Meghan, Harry’s secret: they’re boring
I watched the first 10 minutes of the first 52-minute installment of the six-part docuseries “Harry & Meghan,” streaming on Netflix and concluding Thursday. It’s unfair to “review” the project based on such a short sample, but it was all that I could stand.
I have long enjoyed “The Crown” for its fabulously expensive and sumptuously produced take on 20th-century history. But that doesn’t mean I really care about the royal family. I’m American, and we fired our king in 1776.
And as for the “controversy” surrounding Prince Harry and his wife, the former “Suits” star, and the rest of the Windsors, I am reminded of the old phrase Bill Clinton used to employ when he wanted to skirt the issue: “I don’t have a dog in that fight.”
But as a TV reviewer, I do have a metaphorical canine in the broadcasting business and the nature of nonfiction storytelling and narrative explication.
And my fight is not with the self-exiled couple, but with Netflix itself.
Watching the opening moments of “Harry & Meghan,” we’re confronted with a film that never seems to get started or get to the point, a point, any point.
The subjects continually turn to the camera and declare, “We want to tell our story.” So tell it, already! We’re watching!
In its defense, we do get to see toddler Archie stare into a Montecito sunset and declare that it’s “pretty.”
A few minutes later they turn to us again and say, “Just why are we making this film?” You mean the film I’m already eight minutes into? You should have thought of that before you started! Why are you wasting our time with all this formerly royal rumination? “Where,” as Walter Mondale so famously quoted Wendy’s pitchwoman Clara Peller, “is the beef?”
I’m sure Fleet Street tabloids are having a field day with this effort. And Harry intimates at one point that “the media” is his real target. But I’m not sure I have the hours to spend finding out more.
Since most of what I know about the royals is from “The Crown,” it occurred to me that a former cable TV star and the son of Princess Diana — that most fabulous of royals — might not be cut out to become second-tier personalities in the family firm.
As “The Crown” told us, Prince Philip and Princess Anne spent most of their professional lives dutifully cutting ribbons, making brief remarks and shaking hands at ball bearing factories in Sheffield and other provincial cities. Glamour does not quite come to mind.
So you can see why two personalities with enough self-regard to make a series like “Harry & Meghan” might want to decamp for California.
It’s a bit ironic that Netflix, home to “The Crown,” has also created a culture of serialized documentary time-wasters, from the hundreds of multipart true-crime bingers to the banalities of “Tiger King.” An audience has clearly been found for such fare, and for “Harry & Meghan.”
› Hulu streams the new FX series “Kindred,” adapted from a novel by Hugo Award-winner Octavia Butler.
After selling a family brownstone in Brooklyn, a woman (Mallori Johnson) moves to Los Angeles to jump-start her writing career. After receiving a chilly reception from relatives she hoped would embrace her, she retreats to a home purchased sight unseen, where she is haunted by visions of her enslaved ancestors’ past.