It all started so well, didn’t it? Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, hemmed in by the restrictive constraints of the British monarchy, abandoned their gilded, pampered, Palace lives in order to move to Los Angeles to prove that they were capable of achieving success on their own terms. In an enormously skewed way, if you squinted, Megxit could be seen as nothing less than the perfect demonstration of the American Dream.
Better yet, they found success almost immediately. A five-year $100 million development deal with Netflix. A $20 million exclusive agreement to make podcasts with Spotify. Then a reported $20 million advance from Penguin Random House for Harry to write Spare, and, allegedly, another half a million from the same company so that Meghan could write a 169-word picture book—that’s around $3,000 per word. The Sussexes’ impact as entertainment moguls was vast. Hollywood was theirs for the taking.
But that was a long time ago. Now the fate of Archewell Productions, Harry and Meghan’s production company, seems to be hanging in the balance after an extraordinary exodus of talent. Over the past two years, head of internal content Ben Browning, senior vice president of scripted television Nishika Kumble, global press secretary Toya Holness, marketing head Fara Taylor, audio head Rebecca Sananes, and president Mandana Dayani have all departed. Last month, it was senior manager Bennett Levine’s turn to leave.
Then, as of last Monday, the Web site for their charitable and commercial work, archewell.com, redirected browsers to the shiny, new sussex.com, which comes complete with royal titles and a coat of arms (and, tucked away in its nether regions, a small link to archewellproductions.com). It appears to mark the start of a rebranding in which things are less about what Harry and Meghan have made and more about how fancy they are.
Already there have been accusations that the couple are playing with fire with the new Sussex Web site—their attempts to launch various products under the name “Sussex Royal” back in 2020 were sheepishly withdrawn after public blowback and the late Queen’s rumored disapproval. In any case, making a pseudo-royal site about yourself when you’ve literally changed continents to distance yourselves from the royal family is an undeniably strange flex.
By Thursday, however, the couple’s rationale became a little clearer. Their two children had, apparently, been known as Archie Sussex and Lilibet Sussex since the coronation—it seems Harry and Meghan weren’t just rebranding their business, they were rebranding their children too. According to The Times of London, the new Web site is just a “family hub for the work the Sussexes do” and to “unify” the family—and not a ruse to draw attention away from all the Archewell deserters.
The audio adventures of the Sussexes have been a well-documented disaster, with their Spotify deal ending unexpectedly (ostensibly by “mutual agreement”) last June. Two days after the couple’s departure from Spotify was made public, the company’s executive and the Ringer C.E.O. Bill Simmons suggested that their podcast should have been entitled “The Fucking Grifters.”And when the Sussexes recently attended a film premiere in Jamaica as the guests of Paramount Pictures boss Brian Robbins, rumors grew stronger that Netflix was starting to get cold feet about their deal, too.
Despite the rumors, Netflix insists that the deal with the Sussexes is alive and well, and that there was definitely nothing to see here. On the first of this month, Netflix’s chief content officer assured journalists that the Sussexes had “a movie, a TV show, and a couple of unscripted shows” in development there. Which sounded to some like Hollywood-speak for “Who knows?” Markle’s Netflix children’s show, Pearl, was canceled before it even went into production in 2022 (admittedly amid a wave of cutbacks across the streaming platform), and there has been growing speculation that the pair have already burned through all their good stories—how they were both victims of the monarchy and the press—and are now running on fumes.
Making a pseudo-royal site about yourself when you’ve literally changed continents to distance yourselves from the royal family is an undeniably strange flex.
It doesn’t help that the streaming deals the Sussexes signed were closely modeled on the ones signed by the Obamas. Higher Ground Productions, Barack and Michelle’s multi-media shingle, has been a roaring success from the get-go. They produced four hit podcasts for Spotify—including one entitled Renegades: Born in the USA, co-hosted by Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen, which should have been excruciating but somehow wasn’t. With Netflix, they’ve made five acclaimed documentaries. They’ve made a fleet of startlingly well-received television programs, and last year they produced Rustin, a feature film that recently landed Colman Domingo with a best-actor Oscar nomination. The hope must have been, at some point, that Archewell would emulate the level of success paved by Higher Ground.
It has not. The Obamas, remember, actually achieved things prior to setting out on the entertainment highway. So far the sum output of Archewell Audio and Archewell Productions consists of 12 widely mocked podcast episodes, a holiday-special podcast, two docuseries about Harry and Meghan, and a third wanly received docuseries about the Invictus Games, which Harry founded, and which has been rumored to be having its own financial troubles. Compared with what the Obamas have accomplished, this would appear to be a worrisome return on an investment totaling $120 million. Perhaps it is simply the difference between content made by people who used to rule the world, and content made by people who only think they did.
But hope springs eternal. This week it was announced that Meghan has signed another podcast deal with Lemonada Media, a company with presumably shallower pockets than Spotify’s. And one Archewell project in the works at Netflix is an adaptation of Carley Fortune’s novel Meet Me at the Lake, a story about a young woman who inherits her mother’s holiday resort despite longing to live in the big city. Obviously a lot of the film’s appeal will rest on its execution, but in terms of plot there is little to distinguish it from any of the generic pap that gets smeared across the Hallmark Channel. It doesn’t have a tremendous amount to say about the world. It doesn’t shine a light on any underserved communities, except perhaps the small but crucial “begrudging resort owner” demographic. It categorically will not win any Oscars.
But the Sussexes have been running Archewell for long enough to know what attracts an audience, so perhaps the project can be salvaged by a long interlude where two grifters visit the resort and spend 45 minutes complaining about Prince William. At this point, it might be the only thing that keeps their American Dream alive.
Stuart Heritage is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. He is the author of Bald: How I Slowly Learned to Not Hate Having No Hair (And You Can Too)