The Trendy New Idea Is Moving On To Next

Michael Hedges December 12, 2022 Follow on Twitter

Popular culture is everywhere, almost. It is a fixture, some would say obsession, of mass media. Indeed, accessibility fuels popular culture. The ticket price, figuratively, is always right. The other defining feature of popular culture is transience. While high culture endures, pop culture rejects that idea.

For the present, streaming video on demand, Netflix in particular, is the emissary of popular culture. It has that post-modernist digital feel. It is trendy. Netflix springs on customers a variety of visual gems, appropriately mixed with less distinguished material. As has been said, there’s no accounting for taste. Pick and choose, go to the next, see it again, it’s the customer’s choice. Again, very post-modern.

The semi-autobiographical documentary series Harry & Meghan commenced its run on Netflix last week (December 8). It is all about Harry & Meghan - British Royal Family members (for the moment) the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. For several years they have been rather outspoken, castigating British society and British tabloid media. They have fans across the world and detractors. The second three hour-long episodes will appear next week.

Episode One attracted 2.4 million UK TV set viewers on December 8, episode two 1.5 million and episode three 800,000. UK media watchers noted that the episode one audience was more than twice that of the episode one, series five of The Crown, a dramatized depiction of the UK Royal Family. “Harry & Meghan has become Netflix’s biggest show of the year in the UK after it dropped in a blaze of publicity on Thursday morning,” said media news portal Deadline (December 9). Netflix has about 225 million paid subscribers worldwide. In October it entered into agreement with Broadcasters Audience Research Board (BARB) to provide UK viewer data, which does not include mobile phones, laptops or tablets.

Critics of the early episodes were critical, in right-wing newspapers scathing. It was hardly surprising as the couple has been railing about the UK tabloids forever, often understandably. The Duke of Sussex has filed several lawsuits against Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and MailOnLine, the most recent in October, jointly with Elton John. The Duchess of Sussex won a lawsuit against the Daily Mail for publishing without permission a letter from her father.

On one side critics reviewed the first episodes as failing to provide the expected bombshell. “There are no major revelations here, nothing so incendiary that it will cancel King Charles III’s coronation next year,” wrote The Independent arts editor Jesse Thompson. The Telegraph - reliably right-wing - condemned the episodes as a “very Californian exercise in grievance.” The New York Post, published by News Corp, principally owned by the Murdoch family, called it “a big snooze” and “a hypocritical attention grab.”

“Reviews don’t always mean much to Netflix,” offered business periodical Forbes (December 9). “The platform is built on buzz, banking that people will hear about series and be eager enough to be part of the conversation about them that they’ll invest in a subscription.” Forbes writer Toni Fitzgerald also quoted US streaming household data from Samba TV showing just under a million viewing Harry & Meghan first episode when it appeared Friday (December 9). That data gave a bit of demographics: viewers 20 to 24 years were “overindexed,” as were households with incomes exceeding US$150,000 annually. As they say in the boardrooms: BINGO!