The Truth About Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s Netflix Viewers

Though the Sussex’s documentary set a record for documentary watch hours, it’s not necessarily good news for ex-royals

On Tuesday December 13, Netflix announced that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s eponymous reality show achieved a record-breaking documentary views. That might be a boon for the Sussexes, but when looking more closely, the news isn’t as great as it first appears.

According to a press release from Netflix: “Volume I of the unprecedented and in-depth documentary series Harry & Meghan debuted with 81.55M hours viewed, the highest view hours of any documentary title in a premiere week. The series from Oscar-nominated director Liz Garbus appeared in the Top 10 TV list in 85 countries, including #1 in the United Kingdom. After just four days, over 28M households have seen the first three episodes (81.55M divided by 2.9 hours), and Volume II premieres this Thursday.”

That might initially seem all well and good, but it’s a very surface level view. There are several key numbers that could give the public a better indication about whether or not the show was as successful as they want the world to believe.

The most obvious problem is that the critics and the public mostly hated the series. It currently has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 45% for critics and 12% for audiences, and an IMDb score of 3.2. Even the mostly reviled “She Hulk” did better, with a Rotten Tomatoes audience score of 33%.

Generally, audiences and critics complained that the series was slow, self-indulgent and boring, with a lot of fuss and few bombshells.

The Telegraph review stated: “Yet by the end of the first three episodes, it soon becomes apparent that the only Mug(gle) to have fallen under any spell is Harry himself - a husband so besotted by his wife that he has been completely blinded to the magic of his once majestic life.”

Variety, a publication that under any other circumstances should be positive towards “Harry and Meghan,” stated: “They may have shed their responsibilities to the crown, but they’re still in a kind of service: There’s an air of duty about the entire enterprise of ‘Harry & Meghan,’ as if they’re honor-bound to keep reciting their personal story until we eventually lose interest.”

Given that Meghan just did an interview with Variety earlier this fall, that has to bruise the ego a bit.

Since so few who watched actually liked it, what’s the truth behind the Netflix numbers? Are they lying to protect their product?

Though it might seem like that’s the case, the answer is probably no. The series got high views, but it’s probably more of hate watching than anything else.

First things first, the number regarding household watches by Netflix is slightly misleading. Their conclusion that 28 million households is based on dividing the amount of watch hours by the length of the series.

This is problematic.

It fails to take into account that some people, especially Sussex Squad members, probably watched the series twice if not multiple times. Since I missed a key bit in my recording for a video, even I rewatched one episode again. I also started and stopped scenes pretty consistently when I was worried I misheard something or thought a particular quote would be good to record.

Ergo, my “watch hours” wouldn’t be the normal 2.9 hours, they would probably be more.

And there’s no doubt Netflix knows 100% how many households watched it. They’re not telling us exact numbers, as perhaps, they don’t want more of the public to know that millions couldn’t even make it through the first episode. This would make sense given some of the data that we have out of the U.K.

The British viewer tracking system Barb reported that 2.4 million people tuned in for the first episode, 1.5 million for the second and 800,000 for the third.

In just three episodes, Harry and Meghan lost over 60% of their audience.

It’s definitely not outside the realm of possibility to believe that something similar happened with “Harry and Meghan,” a fact Netflix doesn’t want people to know.

Perhaps 50 million people worldwide actually watched at least some part of the series, but that would mean that perhaps people only got through about 1.5 hours or less. The number of viewers could be even more, but that could mean the average view is only about 30 minutes.

Don’t forget, in 2017 Netflix called out on Twitter “the 53 people who've watched A Christmas Prince every day for the past 18 days: Who hurt you?”

Netflix knows exactly how many households watched “Harry and Meghan,” but it doesn’t want the public to know given that their $100 million investment has been a gigantic flop

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