Netflix to Trade Harry and Meghan for William and Kate — And It Was Never a Difficult Decision

Netflix bet on Sussex drama. It didn't last. Now the streamer wants what it always should have — restraint, dignity, and the future king.

When Prince Harry and Meghan Markle signed their $100 million Netflix deal in September 2020, it felt like the beginning of something seismic. Two people walking away from the most famous institution in the world, armed with a streaming cheque and a story the whole planet wanted to hear. The definition of utopia. Netflix, never one to miss a cultural moment, bet big. And for a moment, it paid off.

The Harry & Meghan documentary became the platform's biggest documentary debut ever in December 2022. The world watched, talked, and then slowly stopped. Live to Lead came and went. Heart of Invictus barely registered. Harry's Polo series — a show about a sport most people have never watched and arguably never will — failed to crack the top ten. The final verdict arrived in the form of With Love, Meghan. To put that in perspective, four seasons of Suits — a show Markle left years ago to become a royal — ranked higher, despite being off air for six years. The woman had been outperformed by her own past.

The streaming giant took note and moved on. Reports have since emerged that Netflix is engaged in backchannel conversations about a potential deal with the Prince and Princess of Wales. Sources have told columnists that the streamer is looking to 'erase the chaos' of the Sussex era, pivoting instead toward content built around Prince William's Earthshot Prize and Kate Middleton's early childhood development campaign. Documentary-style. Purposeful and dignified. The very opposite of what came before.

William and Middleton, it turns out, make for a compelling proposition — and not just on paper. When Middleton's cancer diagnosis emerged, everything shifted. The world, which had grown accustomed to ignoring them in favor of the louder, more combustible Sussexes, suddenly looked up. There was a character arc forming — a family holding together under unimaginable pressure, a future king steadying himself in real time. The interest returned to William and Middleton. It returned to the monarchy itself. And Netflix, which knows better than anyone how to find a story worth telling, appears to have taken note.

There is something quietly poetic about all of this, though not in a way that is particularly kind to the Sussexes. Harry and Markle left the institution specifically to control their own narrative, to tell their story on their own terms, on their own platform. And now, that very platform may be preparing to hand the keys to the institution they left.

But it is worth pausing on why the Sussex-Netflix experiment unravelled in the first place. Because the failure was maybe never really about the content. It was about a fundamental misunderstanding of what made them compelling. Their royal identity was the product — the titles, the institution, the inherited mystique. That was what the world was paying attention to. When they stepped away from all of that, they did not become more interesting. They became ordinary. The streamer funded the chaos, benefited enormously from the initial wave of it, and is now, without much ceremony, distancing itself from the wreckage.

The philosophical shift at play here is the basic difference between restraint and exposure. The monarchy has always understood, almost instinctively, that mystery is currency. King Charles and Queen Camilla learned this lesson the hard way — their relationship so thoroughly litigated in the press over decades that by the time they married, the public had little appetite left. Overexposure has a cost, and it is paid in relevance. William and Middleton, by contrast, have remained almost stubbornly untouched — and that restraint, it turns out, is exactly what Netflix now wants to buy. 

A deal between Netflix and the Waleses, should it happen, would be significant for reasons beyond ratings. It would represent a formal acknowledgment that the platform, which once staked its royal content strategy on disruption, has decided that dignity is, in the end, a better investment. There is, however, one condition worth noting. As long as Harry and Markle remain tied to Netflix in any meaningful capacity, William and Middleton will not come near it. The Palace does not do proximity to chaos, and it never has. Any deal would require a clean break — a severance that Netflix, given the numbers, may now be more than willing to make.

It would also confirm something the past three years have been quietly building toward — that the sun has well and truly set on the Sussex era, at least as far as mainstream cultural appetite is concerned.

The opinions expressed in this article belong to the author alone and are not attributable to The Royal Observer or its editorial team.