1. In the first three episodes of the Netflix series, the couple describes ongoing harassment from the news media and wanting to continue Princess Diana’s legacy. The series starts with an onscreen message stressing its authenticity.
2. “This is a firsthand account of Harry and Meghan’s story, told with never before seen personal archive.” Members of the royal family “declined to comment,” it adds, although people close to Harry and Meghan, including Meghan’s mother, are featured in the first three episodes.
3. Despite being filmed before Queen Elizabeth II’s death in September, the documentary arrives in a changed royal landscape, with King Charles III — Harry’s father — scheduled to be crowned next May. A further three episodes will be released on Dec. 15. Here are the main takeaways from the first three, which deepen the couple’s complaints about Britain’s news media, reveal details of Meghan’s fractious relationship with her relatives and claim that some royals viewed media harassment as a “rite of passage.”
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Harry’s war with the news media continues
4. The first episode tells the story of how Harry and Meghan fell in love, but it also criticizes Britain’s news media. Harry said the paparazzi had always had an impact on his life. Although he has few recollections from early childhood of his mother, Princess Diana, he said, “the majority of my memories are of being swarmed by paparazzi. Rarely did we have a holiday without someone with a camera jumping out of a bush, or something.”
5. Harry said photographers continued to hound him when he attended school and began dating. The paparazzi harassed his girlfriends, he added, and as a result their families’ lives were also “turned upside down.” When he met Meghan, he said, “I was terrified of her being driven away by the media — the same media who’d driven so many people away from me.”
The couple wants to carry on Diana’s legacy
6. Harry said that tabloid media harassment of Meghan was reminiscent of the experience of his mother, who died in a 1997 car crash in Paris after being followed by paparazzi. But he also made positive comparisons between his wife and his mother. “So much of what Meghan is, and how she is, is so similar to my mum,” he said in the series’s first episode. “She has the same compassion, the same empathy, she has the same confidence, she has this warmth about her.”
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7. Harry said he also saw himself as continuing Diana’s legacy. “I am my mother’s son,” he said. Of his charity work, he added, “I wanted to somehow carry my mum’s torch and try and keep her legacy alive and try and make her proud.”
Meghan’s mother said negative reactions to the couple were ‘about race’
8. Doria Ragland, Meghan’s mother, sat for a rare interview for the docuseries. In the second episode, she discusses her daughter’s childhood and relationship with Harry. When the couple started receiving negative treatment in the British press, Ragland said, she told Meghan that it was because her daughter is mixed-race.
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