(Daily Mail) It’s happened faster than many of us perhaps thought.
At the start of the year, Harry and Meghan were on everyone’s lips.
Thanks to the double-barrel onslaught of their Netflix documentary whine-a-thon and Harry’s misery memoir Spare, people simply couldn’t get enough.
Love them or loathe them, they were the conversation.
Yet in less than ten months, it seems their inevitable implosion in relevance, their downward spiral towards the cultural trash can, is all but complete.
And how sad.
A pair whose refreshing presence once said so much, who – as the 21st Century royal couple – offered a bright, modern future of influence (in the truest sense), reduced to the butt of a throwaway gag on a comedy cartoon series way past its prime.
Gone are the days of full-episode South Park takedowns. On Sunday, Family Guy – limping on in its 22nd series – featured a twenty-second satire of the pair.
Gone are the days of full-episode South Park takedowns. On Sunday, Family Guy – limping on in its 22nd series – featured a twenty-second satire of Harry and Meghan.
At the start of the year, Harry and Meghan were on everyone’s lips. Thanks to the double-barrel onslaught of their Netflix documentary whine-a-thon and Harry’s misery memoir Spare, people couldn’t get enough. Yet in less than ten months, it seems their inevitable implosion in relevance, their downward spiral towards the cultural trash can, is all but complete.
We see a cartoonified Duke and Duchess sipping iced tea poolside at their Montecito mansion. A butler comes over with a stack of envelopes and says to Harry: ‘Sir, your millions from Netflix for… no one knows what.’
‘Put it with the rest of them,’ Harry says, waving the butler away.
Meghan, lounging in her bikini, gets an alert on her iPhone: ‘Baaabe, time to do our daily $250,000 sponsored Instagram post… for Del Taco.’
‘I shouldn’t have left the made-up nonsense,’ Harry drones.
No, he shouldn’t. Because look where it’s got him.
The worst thing about the scene is that it’s excruciatingly unfunny.
The unfairly gained Montecito millions, the moody prince, his fame-obsessed actress-wife. It’s all pretty obvious stuff – and tells you a lot about the quality of the writer’s room on a show that’s been running since 1999.
No subtlety, no comic timing, just one smack-you-in-the-face obvious ‘punchline’: America thinks you, Harry and Meghan, are grifters!
Back in June, when Meghan’s Spotify show Archetypes was axed after one underwhelming series, American sports supremo and Spotify’s own ‘head of podcast innovation and monetization’ Bill Simmons explosively lambasted the pair as ‘f***ing grifters’.
It was rude, perhaps uncalled for, and no doubt deliberately provocative.
It could also have been dismissed as the outburst of one angry old man.
This latest Family Guy clip changes things. It tells us that Americans everywhere now agree with Simmons. They’ve lost the culture.
But it didn’t have to be this way.
While Britain washed its hands of the boresome pair, excitement in America was palpable at the prospect of gaining a slice of Royalty stateside.
Hollywood was practically polishing the Walk of Fame stars ahead of time.
