Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on their wedding day.
People have been anticipating the release of Netflix’s docuseries Harry & Meghan for months, salivating over the royal dirt to be spilled and what big reveals might be in store about the UK’s first family.
While reviews for the show have been mixed, viewer turnout wasn’t. The first episode of the new series, released Thursday, drew a robust audience.
Nearly 1 million households watched in the United States during the first day of release, according to Samba TV, which measures TV viewership. In Great Britain, the episode drew 786,000 households, which is remarkable—the country has way fewer households than the United States yet nearly matched the American audience.
That speaks to just how rabidly people follow the royal family’s exploits in Britain, and the popularity of the royal couple, who relocated outside the country a couple years ago following years of intense tabloid attention and incidents of racism detailed in the documentary. (Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, is Black.)
The new Netflix
It seems young people would rather watch real-life royals than dramatizations about them. Samba reports that adults 20-24 overindexed on live-plus-same-day viewership of Harry, while they underindexed by 14% on episodes of Crown.
Of note to advertisers, especially those who may be eyeing Netflix’s recently launched ad-supported tier, Harry overindexed among households that make $150,000-$200,000 and those with incomes above $200,000.
Of course, another question is whether this is just people reacting to the initial buzz about the show, or if they saw enough to entice them to stick around for future episodes, notes Cole Strain, Samba’s vice president of measurement products.
“It remains to be seen whether buzz continues to build over the weekend and viewers stay hooked beyond the first episode, or whether this was simply a publicity-fueled initial pop that will fade,” Strain says.
Critics have not been kind to the program. Newspapers in the UK dismissed the show as “tedious” (the Spectator”), a “one-sided PR effort” (the Guardian) and an attempt to force “the politics of racial division” upon Britons (the Telegraph). It’s important to note that many of these papers are the ones criticized by the royal couple in the documentary for exhibiting hostility and racism, so little wonder the reviewers were not impressed.
Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal was similarly unimpressed, calling the program “a royal pity party.” Google users had given it a paltry 2.2 stars as of Friday afternoon (on a five-star scale). Other reviewers were kinder but noted that the show jumps around a lot and can’t seem to find a focus.
Still, reviews don’t always mean much to Netflix. The platform is built on buzz, banking that people will hear about series and be eager enough to be part of the conversation about them that they’ll invest in a subscription. The addition of the ad-supported platform means consumers can get those subscriptions for less—making an investment just to watch a single show, like Harry & Meghan, more likely.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonifitzgerald/2022/12/09/how-many-people-watched-netflixs-new-harry–meghan-docuseries/