While Meghan, Duchess of Sussex might have raised a glass of her branded “As Ever” rosé to toast an unexpected new deal with Netflix, her husband should realise that his own media career is now finished.

Prince Harry was not born to front documentaries. He lacks the charisma to host lifestyle shows, and is wooden as a podcaster. He has neither the talent nor inclination to be a producer or a director. Most surprisingly, the Duke of Sussex appears bereft of the ideas or contacts to generate interesting programme formats.

Lord knows, Netflix executives must have tried. During a five-year, $100m (£74m) partnership with Meghan and Harry’s Archewell Productions, the only project they could really get to fly was Harry & Meghan, the series in which the couple trashed the Royal Family only for Harry to find himself estranged from the King after his father’s cancer diagnosis.

Beyond dishing the dirt on Harry’s relatives, Archewell’s most successful Netflix format has been the Duchess’s cooking show With Love, Meghan, which was monstered by critics, including one who said it was “toe-curlingly unlovable”.

When Archewell was launched in the wake of the couple’s “Megxit” from the Royal Family in 2020, its mission was to “build a better world, one act of compassion at a time”, making shows that would “uplift and unite communities”.
I am not sure how the content it has made for Netflix remotely achieves those lofty aims.

In a trailer for a surprise second series of With Love, Meghan, which starts next week, she was shown hanging out with famous friends in the kitchen of her mansion in super-rich Montecito, California. Is this the community she is uplifting? Harry did not appear. The Netflix extension deal is all about his wife.

The best idea that Harry could come up with was the horrific Polo, another critically panned show which only undermined Netflix’s hard-won reputation for making documentaries that change public perceptions of a sport.

Polo might be a favoured pastime of the Prince but it attracts an elite community little in need of being uplifted. Audiences were uninspired, with only 500,000 watching, leaving it ranked 3,436th in the streaming company’s portfolio for the first half of 2025.

For a moment after Megxit, the Sussexes seemed like genuine media power players. Aside from the Netflix bonanza, Archewell landed a $20m contract with the audio platform Spotify. That ended after 12 episodes of the couple’s tepid podcast, Archetypes.

Spotify’s head of podcast innovation and monetisation, Bill Simmonds, later denounced the couples as “grifters” for their lack of talent. “I have to get drunk one night and tell the story of the Zoom call I had with Harry to try to help him with a podcast idea,” he said.

So why has Netflix bothered with a new deal? Partly to protect its public reputation after spending an amount that more talented parties could have used to produce material of far greater artistic merit. The streamer trilled that the car-crash viewing of Harry & Meghan had been its “fifth most popular documentary series of all time”.

Netflix has an interest in Meghan’s As Ever product brand, and so it praised With Love, Meghan as its “most-watched culinary show” (it placed 383rd in Netflix’s wider 2025 rankings).

The reality is that Meghan was so desperate for this extension that Netflix could cut a watered-down deal that gives it first refusal, should any dramatic update in the couple’s circumstances create opportunities for personal outpouring in the style of Harry & Meghan.

Until then, Netflix will focus on Meghan. Harry’s only future role appears to be as one of five producers – including his wife – on an Africa-based factual show, Masaka Kids, A Rhythm Within. Let us hope that this gives him a worthwhile community to uplift, although his record in development work has been tarnished by problems at Sentebale, the charity that he co-founded to help people in southern Africa with HIV and Aids. Harry resigned from it in May.

Meghan is the only real media worker in the couple and Harry’s primary role in Archewell is to bring the royal credentials that set her apart from her peers.

His interest in media is not as a creative but as a reformer or regulator, seeking to curb the tabloid excesses that led to the death of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales. He claimed a “monumental victory” in settling with Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers in January, and is due to go to court next year with privacy claims against Associated Newspapers’ Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday (The i Paper is part of Harmsworth Media, a publishing division owned by Associated Newspapers Limited’s parent company DMGT, and has complete editorial independence.)

So Harry and the media remain entwined. But he needs a new job. His campaign for press reform has won him admirers – but he will lose public respect if he cannot find a way to earn a living beyond traducing his own family.