Once again, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle would like your attention. More than six years after stepping away from royal duties and moving to California, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are reportedly preparing to move back to Britain later this month with Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet. The children are enrolled to begin school in Britain in September, while Harry and Meghan are expected to live in a private residence and remain outside the ranks of working royals.
For a development attracting breaking-news treatment, the return feels strangely unsurprising. One explanation is that Harry and Meghan’s American experiment always contained a contradiction: Much of their value as celebrities came from the institution from which they were trying to create distance. America has no shortage of famous people.
This is a country that can turn a reality show contestant or the mildly interesting child of somebody famous into a celebrity in 48 hours. Fame, unlike sanity, is abundant here—but royalty isn't, which was always going to be the reason Meghan and Harry were going to be relevant here. The couple's direct access to the British monarchy, an institution Americans could watch obsessively, initially proved enormously marketable.
After leaving royal duties in 2020, the couple built a media business around podcasts, television and publishing. Their six-part Netflix documentary Harry & Meghan, centered heavily on their relationship with the royal family and their departure from royal life, became Netflix’s most-watched documentary series during its first four days. Harry’s memoir Spare and the couple’s interview with Oprah Winfrey similarly turned their account of palace life into a global cultural event.
Their biggest American story repeatedly remained the British story they had left behind and the longer they removed themselves from active royal life, the harder it became to replenish the thing that made their celebrity unusual and interesting in the first place. And that is why the American experiment always had a built-in expiration date: Their most valuable asset here was not simply fame but fame through proximity to a world Americans could not otherwise enter. But proximity fades because there are only so many palace grievances to reveal, family feuds to narrate and royal doors to crack open before the audience starts asking what comes next.
They could have reinvented themselves, just like thousands of immigrants do in the U.S. every year, but reinvention requires eventually becoming more interesting than the thing you are reinventing yourself from and they never quite managed it, maybe because, blasphemy!—the two were never really that interesting in the first place.
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