What 'As Ever' Was Always Going to Be
Meghan Markle signed a deal with Netflix reportedly worth $100 million. The streaming giant — which has fired multiple rounds of employees, canceled dozens of shows, and spent the last three years trying to prove to shareholders that it disciplines content spending — agreed to pay nine figures to a woman whose primary credential was having married into and subsequently departed a royal family.
The result: a deal that by multiple accounts cost Netflix tens of millions of dollars without generating a corresponding return. Shows that didn't connect. Projects that didn't land. An audience that turned out to be smaller and less loyal than the social media heat suggested it would be.
In the media business, there's a phrase: confusing platform for talent. It means mistaking the size of someone's microphone for the quality of what they're saying through it.
Meghan Markle has a very large microphone. Netflix paid $100 million to discover that the microphone, not the voice, was the valuable part.
The Celebrity Grievance Industrial Complex
I want to be specific about what went wrong here, because it's instructive beyond the tabloid surface.
The entire Markle brand — and it is consciously a brand, managed and deployed with deliberate precision — is built on a single narrative: she was mistreated by an institution (the Royal Family) that represents an older, more exclusionary world, and her journey away from that institution is a story of liberation, authenticity, and self-determination.
That narrative works on social media. It generates engagement. It produces headlines. It maintains a dedicated audience of people who have emotionally invested in the idea of her as a heroic figure.
What it doesn't do, demonstrably, is convert into sustained viewership on a streaming platform that charges $15.49 a month. The grievance economy and the subscription economy have different currencies. Netflix discovered this expensively.
I know a man who works in development at a major streaming competitor. He told me, some time ago, that the single most dangerous word in content acquisition meetings is "cultural moment." Because a cultural moment, by definition, passes. You sign deals during cultural moments and deliver content six to eighteen months later, after the moment has moved on. What you're left with is the content stripped of its context — and if the content itself isn't strong enough to stand alone, you have a problem.
The Markle content was not strong enough to stand alone.
The Price of Mistaking Grievance for Story
Here's what the Netflix accounting actually reveals, beneath the celebrity gossip layer. Content that is primarily about a person's complaints — about institutions, about family members, about the press, about race, about the machinery that failed them — has a ceiling. People are interested in grievance for approximately as long as the grievance feels fresh.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex's departure from royal duties happened in January 2020. Their Oprah interview aired in March 2021. Their Netflix documentary dropped in December 2022. By the time "As Ever" was attempting to generate content from this narrative infrastructure in 2025 and 2026, the freshness had degraded completely.
Netflix paid for a moment. The moment had a shelf life. The shelf life expired. And now there are sources inside the company willing to go on record to Page Six about the losses, which is itself a form of institutional communication — someone inside Netflix is sending a message about how deals like this get evaluated going forward.
The British press, which has had a complicated relationship with the Markles, is not wrong when it observes that the pair's commercial endeavors have consistently underperformed their hype. Not because of malice. Because the hype was always generated by controversy, and controversy doesn't scale into a cooking show or a lifestyle brand. It scales into a news cycle. News cycles end.
Netflix is moving on. The $100 million is a lesson. Expensive lessons are the ones you don't repeat.
