By and large, if there is one thing that the world absolutely does not need any more of, it’s podcasts. And yet the death of Prince Harry and the Duchess of Sussex’s Spotify deal – as public and messy as it was – has by all accounts deprived us of an absolute corker.
Last week, Bloomberg reported that one podcast idea seriously mooted by Harry was to make an entire series about childhood trauma. Not just his own trauma, because he has obviously got enough mileage out of that elsewhere, but the trauma of a group best described as “world baddies”. As Bloomberg wrote, the concept of the show was as follows: “Harry would interview a procession of controversial guests, such as Vladimir Putin, Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump, about their early formative years and how those experiences resulted in the adults they are today.”
This is the best idea in all of history – convincing a fleet of powerful and dangerous men to abandon every instinct that brought them to power in the first place, so that they can discuss how sad they are about never being hugged by their fathers, with Prince Harry, for a podcast. Sadly, perhaps because Vladimir Putin has been too busy threatening the world with nuclear annihilation to discuss how badly he got bullied at school, the project came to naught.
Of course, it was inevitable that Harry’s bad ideas would eventually leak to the press, after Spotify executive Bill Simmons teased some of them on air recently. Labelling Harry and Meghan as a pair of “fucking grifters”, Simmons said: “I have got to get drunk one night and tell the story of the Zoom I had with Harry to try and help him with a podcast idea. It’s one of my best stories … Fuck them. The grifters.”
The tragedy is, though, that the news of these terrible ideas got lost in the din of other people rushing to trash the couple. As well as Simmons, Jeremy Zimmer – chief executive of the United Talent Agency – mentioned the collapse of the deal during an advertising festival in Cannes, saying “Turns out Meghan Markle was not a great audio talent, or necessarily any kind of talent. And, you know, just because you’re famous doesn’t make you great at something.” Taylor Swift was apparently unimpressed enough at Meghan’s Archetypes podcast that she reportedly turned down a personal invitation to appear on the show.
And then, just to heap even more on top, Netflix is apparently getting ready to give Harry and Meghan the chop, refusing to pay them tens of millions of dollars unless they came up with a hit as successful as their recent six-part documentary. Which they won’t, presumably, because that documentary was literally the sum total of their entire lives. Also, it doesn’t help that their other ideas don’t sound particularly compelling; one is a reimagining of Great Expectations where Miss Havisham is now “a strong woman living in a patriarchal society,” and another is described as “Emily in Paris, but about a man.”
Their current woes, it seems, come from giving up the good stuff too early. As an entity, Harry and Meghan are only interesting for as long as they can destabilise the monarchy. Their Oprah interview did that. Their documentary did that. Harry’s book Spare did that. Archetypes did not do that, and as such was roughly as interesting as listening to changing-room chatter in the world’s most insufferable yoga studio. As such, it is increasingly clear that only fumes are left in the tank. It might be time for Harry and Meghan to go away for a while and work out who they actually want to be now.
This isn’t to say that we should write them off, of course. The Duchess of Sussex has signed with a talent agency and, depending on who you listen to, either wants to revive her blog as a Goop-style wellness hub or become US president. Any of these ventures might boost the family coffers, something that would give Harry a bit more freedom to go and chase down Putin for that interview.
