Netflix has decided to delay airing its documentary series featuring Meghan Markle and Prince Harry until next year after being inundated by complaints about its latest season of “The Crown,” Deadline has reported.
The company had been considering airing the untitled documentary series produced by Netflix and Archewell Productions beginning in December, according to Deadline. But Netflix has been grappling with major complaints about its other royal series, “The Crown”; new episodes of the show are set to start airing in the U.S. early next month.
“They’re rattled at Netflix, and they blinked first and decided to postpone the documentary,” a source told Deadline.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex may be relieved about the hang-up amid reports they were considering “softening” some content in the wake of Queen Elizabeth II’s death.
The “Crown” attacks have been so vehement that Netflix on Friday added a disclaimer to the trailer for the series that it’s a “fictional dramatization” that has been “inspired by real events.”
Former British Prime Minister John Major was one of the first to take issue earlier this month with the plot of the first episode in which Prince Charles (played by Dominic West) — now King Charles — secretly meets with Major (Jonny Lee Miller) in 1991. West complains in the episode about having to wait to become king, and hints that Major should press for the abdication of Queen Elizabeth II.
Major complained that no such encounter occurred, and blasted the depiction as “malicious fiction” and a “barrel-load of nonsense.”
British actress Judi Dench last week accused “The Crown” of being “cruelly unjust” and demanded a disclaimer calling it fiction, in a letter to the Times of London.
“The closer the drama comes to our present times, the more freely it seems willing to blur the lines between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism,” she wrote.