Harry & Meghan: Bombshell exposé confronts controversial subjects in rebel royal couple’s lives

Angela Barnett is a writer and body image activist.

OPINION: Yesterday I told a friend I was watching Harry and Meghan when it dropped on Netflix and she said “which side are you on?” Meaning was I on Team HAM (Harry and Meghan) or Team FAM (the royal family). But really what she was asking was did I like Meghan Markle. Because this is what the fascination is all about.

We’ve been fed so many stories about her–a single tear from Meghan at the Queen’s funeral creates a twitterstorm about its genuineness.

Yet as the affable, roguish, youngest son of Charles and Diana, nobody is asking anyone if they like Harry. He’s been painted as the hapless chap who fell in love with an American divorced seductress. She’s seen as the evil mastermind behind it all; the ambitious puppeteer of her prince.

After watching the first two episodes of their six-part series, Harry and Meghan, I’m definitely in for the whole season. You get to see them but more importantly Meghan as she is; her nerdy younger self, her activist self which started at 11, and her bi-racial experiences of not being white enough in white spaces or black enough in black spaces.

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* Former palace staff pour scorn on Harry and Meghan’s ‘truth’

I’m not a royalist–and the more I learn about colonisation the less I want to feed into the fairytale fantasy freak show that’s the royal family–but Harry and Meghan hooked me in from the trailer with Harry saying ‘I was terrified, I didn’t want history to repeat itself.’ He was referring to the paps, of course, hounding the couple just as they did to his mother.

He reflects in the first episode that when Princess Diana died the paparazzi waited until the brothers finished school but then it was game on.

He got to the point where he thought he’d never find anyone who could put up with all the media attention. People in the royal family don’t really have free choice. It’s like a gilded cage, Harry says.

You get to hear about and see the life Meghan had before she met H, as she calls him – it could be spin, of course, and some of this will be, but it takes you through the harsh realities of being connected with Team FAM. How within days after the story broke that they were dating, Meghan’s neighbour in Toronto was paid to install a camera zoomed in on her backyard. How on the set of Suits they had to cage in all the trailers.

She had six men sleeping in cars surrounding her house every night and these were not security, they were photographers waiting to snap her.

You get to see the horrendous, racist comments made about her within eight days of them coming out to the media. You get to understand how big the decision was to be part of it all.

I’d read in the build-up that the show was about Team HAM’s love and had rolled my eyes at Meghan’s pithy words ‘people love love’. I didn’t want to see their excellent communication skills or how they were nailing coupledom (yawn).

They have two children under four so I wanted sharp words over tea bags left in the sink, not kitchen smooches. While their obviously genuine love for one another is a through line of the story so far, Harry and Meghan is about the power and manipulation of the media. It’s about racism. It’s about exposing the tightly wound PR machine of Team FAM.

As Harry says in the show ‘there’s leaking [of stories] but there’s also planting of stories’.

It’s helpful for us commonwealth pawns watching from our couches to know this.

This bombshell exposé speaks up about uncomfortable subjects.

Harry admits to having no idea what unconscious bias was growing up with a well-polished silver spoon in his mouth and it wasn’t until he could see what it was like for his wife, a woman of colour, to enter the world of excess cutlery, curtseying to grandmothers, conquering vibes, and gold leaf wallpaper, to understand what it was.

We need more stories exposing racism in institutions and if the masses need to be pulled in with a fairytale about a prince and his actress, then that’s a clever way to do it.

Before Harry, Meghan was successful, focused, and motivated to make the world more equitable. She was far more than an actor, speaking on behalf of UN Women. Don’t we need more role models like this? Meghan’s no delicate duchess. She is fierce about fairness, and it’s cool that the wildest royal loves her for it.

She’s also a force – three years ago she designed her disruptive Vogue cover that had not one but a matrix of incredible women on the cover yet she was slammed for including, at the time, ‘unknowns like Greta Thunberg’. Maybe she was just way ahead of everyone.

We know – from that reliable source of royal information, The Crown – that all hell breaks loose when anyone in the royal family works against the media.

This was always going to be explosive.

Yes, this show is sensational. Yes, they made a lot of money (even if they were both top-billing actors $183 million is still a lot for a TV show, for instance, Leonardo De Caprio got $30 million for Don’t Look Up). Yes, they are telling their side and there will be other sides because there always are. But it takes courage to do this.

Harry and Megan is a story about a pair of rebels going up against a family that’s existed for over 1000 years, anointed by blood and God to rule over not just Britain, but many countries. The power of Team FAM is unfathomable for most of us lay people.

But as Meghan says at the beginning of the show: “In the last five years, books have been written about our story by people we don’t know. It’s time for us to tell ours.”