Why Prince Harry’s And Meghan Markle’s Debut As Co-Producers Of Netflix’s ‘Live To Lead’ Series Is Their First Real Commercial Test

For all the noise around the streaming service Netflix’s six-part ‘Harry & Meghan’ episodes dropping earlier in the month, and Prince Harry’s subsequent, apparently ongoing difficulties in thawing out the quite frosty relations between him and his immediate family, it’s been easy to miss that the — to use an Archewell company adjective — “impactful” Netflix content as created, co-produced and fronted by the couple themselves is upon us. The drop date for the Archewell-co-produced seven-part series ‘Live to Lead’ is December 31.

The series profiles seven “leaders” as defined and picked by Prince Harry, Meghan Markle and their co-producers, with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle doubling as the series’ presenters. The Netflix tweet announcing the drop was nothing short of a demonstration of complete solidarity with the inspirational tones of the Archewell Productions mission. The text of the tweet reads: Their voices give us hope. Their actions shape our world. Their leadership inspires our future. Live To Lead — a documentary series presented by The Duke and Duchess of Sussex — premieres December 31.

We’ll get to the ways in which London’s Fleet Street Prince-Harry-beat reporters will be covering this as the coverage ramps up in the coming days, but for now it will suffice to say that the couple’s critics in the London press will be only delighted with another broad opportunity to swing away at the project’s offerings with some swift rapier work. Whether that will mean much, or anything, to the couple in terms of their larger project of creating content is not known. Far more important to the producers and their studio, if such an antiquated noun can be attached to Netflix, will be whether the ‘Live To Lead’ epsiodes will gain any audience traction.

The substantial traction created by the couple for the six-episode ‘Harry & Meghan’ series will be helpful. But documentaries are funny, stand-alone kinds of things, and it’s arguable whether a popular reality-tv series on the works and days of the couple — in other words, with the narrative focus tightly bound to the personal lives of the stars — will be helpful to a straight-up documentary on Greta Thunberg or the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Baader Ginsburg, two of the better-known subjects of the ‘Live To Lead’ series.

In fact, so much of what Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have generated thus far — and so much of what they talk about when they talk — is themselves (or versions of their larger narrative of conflict with Harry’s family) that large swaths of both the British and American audiences have come to expect that that’s their shtick. They can only, or have only to date, talked about themselves. Logically, then, a difficulty that any viewer will face with a Prince Harry-and-Meghan-Markle-produced documentary on New Zealand’s innovative, forthright prime minister Jacinda Ardern — who is profiled in the series — will be what to do with the baggage unrelated to Jacinda Ardern that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will bring. By ‘baggage’ is meant the burgeoning fund of public knowledge of the last four years of the couple’s self-extrication from the British royal family.

The question isn’t whether Harry’s and Meghan’s presentation duties will “get in the way” of the Ardern story, or any other story in any other of the episodes. British, American and global Netflix audiences have proven themselves to be quite sophisticated at parsing the price of fame — however it is wielded or gotten. It’s not about the presentation.

The question is whether an audience will want to look at Jacinda Ardern, or Greta Thunberg, or Justice Ginsburg through Prince Harry’s and Meghan Markle’s editorial (production) lens. Bluntly put, the metric is whether Harry and Meghan can stop being Harry and Meghan long enough to tell us a good story, so that we keep coming back for more.