Meghan Markle’s new Netflix show has failed to break into the streaming giant’s top 300 programmes for the first half of the year, as the Sussexes’ dreams of creating a media empire continues to struggle.
Testing the limits of mere celebrity to gain an audience. Or even mere likeability. Another way of putting the same thing she was a C list actress – supporting part on a cable show. Now she’s famous and also the skill level of a C list actress.
We can also run this the other way around. Sure, someone can be famous for being famous. But that’s not one of those things that lasts. There has to be a reason for the famosity in the first place for it to continue.
Bit difficult to try and bluff in a game of 1 card poker.
The race card…
Three cards, surely? She has a pretty smile and is shaggable, but so are many, many other women, and her sister-in-law is (was) hotter. (The cancer treatment seems to have hit Kate pretty hard and she’s starting to show her age. Look at her hands. What a pity.)
Some months ago I was flicking through UK cable channels and noticed one of the obscure channels was showing Suits. It never occured to me to actually watch any of it so see what it was like, and the level it struck my counciousness was that I cannot remember what channel it was on..
A C-list actress married to a C-list prince. I’ve said all along that she thought Harry was more important than he really is, and that the royals in general are more important than they really are. So when she found out that being a weal wive pwincess actually means pretending to be interested in the finger-paintings of sticky six-year-olds on a wet Tuesday afternoon in Wolverhampton, she demanded to see the manager.
“Three cards, surely? She has a pretty smile and is shaggable”
Yeah, you can certainly see what Harry was thinking. Or rather, why he wasn’t. But she’s burned those cards by demonstrating to the world that she’s also mental.
Oedipus syndrome Sam
Hazza’s mum was off her rocker too.
I wish I could land a multimillion dollar deal with Netflix before they realise I’m useless.
Be fair -that’s a talent of sorts.
Geoffers,,
“I wish I could land a multimillion dollar deal with Netflix before they realise I’m useless.”
This has been true to right back to people talking about Sigue Sigue Sputnik signing a multimillion pound deal, but the contracts that people refer to are the optimal deal if the buyer wants it, and are heavily weighted towards the buyer.
So, record company gives band a 4 album deal. But that’s really a 1 album deal, with 3 optional albums they can exercise. They do this because if album 1 works out spectacularly, the band can’t come back and say “yeah, we’d like a bigger royalty on album 2”. U2 got really rich after The Unforgettable Fire, because that was album 4 of a 4 album deal. They’d made good money but now, they weren’t a band that had to be heavily marketed and promoted but a band that were known and had sold 5m copies and were going to print money for whoever signed them. So they could get a bigger royalty.
It’s also why Marvel signs 6 movie deals and why they killed off a load of characters in Avengers Endgame. That was movie 6 for them. The reason why Robert Downey Jr made so much more money than everyone else is that he was only signed for a 1 picture deal, the first Iron Man, and he wasn’t paid much for that. But he was basically indispensable after that, and so could get $20m+ per movie.
If it happened to be that Harry and Meghan were brilliant at being presenters, Netflix don’t want people they helped to build fucking off straight away. So they tie them into options they can exercise. Netflix have not paid H&M $100m. That’s what they get if Netflix exercise every option. They’ll still be rich if that happens but not be able to bleed all the money. I doubt they’ve even paid them more than a few million so far, and that’s not even money just for them but for the whole production crew. Netflix are not so stupid as to just back up a truck full of dubloons to Montecito.
I know nothing about this stuff, but my wife knows, so she can tell Meghan doesn’t know wtf she’s doing. She’s trying to fake being Ina Garten. But Ina Garten knows what she’s doing. Megs is a ho pretending to be a housewife, she doesn’t know how to cook and her Idea of “style” is lame, That’s the problem the poor Sussexes face in general, they’re phonies in a culture that wànts authenticity. But the more you get to know the authentic royal Them, the less you like them.
She probably thought all this lifestyle stuff was easy and her minions could just hand her a script, as if that’s how Martha Stewart became a billionaire. I’m not sure what they expected after “retiring” from the royal family (lol) but maybe it really was to follow their dreams of boring podcasts, crap daytime TV shows, and flogging cheap plonk?
Only a matter of time before one or both of them are eating kangaroo penii in the jungle with Ant and Dec.
Not that I watch the telly but oooh let it be Megs. It would be hilarious to watch the tubby superannuating MILF lose it and get fired.
Frankly, it would be just fine never to hear any more from or about this tedious self-centred entitled pair ever again.
Or, if to put it another way, frankly my dear I don’t give a damn.
Norman – I’m trying to think of who their fellow celebs on the island would be. Chris Eubank, the Hamiltons, somebody from S-Club 7, Jedward, Dominik Diamond and Ritchie? And I don’t think the Gladiators are busy.
From a branding and marketing pov (as both Harry and Megs would put it, they’re not shy about their commercial aspirations), they’ve swapshopped the magic and sparkle of royalty for Keith Chegwindom. This is not how good King Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor, did it at all.
Harry was starting to carve out a good and popular role as veteran’s charities k ambassador and working with disabled charities in general. They could have expanded that role and become quite popular and she would have even received most of the fawning press coverage she craved.
Furthermore, if they’d played the game she would have had access to palaces and huge houses with all the flunkies she desired and her kids would have been given prince and princess honorific titles.
The problem was that she would always be playing 2nd fiddle to Kate.
Off topic but perhaps of interest to Mr W: after the implosion of the newspapers where have all the journalists gone?
https://www.thefirebreak.org/p/where-have-all-the-journalists-gone
I think she was always too woke for that, BiND. You don’t get to boss people around and lord it the way she likes to if you’re just cutting ribbons for charidee. And she was never as hot as Kate, and knew it. Bit of a problem for the “black” girl.
Dearieme, point to a contemporary “journalist” who is a genuinely dispassionate reporter and I’ll show you a piece of rocking-horse shit. I’ve never met a blunt who wasn’t some kind of budding Dave Spart.
“And she was never as hot as Kate, and knew it.” — err no . Meghan was/is pretty standard US TV hot. Kate is was good looking enough but they’re on a par IMO. But the looks aren’t quite as important as the je ne sais pas. And Kate has that and Meghan not so much.
Hallowed Be said:
““And she was never as hot as Kate, and knew it.” — err no”
Indeed; don’t forget Kate was out-hotted at her own wedding by her own sister’s arse (although from the occasional pictures I’ve seen subsequently, I’m not sure that lasted).
I don’t think she was or is capable of letting Harry get the credit. Remember the video going around a while back where he was doing the standard “and what is it you do?” routine at a meet-and-greet, and she moved to stand directly in front of him mid-sentence?
Hallowed Be,
“But the looks aren’t quite as important as the je ne sais pas. And Kate has that and Meghan not so much.”
Looks don’t matter that much because the monarchy is mostly a sell to women. Women like to see good looking women, so TV presenters for women are good looking. And Kate is about at TV presenter levels of hotness. But above that baseline, a TV presenter is about the job, how they come across. They picked people like Carol Vorderman and Rachel Riley for doing the numbers on looks and being able to do the numbers.
Kate is very pretty, but she is not an Uber babe. She wins out because she has the whole princess schtick sussed out. She can do formal and casual, she seems very nice and she is aspirational – middle class girl gets to the top.
Modern US actresses aren’t that hot these days. We are mostly of a generation who used to watch the stunners of the 70s and 80s and now all the modern girls seem so dowdy in comparison.
ps Kudos to Steve for picking Dominik Diamond, he really used to get on my tits as well.
Hallowed Be,
‘Je ne sais quoi’, not ‘… pas’.
Otto
“Kate is very pretty, but she is not an Uber babe.”
No, I can’t see her taking up cab driving if the monarchy goes tits up. Although I wouldn’t mind a ride in her Prius.
cough splutter
coffee over screen
well done Mr W !
Bloke in Powys:
Unless you’re Richard Murphy, in which case it’s “Je ne sais rien.”
Dearieme – The problem was that she would always be playing 2nd fiddle to Kate.
And when Kate is Queen, Meghan would have to curtsey. She’d be seething. But I think they thought they were going to hobnob with A list American slebs. She invited George Clooney and Oprah to her wedding ffs. They aren’t friends and didn’t know who she was, so that was a bit strange and very blatant social climbing (Meg isn’t good at this and it’s a sign of how poorly advised/chaperoned the royal family is, that she was allowed to get close to HRH in the first place. I thought part of the job of servants was to keep the riff-raff at a distance?)
But they’re not hobnobbing with A-listers, they’re embarrassing themselves with crap product endorsements and all the shameless self-promotion of a dropshipper on YouTube. King Charles also sells wine, but it’s from local English farmers and all the proceeds go to charity. You don’t see him plugging it on Netflix, he has a very tasteful website for the Highgrove stuff. But then he’s not desperate for cash.
I think Meg had unreasonable expectations of how high she could monkeybranch in the social order after placing Harry under some strange sexual spell. British royals aren’t really celebs and can only tarnish their own star power by being too closely associated with entertainment royalty, like they tried to warn Edward. (Hollywood slebs tend to be beautiful, funny or sexy. Harold is a 40 year old balding Englishman with ginger pubes who only recently learned how to squeeze his own toothpaste.) But even if Harry was a royal Grace Kelly, substituting HRH for success in the mediasphere would still be a social downgrade, if not a financial one.
Harry’s birthright taps into something much older and more deeply rooted in the human consciousness than the current cover of Heat magazine, trading it in for Tinseltown makes me think he doesn’t ever muse on etymology. He is the proud heir of great warlords, crusaders and kings, a living representative of the enduring sovereign power of Great Britain. Royalty is bound to the deep magic, which is why you don’t go on It’s A Royal Knockout.
Otto – ps Kudos to Steve for picking Dominik Diamond, he really used to get on my tits as well.
Dexter Fletcher was the best Gamesmaster host.