Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's highly-anticipated Netflix documentary has finally dropped on the streaming platform.
The first three episodes of the series, which are each just under an hour long, were released at 8am this morning (Thursday December 8). The final three episodes will be available to watch from next week on Thursday December 15.
The first half of the docu-series explores Harry's childhood as a young Royal, his relationship with his late mother Princess Diana and his feelings towards the paparazzi. It also details how his and Meghan's relationship blossomed - from meeting on Instagram and taking a romantic trip to Africa, to sneaking the actress into Kensington Palace.
Read more: Harry and Meghan open up about Duchess of Sussex meeting Queen for first time
It also explores the couple's engagement, Meghan's relationship with her dad and what it was like her for to swiftly learn about Royal protocol. The series features plenty of funny nuggets, heart-warming moments, and painful memories - making it a must-watch for many Royal fans.
Here is everything we've learned so far...
Why Harry and Meghan decided to make the series and how the idea came about
Meghan revealed that the couple wanted to make the documentary to 'let people have a bit more of an a glimpse into what happened' and who they are. She added: "People we don't know have written books about our story. Doesn't it make more sense to hear it from us?"
Harry said a friend suggested the couple document themselves during that period of time. He thought it was a 'sensible idea,' especially as there was 'a lot of disinformation' surrounding their departure from the Royal family.
It’s a big deal for the pair, that much is clear. Moments in to the third episode, Meghan explains: “We weren’t allowed to tell our story,” reflecting on the stage-managed media events announcing their engagement. The couple had a carefully choreographed photocall and interview with the BBC on revealing Harry had got down on one knee.
But that’s not something confined to the engagement, Harry says. “We’ve never been asked our story, that’s the consistent [theme],” he adds, quickly, before Meghan replies: “Until now.”
Harry and Meghan met over Instagram
If sliding into the DMs on Instagram is good enough for royalty, then it's good enough for us! The couple revealed that they first got talking on the social media platform after Harry's friend had shared a video of themselves and Meghan.
The actress was donning the famous Snapchat dog ears filter in the clip. From there, Harry and Meghan swapped numbers and were 'constantly in touch.'
Harry was late for his and Meghan's first date
Meghan was having a 'single girl summer' with plans to travel Europe before she met Harry. The House of Cards star went to watch Wimbledon in 2016 and had arranged to finally meet Harry the next day.
Their first date - and first time meeting in person - was at 76 Dean Street in Soho. But Harry turned up late. He admitted he was 'panicking, freaking out' and 'sweating' as he rushed to meet Meghan.
Meghan thought he was one of 'these egotistical men' who any girl would wait half an hour for - she wasn't interested in that. But once Harry arrived she said he was very sweet and apologetic for being late.
They arranged dinner for the next night.
Harry has a 'second family' and friends in Africa that 'literally brought him up'
At 18 years old, while dealing with the paparazzi and still grieving for his mother, Harry took a trip to Lesotho in Southern Africa. He met Prince Seeiso, who hadn't long lost his own mum, and Harry said they quickly 'became like brothers.'
Harry would visit the Prince annually and sometimes spent three months at a time away in Africa. "Lesotho gave me the space and the freedom to breathe, to live and to grow," he said. "I've got a second family out there and a group of friends that literally brought me up."
Harry took Meghan on a trip to Africa - after only meeting in person twice
As part of her summer of adventure, Meghan took Harry up on an offer to visit Botswana together. Despite having only met in person twice before the couple lived in a tent together for five days.
The trip was the first time they'd seen each other in a month. The couple remember Harry handing Meghan a chicken sandwich, jumping in Land Cruiser and 'off they went.'
They sat together, progressed to holding hands and 'squeezed in a kiss' between the bumps. Meghan said of the trip: "We had to get to know each other before the rest of the world and before the media joined in.
"We could both be completely ourselves. There were no distractions, no cell phone signal, no mirrors, no 'how do I look?' Thankfully we really liked each other."
Harry was terrified of Meghan being driven away by the media
The Prince said he was terrified of the media driving Meghan away - especially after how his own mother, Princess Diana, had been treated by the media.
In the first episode of the documentary, he acknowledged the 'pain and suffering' of women marrying into the Royal family. He added: "I remember thinking: 'how can I ever find someone who is willing and capable to withstand all the baggage that comes with being with me.'
"Every relationship I had within a matter of weeks or months were splattered all over the newspapers and that person's family harassed and lives turned upside down."
He added that he was terrified of Meghan being driven away by the media - "the same media that had driven so many other people away from me".
Harry would sneak Meghan into Kensington Palace
The loved-up couple wanted to keep their relationship a secret for as long as possible so they could get to know each other without the media intruding. Meghan described their long-distance relationship as 'exciting, relaxed and easy.'
She implemented a two-week rule, where she would want the couple to see each other in person every fortnight if they could. It was easier for Meghan to visit Harry in the UK 'under-the-radar.'
Harry said Meghan would stay with him at Kensington Palace and they would get to know each other without anyone taking photographs and it becoming news - but it was always a risk.
He explained: "Getting her through the police barrier and onto Kensington palace is a risk in itself, right? Because it's not about who you trust, it's about who they trust. That's literally how it works".
The pair had been dating for four months, from July 2016, until the news of their relationship broke in early November.
Meghan is 'so similar' to Princess Diana - and the couple are making sure their children learn about their grandma
Prince Harry said: "So much of what Meghan is and how she is is so similar to my mum. She has the same compassion, she has the same empathy, the same confidence, she has this warmth about her."
In one emotional scene, Meghan can be seen showing baby Archie a large framed photo of Princess Diana on their wall. Archie is taking in the photo as Meghan asks: "Who's that? Yeah, that's your grandma Diana."
Paparazzi response to their relationship left Meghan 'scared'
Episode two began with Harry and Meghan being driven around New York and the conversation between the Duke and Duchess of Sussex quickly got on to whether they were being followed by paparazzi. Invasion of privacy was a theme throughout the episode and Harry made a reference to his mother, Princess Diana, saying: “Back in my mum’s days, it was physical harassment. They had cameras in your face following you, chasing you.
“Paparazzi still harass people. The harassment really exists more online now.
“Once the photographs are out and the story is then put next to it, then comes the social media harassment. To see another woman in my life who I love go through this feeding frenzy. That’s hard. It is basically the hunter versus the prey.”
Later in the episode, Meghan spoke about how her life was turned upside down when the news of their relationship broke. She accused the press of paying her neighbours to install cameras. Meghan said: “It felt like all of the UK media descended upon Toronto. My house was just surrounded. Just men sitting in their cars all the time waiting for me to do anything.
“Then my neighbours text me and said ‘they are knocking on everyone’s doors trying to find you’. They had paid certain neighbours to put a live stream camera into my backyard. “Suddenly everything about my life just got so much more insular. Like all the curtains were pulled, all the blinds were pulled. It was scary.”
Meghan later said that when she raised concerns to police, they fell on deaf ears and she was eventually the subject of a death threat. She added: “I would say to the police, if any other woman in Toronto right now said to you ‘I have six grown men who are sleeping in their cars around my house and following me everywhere that I go and I feel scared, wouldn’t you say it was stalking?’ And they said ‘yes but there’s really nothing we can do because of who you’re dating’.
'The Palace' apparently told Harry and Meghan to remain tight-lipped over concerns of racist press coverage
The episode touched on accusations that Meghan has experienced difficulties since she started dating Harry due to being mixed race. The former Suits star said that she was never treated as a ‘black woman’ growing up and had only really seen racism through the eyes of her mother.
“I had never in my life heard someone say the N-word,” she said. “[It’s] very different to be a minority but not be treated as a minority right off the bat. Obviously now people are very aware of my race because they made it such an issue when I went to the UK but before that most people didn’t treat me like a ‘black woman’, so that talk didn’t have to happen for me.”
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex said that the Palace effectively told them to ignore any news stories with racist undertones.
Harry also said that other members of the Royal Family did not think there was any difference by how Meghan was treated by the media, compared to their own partners. He remembered: “Within that first week that it became public knowledge, the first story was ‘Harry’s new girl is (almost) straight outta Crompton’ and I was like ‘whoa!’
“The direction of the palace was ‘don’t say anything’. But what people need to understand is, as far as a lot of the family were concerned, everything that she was being put through, they’d been put through as well, so it was almost like a rite of passage.
“Some of the members of the family were like ‘my wife had to go through that so why should your girlfriend be treated any differently? Why should you get special treatment? Why should she be protected?’ And I said ‘ the difference here is the race element’.”
Meghan thought it was a 'joke' when Harry told her she had to curtsy during first meeting with the Queen
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex opened up about the first time that Meghan met the Queen. Meghan admitted that she thought it was a 'joke' when Harry asked her if she knew how to curtsy, ahead of their first meeting at the Duke and Duchess of York's country residence Royal Lodge.
"I mean it's surreal, there wasn't like some big moment of 'now you're going to meet my grandmother.' I didn't know I was gonna meet her until moments before.
"We were in the car and we were going to Royal Lodge for lunch and he was like 'oh my grandmother is here, she's gonna be there after church.' We were in the car driving and he's like 'you know how to curtsy, right?' And I just thought it was a joke.
"Now I'm starting to realise this is a big deal. I mean, Americans will understand this, we have 'Medieval Times, Dinner and Tournament'. It was like that."
Harry also conceded that explaining that he had to ‘bow’ to his own grandmother was ‘weird’.
"How do you explain that to people? How do you explain that you bow to your grandmother and that you would need to curtsy, especially to an American? That's weird."
The couple got matching penguin onesies for their engagement party
The episode ended with the couple announcing their engagement and Harry opened up about how he proposed by opening a magnum of Champagne and turning on 15 electrical candles in the gardens of the Kensington Palace cottage where they stayed at the time. He then joked that he had her pet dog Guy ‘hostage’ so she could not say no.
He said: “I wanted to do it earlier. Like I was… because I had to ask permission from my grandmother, I couldn’t do it outside of the UK.
“I did pop a bottle of champagne while she was roasting the chicken and that kind of slightly gave the game away. She was like ‘you don’t normally drink champagne, what’s the occasion?’ I was like ‘I don’t know, just had it laying around here, whatever.
“It wasn’t that I knew she’d say yes . but she’d already moved Guy over so I had Guy as a hostage. He was using stilts so he couldn’t run away. And then in the north garden being overlooked by the staff flats, I got 15 of those electric candles. Of course I got down on one knee, of course I did.”
Meghan appeared to send a selfie-style video to her friend Jess, that was shown in the episode, in which she excitedly whispers: ‘oh my god Jess it’s happening, he told me not to peek’.
The most surprising detail was that the pair hosted a small engagement party with a theme that everyone had to dress in animal onesies, with Harry and Meghan both dressing as penguins. Meghan’s friend Lucy explained the cute reason for the decision.
“Penguins mate for life,” she said. “They were so sweet.”
Harry is a keen birdwatcher
One of the sweetest moments of the episode just showed Harry being a father to Archie. The Duke of Sussex tried to get the toddler to show an interest in nature, whispering: "We won't get a chance to be this close to hummingbirds ever again because they're scared of humans," but the tot who is sixth in line to the throne did not seem to care.
As Harry stood in awe, Archie said in his American accent: "I've got a dirty foot mama, because I was with you". Harry and Meghan both laughed and the Duchess of Sussex told her son: "Papa is a bird watcher so this is a really big moment for him".
Harry’s Nazi costume ‘one of the biggest mistakes of my life’
The third episode of the documentary doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to addressing Harry’s own problematic past. When he was 20, he wore a full Nazi unifrom, complete with a swastika armband, to a friend’s fancy dress party.
The incident was condemned at the time, and Clarence House apologised — but it appears the Prince’s remorse is real. “It was one of the biggest mistakes of my life,” Harry says.
“I felt so ashamed afterwards. All I wanted to do was make it right.
“I sat down and spoke to the Chief Rabbi in London, which had a profound impact on me. I went to Berlin and spoke to a holocaust survivor. I could have got on and ignored it and made the same mistakes over and over in my life… but I learnt from that.”
Meghan really had to learn a lot about the UK… and Royal protocol
Anyone who’s moved countries can tell you there’s a lot to learn very quickly. If they tip at bars, how tax works, and whether or not to bow, shake hands, or hug. It can be a minefield.
Meghan had to do a lot of that — and about Royal protocol, which seems to be an A-level in its own right, and British history. She has to do all that in the glare of the media spotlight, too.
This may not come as a surprise to most — but for Meghan, it seemed genuinely concerning. She rolled up her sleeves though and got on with it.
“I had to learn so much… I had to learn the national anthem,” Meghan reveals. When she’s asked how she did that, she replies: “Oh, I Googled it. I’d sit there and I’d practise and I’d practise and I’d practise.”
Harry also says that a lot of the protocol is ‘invented’ — the implication is by the media in order to portray Meghan in an unkind light — but one rule seems to be steadfast. That’s colour — or specifically, the colour of clothing.
“Most of the time, when I was in the UK, I’d rarely wear colour,” she explains. “There was thought into that, [as] to my understanding, you can’t wear the same colour as Her Majesty at a group event, and you can’t wear the same colour as another senior member.
“So I thought, what’s a colour they will never wear? Camel, beige, white? I wore a lot of muted tones to blend in.”
The sequence is accompanied by a series of photos showing Meghan wearing those colours — and once it’s pointed out, you can’t unsee it. HM Queen Elizabeth II had a penchant for purple, while Kate can be seen in oranges, with Camilla choosing a blue sometimes.
The heartbreak of ‘finding out that you’re not coming to the wedding through a tabloid’
As the episode climaxes, attention turns to Meghan’s dad, Thomas Markle. In the run-up to the couple’s big day, photos of Thomas Markle getting fit for the wedding, reading up on British history, and looking at photos of the couple online appeared in various news sites. That led suspicions to be raised among the couple’s press team that they wer staged.
In the documentary, the suggestion is that Mr Markle staged the pictures in exchange for a huge sum of money. At the time, Harry and Meghan’s press team decide they need to ascertain if that’s the case.
Their press team tell Meghan to call Thomas to see if it’s true. He denied that it was on the call.
Meghan then suggests that they arrange for Thomas to leave his home in Mexico a day early to come over to the UK for the wedding — in order to avoid the glare of the spotlight. “He said no… I have things to do [here],” Meghan remembers.
“It felt really cagey, I was like ‘it doesn’t make sense’. When we hung up, I looked at H and I said ‘I don’t know why… but I don’t believe him.”
His involvement with the media leaves Meghan’s mother, Doria, ‘stunned’. She told the cameras: “I was stunned that Tom would become part of this circus. Certainly as a parent that’s not what you do… as a parent that’s not what you do.”
However, the refusal to leave Mexico a day early is not the end of the issue. Meghan says that Thomas wouldn’t pick up the phone to her — but he would speak to TMZ. “I’m finding out that you’re not coming to the wedding through a tabloid,” Meghan says.
Following that, Meghan found out her father was in hospital with heart problems — she says she attempted to call her dad ‘more than 20 times’, but to no answer. Then, she sent texts asking for details of where he was being treated, and offered him help.
There were more leaks, Meghan continues, so she then texted Thomas to ask him to stop speaking to any media. He replied suggesting that his ‘heart attack’ was an ‘inconvenience for you’.
That set alarm bells ringing for Meghan, because in that message, he called her by her first name in full. That’s very out of character, according to the actress.
“You know how people text, my dad would use emoji and ellipses. This was the opposite,” she says. “It called me Meghan, he’s never called me Meghan on any day I’ve lived on this planet.
“Meg. That's what all my friends and parents call me. I thought that’s not my dad.”
After another message, it’s suggested Harry asked Thomas to call him — because the couple believed his phone had been ‘compromised’.
This is the moment which the couple believe was the end of the relationship between Meghan and Thomas, it’s implied in the film. “It’s incredibly sad what’s happened with all this,” Harry reflects.
“She had a father, now she doesn’t have a father. I shouldered that because if Meg was not with me, then her dad would still be her dad.”
It’s a must-watch for Royal fans… but history buffs as well
One thing which is obvious from the off is that the show is sympathetic to Meghan and Harry, as you would expect. However, it’s also essential viewing.
That’s because it provides a window into the heart of Royal life in 21st Century Britain. The detail on the ‘Royal Rota’, which is the arrangement that certain newspapers have in terms of access to the family, is fascinating — and helps paint a picture of how stage-managed their public life is, because it has to be.
The second reason is that the historical context provided on the British Empire and Commonwealth is some of the best analysis you may see on television this year. Two experts particularly stand out.
David Olusoga, a history professor at the University of Manchester, and writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch have limited screen time. However, both do an excellent job of contextualising why it was so important that a biracial woman married into the Royal family.
Read next:
- Harry says it's 'hard' seeing Meghan go through paparazzi feeding frenzy as Netflix show airs
- Meghan explains her 'two week rule' with Harry as she reminisces about their first romantic trip away
- Prince Harry and Meghan's son Archie speaks on video for the first time in bombshell Netflix docuseries as he sees photo of Diana
- Fans stunned as Meghan Markle cringes when Prince Harry reveals how they actually met and why Harry was 'sweating' on their first date
- Prince Harry says dressing as a Nazi was 'one of biggest mistakes of my life'
