Live to Lead, review: a torrent of motivational gloop from Harry and Meghan

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The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are off to a blockbuster start to their new careers as Netflix content creators. Harry & Meghan, the sprawling, intermittently gossipy series chronicling their decoupling from the Royal family, has, in just a few weeks, become the most-watched documentary in the streamer’s history. But now comes the tricky second album – and those drawn to the soap-opera element of the Sussexes’ story will be underwhelmed by Live to Lead.

If ever there were a televisual equivalent of eating your greens, this is it. Seven half-hour episodes explore the life experiences of “inspirational” figures from across the generations: the sort of people whose words end up on fridge magnets and aphoristic Facebook memes. They include, for instance, the late US Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Gen Z environmental activist Greta Thunberg. 

The latter might have a few choice words to offer on the Sussexes’ recently reported fondness for private jets, but we’ll never know: she and they don’t actually meet. Instead, the Duke and Duchess pop up at the start of each episode to introduce the subject, and Meghan delivers self-actualised tongue-twisters – “the legacy that New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is building extends from her belief in never losing her capacity for empathy” – while Harry quotes Nelson Mandela, by whose Foundation Live to Lead is co-produced. They then retreat, and New Zealand documentarian Geoff Blackwell gets on with the tedious business of conducting the actual interviews.

It isn’t that the Sussexes were too busy to step behind the camera and ask feminist campaigner Gloria Steinem whether she had a message for her 20-year-old self (a tedious question that Blackwell springs upon a number of the interviewees). Several of these recordings predate their deal with Netflix. The Bader Ginsburg conversation, for instance, was taped in 2019, 12 months before her death from cancer – and long before Harry and Meghan, through their Archewell production company, entered into a $100 million collaboration with the streaming platform. Bader Ginsburg reveals that her husband was her “biggest supporter”: “He was the first boy I ever knew who cared that I had a brain.” This, you suspect, is the sort of message the Sussexes can get behind.

The Jacinda Ardern sit-down likewise dates from three years ago, and it came as news to New Zealand’s premier that she was to feature in a Harry and Meghan documentary. She had originally agreed to be interviewed by the Nelson Mandela Foundation as part of an initiative “producing resources for future leaders, with the focus on young leaders”. The first she knew of her being sucked into the gravitational field of Planet Sussex was when Netflix released the trailer for Live to Lead earlier this month.

Source: telegraph.co.uk