Since stepping down from royal duties to pursue a more private life, the couple formerly known as the duke and duchess of Sussex have decamped to Tyler Perry’s Beverly Hills mansion. There, they get paparazzi-ready pandemic outings and deals with Netflix, but only after Harry’s pitch to Bob Iger for the Disney boss to hire Meghan clearly failed. Just in time for the new year, Harry and Meghan have announced their latest endeavor: a podcast deal with Spotify.
While the rest of the world has spent the year navigating a global pandemic, Harry and Meg have clearly had a different priority in mind. From their conveniently located Montecito manor to their media maneuvering, the pair seem keen to rival Barack and Michelle Obama’s solitary success as small-screen producers.
The former first family notably sat out the royal wedding so as not to ruffle any political feathers on either side of the Atlantic, and from the moment Harry and Meghan announced their hasty divorce from the palace back in January, sources, likely some of the “five friends” who Meghan likes to have talk to the tabloids, immediately hit the headlines with denials that the Obamas counseled the couple before the decision (who was asking?) and with comparisons between the two pairs (who was doing so?).
But now, the veneer is off. Harry and Meghan didn’t just sign with the same ultra-exclusive speaking agency as the Obamas and the same streaming service, but now, they’ve followed them to Spotify, where the former first lady immediately catapulted to the top of the company’s summer chart. (It ranked fourth globally for the entire year.)
Harry and Meghan are young, comely, and charming enough on camera. They also don’t hold a candle to the appeal of the Obamas, and it’s not particularly close.
For starters, the first black president in our nation’s history and his double-Ivy League graduate of a wife who’s also become a blockbuster author and style icon win whatever reputational race Harry and Meghan want to start on resume alone. For all of his failures as a politician or party leader, Barack is the most popular living president, and four years after the ascent of President Trump, Michelle is still the most admired woman in America, according to Gallup, for the third year in a row.
By contrast, Harry is the now-sixth-in-line spare to the heir, Prince William, and Meghan is a former B-list supporting star of a perfectly respectable cable drama. Sure, Harry and Meghan theoretically have the smarts to cultivate an audience, but they’ve already signaled that they’re too cowardly to speak truth to the one power everyone is interested in: the crown.
Harry could blow Obama’s star out of the water by lambasting his own father’s horrific treatment of his beloved mother and the House of Windsor’s subsequent attempts to silence the prince’s protestations of the handling of her legacy. Meghan could become, without a shred of irony, the feminist hero of the Western world if she unveiled the extent to which Queen Elizabeth has protected her favorite son, accused predator and Epstein associate Prince Andrew.
But Harry and Meghan have evidently chosen to aim both too low and too high, believing they can achieve the sort of transcendent fame reaped by a couple ingrained in the national consciousness by being as boring as a Hallmark greeting card. In actuality, they could replicate the sort of superstardom only recently achieved by Princess Diana herself by ripping off the doors of the palace and telling the truth of its power.
Yes, Harry and Meghan could be the duke and duchess of the people’s hearts, even more influential than our most famous living president, but they don’t have the guts to do what it takes. Thus, they’ll subsist as a pair of discount Oprah Winfreys, twice as privileged but half as enigmatic.
