With the amount of attention the British royal family receives, there is a clear audience for Lifetime's movie Harry & Meghan: Escaping the Palace, but all this rushed piece accomplishes is to highlight other works like The Crown. The Crown is a high-budget, well-received Netflix series. It has four seasons already streaming, with two more scheduled. The series has so far covered six decades of content through the lens of the royal family. The focus is not only on the drama within the family but also on issues facing Britain and the world at that time.
By comparison, the plot of Harry & Meghan: Escaping the Palace is thin. The story begins days after the first of their son Archie and immediately comments on the racism they faced. It follows the couple right up until Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's infamous Oprah interview, in which the pair divulged a lot of previously private drama with the royal family. They revealed that Meghan felt "silenced" (something the film has her say directly to Duchess of Cambridge Kate). Those who watched will remember Prince Harry discussing his strained relationship with his brother, Prince William, as well as the racist comments about the color of their child's skin that the pair faced.
This interview seems to be the crux of the movie's research, and it shows. The Crown, meanwhile, effortlessly mixes the issues the family faced publicly with those they faced privately. They add in dialogue and emotion to fill in the gaps, but all of this fiction appears realistic based on what is known historically in multiple sources. Lifetime tries to draw comparisons between Meghan's experiences and Princess Diana's dark tragedy without sharing much on the rest of the family's perspectives. They instead chose to jump from gossip column story to gossip column story. Much of the narration, such as the Trooping the Colors scenes, is done in the style of tabloid journalism. As a whole, Escaping the Palace proves just how good The Crown is, even if the show dramatizes events.
The characters in the Lifetime film fall flat. Prince William is cold, with no sympathy for Meghan. He becomes hung up over petty things like Archie not being a "royal name" and refuses to let his children see their cousin. Kate is portrayed as a wife forced into submission. She can be seen almost sympathizing with Meghan but backs down when her husband disapproves. He even paints his mother, Diana as a villain to the Royal Family in comments made to his wife, Duchess Kate. This disturbing family dynamic is more gossip than research-based. When The Crown deals with complex relationships, both sides are always given the right to speak. For example, the love triangle story between Princess Diana, Prince Charles, and Camilla Parker-Bowles has time to grow. That story plays out over two seasons (so far), allowing for nuance in their interpretation. Each character has time for their side to be told with enough detail to be understood.
One primary principle in good writing is "show, don't tell." Escaping the Palace chooses to awkwardly drop in names, places, and events, bombarding its audience with information in a clumsy way. While Netflix's The Crown leaves out some true stories, it only does so for brevity, showing its audience what they need to understand the story. The attention to detail from The Crown is also missing in Escaping the Palace. The acting and budget are clearly far inferior. In one scene, Prince Harry and Meghan stand on a balcony, clearly in front of a green screen with no lighting correction. This inattention never happens in The Crown, earning it multiple Emmys.
It’s not easy to write about a group of people notorious for keeping their private lives private, but there’s a right and wrong way to do it. The Crown informs as much as it entertains, hoping that the audience will learn some history while enjoying their show. Harry & Meghan: Escaping the Palace is as salacious as the gossip columns it sources from. The focus is on how it felt, not how it happened.