflix shows and then, on beginning of the new year. , Harry’s memoirs, For spare. (It’s a content Sussex-nami!)
With 2023 just around the corner, Montecito’s creative engines seem to be firing on all cylinders; brains buzz, Macbook Pro keyboards click, as the Sussexes finally begin to reveal the content the world has been promised for so long!
But He lives in Lead’s The release also means something else: Once Harry’s autobiography is published on January 10, the couple’s list of confirmed upcoming projects includes… a doc about the Invictus Games, the initiative for wounded and serving veterans that Duke started when he was a working member. of the royal family.
This is.
Apart from Heart of Invictus i to directthe Sussexes have no other projects planned with the streaming behemoth.
Likewise, Spotify has not announced a second series archetypes or any upcoming Harry series or some new offering from the duo.
In 2021 Meghan published a children’s book called The Bankbut in the 18 months since, no second book, children’s or otherwise, has been announced.
Maybe it’s a hiatus and there are multiple exciting series bubbling up in Archewell’s content labs, but so far, there’s no sign of that.
At first glance, now that we’ve gotten a good taste of what the pair can come up with with a (I assume) full staff, the pair’s career looks bright and shiny. But look a little further and the picture becomes less rosy.
The most obvious and important place to start here is its deal with Netflix, a $140 million deal we were told in 2020 that would make “content that informs, but also gives hope.” (It’s hard to see much that was informative or hopeful Harry and Meghan for the Windsors…)
Its first offering, its self-titled six-part “documentary,” has been a huge hit for the streamer, generating the kind of global cacophony it would normally take an eight-figure marketing budget to pull off. Of course, most of the duke and duchesses’ revelations were repeated, but no matter, two members of the royal family sounding out their deep reservoirs of grief and anger while the cameras were rolling proved to be a hit.
And we know this because the company, after the launch of the first ‘volume’, was quick to inform the world that more than 28 million households had tuned in to see some of the first three episodes of the series. Then came the second batch of episodes, the ones that really got to the meaty part of their story and have been crickets ever since.
While the series remains the most-watched TV show in the UK and number two in Australia and the US, it’s curious that Netflix isn’t bringing it back, proudly talking about how many millions of people around the world are willing to see a duke and a duchess. turn family hostility into television programming.
There are other troubling omens as well. The reviews by Harry and Meghan were decidedly mixed, even from publications like variety which recently included it on its cover (“the Netflix filmHarry and Meghan“It represents the drama of the royal family, once again”).
As of this writing, the show has a Rotten Tomatoes audience rating of 17 percent.
If critics and viewers are less than enamored with this, their supposedly most sensational production, then it remains to be seen how attractive they are as a commercial prospect.
Yet! There’s a lot of momentum around the duke and duchess right now, so how has Netflix capitalized on it? By announcing Live to leadwhose presentation has been decidedly prone to hooking.
Almost immediately, questions arose about the Sussexes’ involvement in the project, as the series features former US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who died in September 2020, the same month the Sussexes announced their agreement with Netflix.
Next, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, who appears in it to directissued a statement of his own saying he had been interviewed in late 2019 and had had “no direct contact with the Sussexes”.
(Basically, it looks like they just shot pieces on camera that went into this production, and hey, a new Sussex show! Still, at least it’s perfectly in line with what they promised to come back when.)
Then there is the moment, New Year’s Eve. It’s a decidedly odd day to release the Sussexes’ next venture with the company, on the same day that most of the world is busy popping champagne corks and trying to defrost party sausage rolls.
What remains to be seen is whether Harry and Meghan can produce successful programming that isn’t based on their royal tales of woe. Will anyone want to watch, listen or read what he’s doing if he’s not dishing out dirt on the monarchy? Does anyone care what he has to say (aside from his legion of fervent supporters) if he’s not milking the trauma of his palace?
As content creators in their own right, they are still an unproven commercial quantity.
Before Christmas, a source said telegraph of the Duke and Duchess: “They hope people are interested in what they’re doing beyond all the drama.”
But…will people give their TV shows, podcasts, or books the kind of attention and in the numbers needed to sustain big business if they don’t take pictures at the Palace?
Julia Alexander of Parrot Analytics, a firm that tracks global audience demand, wrote this month after the release of the first volume: “It’s been a tough push for the Obamas to find mainstream hits outside of early documentaries , who’s to say it will be any easier for the Sussexes?”
Strip them of their titles, strip them of their palace ties, strip them of their claims of royal racism and callous indifference to their suffering, and what’s so attractively left is a proposition for, say, Netflix?
In the bigger picture, the Sussexes would seem to be in a bit of a bind. Until now, their entire public image and business output has also been based on their status as royal refugees, understandable given that it was their most valuable commodity when they arrived in the United States and suddenly found that money royals had dried up, including having to pay their money. safety
(It didn’t seem to occur to them that British taxpayers wouldn’t mind paying to protect two people who had no official status and lived 8,500 km from London.) They needed money; Netflix had a voracious appetite for content – it seemed like a match made in heaven.
Except more than two years later, it seems a bit as if Harry and Meghan have backed themselves into a corner of the brand and today are defined in the public imagination not by their humanitarian work but by their willingness to fool the royal family , sometimes with a large check attached.
Interestingly, its reception in the US is not as glowing as you might imagine. Survey taken at the beginning of December, but before the publication of Harry and Meghan, found that 43 percent of Americans like the Duchess, compared to 52 percent who like Kate, Princess of Wales. Ultimately, Kate has a net approval rating that is 20 points higher than Meghan. (Harry and brother Prince William are almost neck and neck with 52% approval).
So this New Year’s Eve, will there be a lot of people looking forward to a rousing viewing starring the legendary RBG, Ardern and the amazing Greta Thunberg? Even if much of the world isn’t, even if Charles and Camilla are too intent on mixing jugs of pina colada and keeping dogs away from partridge pate, here’s betting Netflix executives will be watching the numbers carefully.
Daniela Elser is a royal writer and commentator with over 15 years’ experience working with various Australian media titles.