The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are off to a very successful start to their new careers as Netflix content creators. Harry and Meghan, the extensive and intermittently gossipy series narrating his separation from the royal family, it has become, in just a few weeks, the most watched documentary in the streamer's history. But now comes the complicated second album, and those drawn to the soap opera element of the Sussexes' story will be disappointed by Live to Lead.
If there was ever a TV equivalent of eating your veggies, this is it. Seven half-hour episodes explore the life experiences of "inspirational" figures from all generations: the kind of people whose words end in fridge magnets and aphoristic Facebook memes. They include, for example, the late US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Gen Z environmental activist Greta Thunberg.
The latter might have a few choice words to offer about the Sussexes' recently reported fondness for private jets, but we'll never know: she and they don't actually know each other. Instead, the Duke and Duchess appear at the start of each episode to introduce the theme, with Meghan delivering self-fulfilling tongue twisters: "The legacy New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is building extends from her belief in never losing their capacity for empathy," while Harry quotes Nelson Mandela, whose Live to Lead Foundation is co-produced. They then leave and New Zealand documentary filmmaker Geoff Blackwell goes on to the tedious task of conducting the actual interviews.
Not that the Sussexes were too busy to get behind the camera and ask feminist activist Gloria Steinem if she had a message for the 20-year-old herself (a tedious question Blackwell asks several interviewees). Several of these recordings predate her deal with Netflix. Bader Ginsburg's conversation, for example, was recorded in 2019, 12 months before her death from cancer, and long before Harry and Meghan, through their production company Archewell, began a $100 million collaboration with the platform. of transmission. Bader Ginsburg reveals that her husband was her "biggest support" of her: "He was the first guy I ever met who cared that I had a brain." This, you suspect, is the kind of message the Sussexes can deliver.
Jacinda Ardern's sit-in also dates back three years, and it was news to the New Zealand prime minister that she was to appear in a Harry and Meghan documentary. She had originally agreed to be interviewed by the Nelson Mandela Foundation as part of an initiative "producing resources for future leaders, with a special focus on young leaders." She first learned that she was sucked into Planet Sussex's gravitational field when Netflix released the trailer for Live to Lead earlier this month.
