The weekend that The Crown’s Season 4 dropped on Netflix, Clarence House unleashed their full-throated hate campaign against Netflix, against the series and against the Duke and Duchess of Sussex for signing on to a Netflix deal. Yes, even after everything that’s happened in the past month, they’re all still talking about it. The Crown gave royal commentators another opportunity to bash the Sussexes and to gaslight Princess Diana in her grave. And even then, the damage control continues because Prince Charles really is *that* worried about chickens coming home to roost. Anyway, Vanity Fair recently had a piece where they spoke to various royal commentators about the Sussexes’ Netflix deal and whether it’s fair game to criticize Harry and Meghan. Note: Sally Bedell Smith was quoted at length in this piece, but we already heard what she had to say.

Some royal experts, like Princess Diana biographer Andrew Morton, say that the alliance is anodyne. “The fact that Meghan and Harry have forged a deal with Netflix, who broadcast The Crown, is irrelevant—like saying the queen should not use the BBC for her Christmas broadcast because they broadcast the Panorama interview with Princess Diana,” said Morton. “Netflix is a broad church that broadcasts a kaleidoscope of shows, from fiction to factual.”

Hugo Vickers, who has written a biography of Elizabeth the Queen Mother, is dismayed by Harry’s association with Netflix. In Vickers’s mind, Netflix “literally bought a member of the royal family.” Vickers added that Netflix’s association with the royal is invaluable—even if the deal ends up going south. “You get a massive amount of publicity by hiring him,” said Vickers. “I just want to speculate…if something goes wrong later, you do not give him $100 million, you maybe just give him a few million, but in firing him you get even more publicity…I don’t know whether they’re going to use him or not. But the fact is [Netflix] has him, and I think that’s absolutely horrific.”

Andrew Morton, meanwhile, thinks that the monarchy should be thanking Netflix. “The Crown has done more to reignite interest world wide in the British monarchy than any television series in history,” said Morton. “It attempts and mainly succeeds in turning remote two-dimensional figures into living, breathing human beings. There will always be the ‘why, oh why’ brigade whining and nitpicking about detail and purpose—but overall, Peter Morgan has done a masterful job in making the monarchy relevant to a new generation.”

[From Vanity Fair]

“There will always be the ‘why, oh why’ brigade whining and nitpicking about detail and purpose” LMAO Andrew Morton has some moments where he’s absolutely savage. I mean, at this point, why can’t Charles admit that his lil’ hate campaign went nowhere? That, if anything, he helped promote the series? As for what Vickers says here… it’s just a lot of tut-tutting from old farts who truly don’t realize how any of this works. Those were the same old bitties crying about how “unroyal” Meghan was and how she was such a monster for wearing nail polish or touching her bump. I mean, as much as I want to just shrug off this stuff and say it doesn’t matter, it actually does matter to the palace and the royal gatekeepers. It’s all pretty pathetic.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Netflix.