Prince Harry’s ‘Polo’ fails to make the Netflix Top 10 in Blow for Royal

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Prince Harry’s Netflix show Polo has failed to chart in the top 10 in the UK, America or globally, amid sharp criticism from reviewers.

The five-part series dropped on Tuesday last week, meaning it only missed one day on the weekly chart, which runs from December 9th to December 15th.

Polobut did not make it onto the Netflix charts in Harry’s country of birth, his adopted home of America, the world at large or any other country Newsweek controlled.

Spy thriller Black Pigeons topped the global chart with 14.6 million views ahead Jamie Foxx: What had happened was… of 8.2 million and No good deed of 6 million

Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey was 10th with 1.8 million views, suggesting Harry’s show came in somewhere behind it.

Why it matters

Harry and Meghan Markle signed with the streaming giant in September 2020 as they were rising stars recently living their post-royal lives in the Californian sunshine.

It took them two more years to debut their first project, Harry and Meghanwho revisited the royal bombshells they first dropped during their 2021 Oprah Winfrey interview.

Although that project was commercially successful, they have struggled to find large audiences for follow-up shows Live to lead and Heart of Invictus, despite the huge sums of money that Netflix has promised.

Early reviews of Harry’s latest offering, Polohigh scorn of the five-part series, a look into the world of a sport that the prince has played throughout his life.

And now that Netflix’s top ten charts have been updated, it looks like their latest offering will indeed thrill and worry on stage and then be heard from no more.

What to know

Polo charts the lives of competitors in the US Open and includes some moments of high drama, including an on-court injury and a father-son rivalry.

However, fans of Harry and Meghan will find very little of the pair in the show as they only appear in the opening sequence and the final episode.

Their on-screen involvement is limited to a charity polo tournament, the Royal Salute Polo Challenge in Wellington, Florida, which raised money for Harry’s charity Sentebale.

Harry was filmed talking to team-mate Adolfo Cambiaso before Meghan had a brief conversation with him in Spanish about having briefly lived in his native Argentina when she was younger.

What people say

Eric Schiffer, president of Reputation Management Consultants, said recently Newsweek: “It’s a pompous depiction of privilege masquerading as a documentary.

“It feels fake. You could almost see an ad, ‘polo the new cure for insomnia, brought to you by royalty.’

“They’ve made it the new frontier of incoherence. This ensures that polo will become even less popular with ordinary people. It just reeks of entitlement and is disconnected, incoherent.”

A two star review i The Guardian described Polo as “unintentionally hilarious” and added: “Uncomfortably privileged players cry in dark rooms when they lose … this documentary about the royal’s hobby is like a spoof.”

“Polo is the stupidest, most disgusting sport known to mankind,” it continued. “It is the playground of the rich.

“It’s a sport where fixtures are chosen by popping confetti-filled balloons, like a nightmarish gender reveal party.

“It takes incredible wealth, usually inherited, which means you can pour a bucket of paint over the whole sport and not hit a single person who at least qualified as an underdog.

“It’s a show about privileged people that shows us exactly how privileged they are, which means there’s not a lot of drama to be found.”

It didn’t do much better in the UK broadsheet The Times: “Prince Harry has made a TV show only he wanted to watch.”

“It’s hard not to shake the feeling that you’re looking at the equivalent of a big, expensive coffee-table book.

“IN The last dancethere was a good chance viewers knew the main basketball superstars, and even if they didn’t, there was a palpable sense of sports history at play.

“The series Welcome to Wrexhamfocusing on Wrexham FC, was about a town’s pride, about achieving the dream.

“Here, despite the efforts of showrunner Milos Balac, who also produced Welcome to Wrexhamis it simply impossible to relate in the same way to polo’s slim, tanned, sports car-driving players, despite the lurking theme of demanding fathers.

“However much of it is shot through a ‘truthful and relatable lens’, it lacks a streak of mischief. Still, if you were Prince Harry, for example, it would arguably be the most compelling thing on TV.”

What happens next

Prince Harry and Meghan’s Netflix deal is expected to wind down next year, with a lifestyle show from Meghan still in the pipeline.

In April, the streaming giant said the series “celebrates the joys of cooking, gardening, entertaining and friendship.”

There were also reports of Harry and Meghan adapting Carley Fortune’s hit novel Meet me at the laketakes place in Canada, where Meghan lived during her filming Suits.

Very little news has come out about the project, with no reports of casting or a release date.

While the Sussexes love a stealth drop, the couple have never actually commented publicly on reports they were involved despite Polo and Meghan’s lifestyle show being confirmed in April.

Fans could therefore be forgiven for wondering if Meet me at the lake is actually on its way to Netflix or not.

However, that would undoubtedly be a shame for Fortune, who said back in 2023: “I am so excited to be working with Netflix and Archewell to bring Meet me at the lake to the screen.”

Jack Royston is chief royal correspondent for Newsweekbased in London. You can find him on X, formerly Twitter, at @jack_royston and read his stories further Newsweek‘s Royal’s Facebook page.

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