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    ‘Harry & Meghan’: What People Are Saying About the Netflix Series

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    Critics on both sides of the Atlantic found common ground in negative reviews of the first three episodes of the series.These days in Britain, very little unites the right and left. “Harry & Meghan,” the intimate Netflix series released Thursday, is quickly shaping up to be the exception.The first three episodes of the docuseries, directed by Liz Garbus and produced in conjunction with the production company of Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, were quickly skewered by a bipartisan group of critics, from The Sun to The Guardian. Although “skewered” may not actually capture the harshness of some of the commentary.Piers Morgan, who has been vociferously critical of the couple in the past, wastes no time laying into the series in his scathing review in The Sun, a tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch:Who are the world’s biggest victims right now? You might think it’s the poor people of Ukraine as they’re bombed, shot and raped by Putin’s invading barbarians. Or those whose lives have been ruined by the Covid pandemic that continues to cause widespread death and long-term illness. Or the millions battling crippling financial hardship in a devastating cost-of-living crisis that has swept the globe.But no. The world’s biggest victims are in fact Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, a pair of incredibly rich, stupendously privileged, horribly entitled narcissists.If you don’t believe me, just ask them!Later in his review, Morgan cautions viewers they may need a “sick bucket.” He was not the only one to evoke gastrointestinal distress. The headline for Lucy Mangan’s review in the left-leaning Guardian exclaims that the first three episodes were “so sickening I almost brought up my breakfast.”More on the British Royal FamilyBoston Visit: Prince William and Princess Catherine of Wales recently made a whirlwind visit to Boston. Swaths of the city were unimpressed.Aide Resigns: A Buckingham Palace staff member quit after a British-born Black guest said the aide pressed her on where she was from.‘The Crown’: Months ago, the new season of the Netflix drama was shaping up as another public-relations headache for Prince Charles. But then he became king.Training Nannies: Where did the royals find Prince George’s nanny? At Norland College, where students learn how to shield strollers from paparazzi and fend off potential kidnappers.Mangan does point out that the series so far has plenty of sweet moments — particularly of Prince Harry and Meghan “being charming and funny together” — but she ultimately finds the finished product wanting:But in the end — what are we left with? Exactly the same story we always knew, told in the way we would expect to hear it from the people who are telling it. Those who don’t care won’t watch. Those who do care — which is to say are voyeuristically invested in the real-life soap opera — will still read into it anything they want to and doubtless confirm all their previous ideas. There is plenty here to start another round of tabloid frenzy, particularly in Harry’s mention of members of the royal family who consider the pressure placed on anyone “marrying in” a rite of passage and resist allowing anyone else to avoid what their own spouses went through, and who bow to internal pressure to choose a wife who “fits the mould.” Which is to say — it is hard to see who, beyond the media, the villains of the piece, will really gain from this?The Independent, a more centrist player in British media, was less savage, but not exactly admiring, calling the series both “self-aggrandizing” and “wildly entertaining.” In her review, Jessie Thompson finds the couple, at times endearing and sympathetic, and the points about racism in Britain eloquently made.But while she writes that she respects their “right to share this stuff on their own terms,” she finds the protestations of love over the top (“We believe you! You are in love! There’s no need to show us any more of your WhatsApps!”) and their inability to talk like normal people when interviewed frustrating.She also wonders at moments in the series “if the couple are naïve or disingenuous”:Did Meghan really think it was “a joke” that she had to curtsy to the Queen of England? It might be an outdated request, but it surely can’t have been an unexpected one. “Like, what’s a walkabout?” she says of her first public appearance. They also seem to have a weird pathological need to document every aspect of their lives.The Financial Times, the more sober-minded and business-focused newspaper, finds the first three episodes of the much-hyped series something of a let down. As Henry Mance writes:Does this “Netflix Global Event” match up to, say, Diana, Princess of Wales on “Panorama,” Prince Andrew on “Newsnight” or even Harry and Meghan’s own conversation with Oprah Winfrey, in which they alleged a member of the royal family speculated about their baby’s skin colour? Bluntly, no. There have been explosive royal TV shows, but so far this is not one of them. Harry and Meghan do not drop bombs; at most, they point plaintively at existing craters. They have also bought into the successful Netflix formula: never say in one hour what you can stretch out over several. This is a show that makes you grateful that the streaming platform has the option to watch at 1.25x speed.In the United States, the reviews registered a similar sense of disappointment.As Stephanie Bunbury writes for Deadline:Three hours into Netflix doc series “Harry & Meghan” and still no tell-all truths from the darkest corners of the House of Windsor. Anyone who had expected the curtain to be lifted on the deep-state machinations of The Firm to protect the brand will be feeling shortchanged by Volume I which dropped today.Daniel D’Addario echoes that sentiment for Variety, lamenting the series’s unwillingness to push past the familiar: “As with the most recent, painfully dull season of “The Crown,” there seems a sort of narrative stuckness, an inability or lack of desire to find the next thing to say that we haven’t yet heard.”But he still holds out hope that the final episodes, which will be released on Dec. 15, will move beyond “the story of their courtship, wedding, and family feuds”:What they want to do now that they’ve overcome adversity may well lie ahead in the next batch of episodes, but speaking in their own voice about issues other than their personal experience would have represented a good start. But perhaps that’s not the remit, on a show for which the pair are engaged with a major streaming corporation to dish the dirt once more. Pity them, too — even after breaking free of Buckingham Palace, they’re still someone’s subjects. More

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      Netflix’s Harry and Meghan Documentary Series to Be ‘Personal and Raw’

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      The documentary series is the most high-profile project from Story Syndicate, a company run by the filmmaker Liz Garbus and her husband, Dan Cogan.Liz Garbus was skeptical.The documentarian behind films like “Becoming Cousteau” and “What Happened, Miss Simone?” was not an avid royal watcher. She knew the broad strokes of the decision by Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, to leave the British royal family. She had seen their interview with Oprah Winfrey. But she assumed that the stiff upper lip emblematic of elite British society would not make for a compelling documentary — too guarded, too interested in hagiography, too much of an all-around royal pain.Then she saw the footage.Encouraged by friends to document their dramatic decision to “step back” as senior members of the British royal family and assert their financial independence, Harry and Meghan shot more than 15 hours of personal video in the early months of 2020 as they finalized their plans to exit Buckingham Palace for good. Then they shared it all with Ms. Garbus and her husband, the producer Dan Cogan.Suddenly Ms. Garbus found herself watching Harry in the Windsor Suite at Heathrow Airport, addressing the camera directly. The video is dated March 11, and Harry has just finished his final two weeks of royal engagements and is headed to Vancouver to meet Meghan.“You’re right there with Harry in the Windsor Suite processing the fact that he’s leaving the royal family for the first time in his life,” Ms. Garbus said. “Then there was another clip with Meghan at home, alone, fresh out of the shower, her hair in a towel, no makeup, processing on her end what their life might actually be like.“It’s very personal and raw and powerful, and it made me appreciate the incredible weight that went into their decision,” she said. “It also affirmed the choice I had made about wanting to unravel how this historic break came to be.”When pressed as to whether Harry and Meghan had final approval over the series, Ms. Garbus responded: “It was a collaboration. You can keep asking me, but that’s what I’ll say.”Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York TimesOn Thursday, selections from those personal archives were made available to the world when Netflix released the first three hourlong episodes of “Harry and Meghan,” a six-part documentary series. (The final three episodes are scheduled to debut on the streaming service on Dec. 15.)Given the rabid, often polarizing opinions that seem to arise whenever Harry and Meghan are mentioned, the series will almost assuredly result in social media memes, tabloid gossip and — Netflix hopes, given that it signed a very rich deal with the couple in 2020 — a global streaming event.“You don’t always expect folks at their level of celebrity to speak with emotional honesty and intensity about things that are upsetting to them or complex in their lives,” Mr. Cogan said. “They were willing to do that, and that was so refreshing to us as storytellers.”More on the British Royal FamilyBoston Visit: Prince William and Princess Catherine of Wales recently made a whirlwind visit to Boston. Swaths of the city were unimpressed.Aide Resigns: A Buckingham Palace staff member quit after a British-born Black guest said the aide pressed her on where she was from.‘The Crown’: Months ago, the new season of the Netflix drama was shaping up as another public-relations headache for Prince Charles. But then he became king.Training Nannies: Where did the royals find Prince George’s nanny? At Norland College, where students learn how to shield strollers from paparazzi and fend off potential kidnappers.Their story is also being framed within “the history of British colonialism and race and its relationship to the monarchy,” Mr. Cogan added. In other words, issues that are sure to make the monarchy stammer.In the series, Ms. Garbus puts the couple’s personal archive into context, interspersing the self-shot video diaries with formal interviews and archival footage of the royal family. Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, is heavily featured, as are Harry’s boarding school buddies, Meghan’s security team in Canada, her college friends and co-stars from the TV show “Suits.”Filming began in November 2021 and ended in July, months before the death of Queen Elizabeth II. When asked if Harry and Meghan had control over the final product, Ms. Garbus said it was a collaboration. When pressed as to whether the couple had final approval over the series, she responded: “It was a collaboration. You can keep asking me, but that’s what I’ll say.”The project is something of a culmination of the issues Ms. Garbus has chronicled for the past two decades. Whether it’s social justice seen through the lens of the prison system (“The Farm: Angola, USA” and “Girlhood”) or uncovering the troubled personal stories of famous yet enigmatic figures — Bobby Fischer, Marilyn Monroe and Nina Simone — mental health and righting systemic wrongs are topics she returns to time and again. (Ms. Garbus also directed a documentary series about The New York Times called “The Fourth Estate.”)In the case of Harry and Meghan, Ms. Garbus said that the story was already in place when she became involved, a first for a filmmaker who prefers to determine how best to approach her subjects. The documentarian Garrett Bradley was previously attached to the project, but the two sides parted ways because Ms. Bradley’s vérité style did not mesh with the couple’s interests. Representatives for Ms. Bradley declined to comment.Ms. Garbus said that Harry and Meghan were interested in telling their love story within the historical context of the British monarchy. Ms. Garbus wanted to expand on that and explore how their personal pasts affected their present.“I’m always really interested in psychology and how someone’s childhood determines their future and what impact they will have on the world,” she said. “In this story with both of them, I was able to look at that.”Some have questioned why Harry and Meghan chose to make a documentary, suggesting that the couple’s decision to give up their royal duties meant they wanted to lead a more private life. In a statement to The New York Times, the couple’s global press secretary, Ashley Hansen, disputes this narrative. “Their statement announcing their decision to step back mentions nothing of privacy and reiterates their desire to continue their roles and public duties,” she said. “Any suggestion otherwise speaks to a key point of this series. They are choosing to share their story, on their terms, and yet the tabloid media has created an entirely untrue narrative that permeates press coverage and public opinion. The facts are right in front of them.”Harry and Meghan shot more than 15 hours of personal video in the early months of 2020 as they finalized their plans to exit Buckingham Palace for good.NetflixThe series also speaks to the expanded ambitions of Ms. Garbus and Mr. Cogan. The duo formed their production company, Story Syndicate, three years ago, combining Ms. Garbus’s directing background with Mr. Cogan’s production and financial expertise. (He previously ran the documentary finance company Impact Partners.) The aim was to serve the streaming companies’ insatiable appetite for documentary projects by overseeing the work of a host of up-and-coming filmmakers. The company now has 37 full-time employees and it works with some 200 freelancers, enabling it to produce projects at a steady pace.Last month, the documentary “I Am Vanessa Guillen,” about a U.S. Army soldier killed at Fort Hood, became available on Netflix. In February, “Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence” from the director Zachary Heinzerling will debut on Hulu. And Story Syndicate just announced that it will produce a project about Halyna Hutchins, the cinematographer killed on the set of the Alec Baldwin film “Rust,” with Rachel Mason directing and with the cooperation of Ms. Hutchins’s widower, Matthew.“We have built a machine to create handmade work,” said Mr. Cogan, adding that though entertainment companies have been tightening their belts recently because of the overall economy, documentaries remain a very strong business. “There’s so much noise in the world and so much content, we want to break through by doing the most elevated, the most intense, the most extraordinary work.”For Mr. Heinzerling, that meant aiding him in his efforts to turn his voluminous research and access to the survivors of a cult into a suspenseful, three-episode series.“We started at this place of how do we create something that the survivors can stand behind that really cuts against that salacious, true crime material that a lot of people are attracted to right now,” Mr. Heinzerling said. “Story Syndicate was integral in focusing the project and really helping me find a narrative thread that would be clear enough so that we could translate the story in a way that would be what I wanted and also interesting for a wider audience.”Even with a number of films and series in production, the Harry and Megan series remains by far Story Syndicate’s marquee project. The teaser alone has amassed some 40.8 million impressions since its release last week.That kind of scale is not something the filmmakers had imagined when they began working in the field.“When we both started in this, it was like joining a priesthood,” Mr. Cogan said. “You decided to become a documentary storyteller because you really believed in it, and you knew you were going to lead a certain kind of life and that was totally satisfying because that’s what you wanted to do.“But the world has changed around us, and now a whole world of people can make a living in nonfiction storytelling.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Becoming Cousteau’ Review: The Old Man and the Sea

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      Liz Garbus’s new documentary is about the life of the French explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau and the fate of the oceans he loved.Jacques-Yves Cousteau died in 1997, and it may be hard for people who came of age in the years that followed to grasp the extent of his fame, or even recognize the category of celebrity to which he belonged.A former French naval officer with an unquenchable love of the sea, he combined the dash of an old-fashioned adventurer with the technocratic discipline of the first astronauts. He was an inventor as well an explorer, a filmmaker who became an environmentalist and, thanks to his natural charisma and his signature red watch cap, a universally recognized pop-cultural figure.“Becoming Cousteau,” Liz Garbus’s new National Geographic documentary, succeeds in restoring some of Cousteau’s luster, and also his relevance. It’s a swift-moving, detailed biography, recounting a life that was long, eventful and stippled with tragedy and regret.The archival footage is enthralling, whether it is tracking coral reefs and shoals of fish or glancing the remarkable history of French men’s swimwear. Cousteau’s ship, a decommissioned minesweeper named the Calypso, appears as a place of swashbuckling, macho high spirits — Simone Cousteau, the captain’s wife, insisted on being the only woman aboard — and rigorous scientific inquiry.But Garbus (whose recent documentaries include “Love, Marilyn” and “What Happened, Miss Simone?”) is after more than poignant nostalgia or a lost sense of wonder. The story of Cousteau as she tells it — aided by narration culled from interviews with Cousteau’s colleagues and children, as well as audio from the man himself — is about the awakening of his conscience, about how his fascination with Earth’s oceans turned into a crusade to save them.From the perspective of the present, it seems intuitive that someone devoted to exploring the oceans would also be committed to their preservation. “Becoming Cousteau” suggests something close to the opposite. In the annals of human exploration, curiosity is often a prelude to and enabler of conquest. And so it was, at least at first, with Cousteau.After injuries suffered in a car crash put an end to his dream of becoming a pilot, Cousteau turned to spearfishing off France’s Mediterranean coast. With his friends Philippe Tailliez and Frédéric Dumas, he developed new diving techniques and underwater breathing machines that opened new vistas.After World War II, his ambitions expanded. “The Silent World,” Cousteau’s 1956 feature film — which won both the Palme d’Or in Cannes and the Oscar for best documentary — offered “an hour and twenty-six minutes of pictorial (and piscatorial) thrills,” according to The New York Times’s critic. Like many explorers, Cousteau viewed this newly charted world as something to be exploited, even colonized. He looked forward to permanent undersea human settlements, and the rise of “homo aquaticus,” a new type of human habituated to life in the water.He also accepted money and commissions from the petroleum industry, which was eager to find offshore sources of oil. Much of Cousteau’s later activism was frank penance for this work, and for his role in hastening the fouling of the oceans he cherished. His ecological warnings were prescient, and not without cost. American television executives stopped broadcasting his documentaries, finding them too “dark,” “strident” and “cynical.”Garbus’s film takes account of the personal losses that shadowed Cousteau’s later years, including the death of Simone and of their son Philippe. But like most documentaries about environmental and social issues — and about well-known, well-regarded people — it accentuates the positive.Cousteau provides an inspirational example of passion harnessed to a noble purpose, becoming an ambassador on behalf of beleaguered and fragile ecosystems. He is determined in his optimism, even as he worries — in the 1980s and 90s — that it may be too late to save the whales, the coral, the glaciers and the fish. “Becoming Cousteau” clings to that optimism, perhaps because the alternative is too worrisome to contemplate.Becoming CousteauRated PG-13 for personal tragedy, environmental peril and smoking. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More