It’s because they speak our language. This isn’t about the accent but about the mode. Harry and Meghan value sharing over the stiff upper lip. Rather than staying mum, they insist on speaking up and speaking out — and speaking their own truth, as opposed to the more rigorous feat of speaking the truth. When they do speak, it’s in the manicured, massaged and meditative parlance of self-care and cause-driven commerce. Words like “conscious,” “consent” and “purpose” roll off their tongues in soothing uptalk. They’ve created a “safe harbor” for themselves. This is a “new path we were trying to forge.” Their work is about “creative activations” and “building community.”
Everything is done with intention. “We’ve been really conscious of protecting our kids as best as we can and also understanding the role that they play in this really historical family,” Meghan explains in the documentary. Because the palace wouldn’t protect them, they must protect themselves. Once they were victims; now they are survivors. As a media-scarred Harry put it to Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes” Sunday, “I will sit here and speak truth to you with the words that come out of my mouth, rather than using someone else, an unnamed source, to feed in lies or a narrative to a tabloid media that literally radicalizes its readers to then potentially cause harm to my family, my wife, my kids.”
It’s because they’re American-style celebrities. Harry and Meghan have outdone Princess Diana’s collaborations with the press by taking full control. They are our first reality-TV royals. And in America, while it’s wrong for someone else to invade your privacy, it’s perfectly fine — even applauded — to exploit your own.
The Sussexes are accessible. They’re fun! Meghan is just a “working mom.” Harry is a romping millennial dad. These celebrities — they’re just like us! — can tell us all about themselves via their own artisanal media empire.
You can find them on Instagram, where they initially found each other and where they chose to announce their independence (as they would say, “stepping back rather than stepping down”). They take selfies, they film themselves incessantly and at least one of them has firm views about portrait versus landscape iPhone footage. The documentary spends a solid episode offering a blow-by-blow — or, rather, a text-by-text — narrative of their entire courtship. They give us so much private information, saturating us with the minutiae of each glowing embrace, that they essentially deprive us of wanting or needing to get anything more anywhere else.
Like many a TikToker or Substacker, Harry and Meghan relish taking charge of the narrative. They made their documentary, they say, because, as they put it, they’ve never been “asked” for their story and weren’t “allowed” to tell it. That’s if you don’t count fawning coverage from Oprah, People or The Cut. (Only very recently — was it mid-episode 5? Or 6? — did some in the American media palpably flag in their adulation.)
But even the friendliest venues stopped short of the couple’s preferred spin on “The Little Mermaid.” In Harry’s twitterpated eyes: Meghan “sacrificed everything that she ever knew, the freedom that she had, to join me in my world. And then, pretty soon after that, I ended up sacrificing everything I know to join her in her world.” Prince Harry undeniably sacrificed his family and his birthright. Most people, royal fans or not, would have liked to see this all play out differently.