As far as book launches go, the publication of Prince Harry’s memoir this week was the type of rollout that mere mortals can only dream of. A flurry of headline-making prerelease leaks preceded a press blitz of epic proportions: sit-downs with 60 Minutes and Good Morning America here and with ITV in Great Britain; a rave appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert; and of course a maelstrom of earned media that attended the royal book tour, including sales-juicing TV news segments and a wall-to-wall tabloid bacchanal, masterfully exemplified by the online news feed of the Sussexes’ bête noire, the Daily Mail. By the close of its Tuesday shelf date, according to publisher Penguin Random House, Spare had become—with the assistance of a megawatt ghostwriter—the fastest-selling nonfiction book on record in the UK and PRH’s biggest first-day nonfiction release ever, with more than 1.43 million copies sold in the US, Canada, and Britain.

This was the second record-smashing metric for Harry in as many months. In December, when all anyone could talk about was Harry and Meghan Markle’s six-part Netflix drama dump, the streamer announced that Harry & Meghan had become its highest-viewed documentary debut ever, with over 28 million households—a mere four days into its debut—devouring the series’ glowing portrait of the couple, either out of love, or curiosity, or a good old-fashioned hate-watch. As Netflix closed out a year that brought its first subscriber slowdown in more than a decade—a stumble that injected a dose of cold hard reality into the go-go streaming era—it was just what the doctor ordered.

It would therefore appear that Harry and Meghan’s business partners are getting a return on the gazillions they’ve shelled out on the royals-in-exile—a rumored $20 million for PRH and a reported $100 million for Netflix, not to mention the reported $25 million deal that Spotify made with Harry and Meghan, who have sucked us in with their behind-the-scenes peeks at dramatic curtsies, palace backstabbing, and physical altercations between once-beloved brothers. And yet, there’s something about the great Sussex media gamble that makes it hard to rate the whole thing an unqualified success, at least not judging by the chatter I intercepted this week from a handful of Hollywood muckety-mucks.

“When the source of your content and your narrative and storytelling is just a giant pity party, it’s over,” one executive told me. “What’s more to say? Everyone’s shaking their heads.” Another said, “Okay, now you’ve told all this shit, but there’s a shelf life to these things. Something can look like it’s the biggest thing in the world, and then, boom, it’s gone.” A third power player concurred, “I am hearing that they are oversaturated. Everyone in our business is like, ‘Shut up, it’s enough already.’ But of course everyone is still rabidly following it.”

These anonymous rumblings were echoed in a front-page New York Times piece on Tuesday from Sarah Lyall, who suggested, “More worrying for Harry and Meghan is whether the continued public re-litigation of their troubles has grown so repetitive or even tiresome that it has eroded their personal brand and damaged their potential future earnings. Once they have exhausted the topic of themselves, what is left for them to talk about?” Harry and Meghan’s spokeswoman countered: “These look-back projects have been years in the making, and now that they have been delivered, this chapter is closed. It is in no way shaping what’s to come from the couple. They are looking forward, and ready for what comes next.”

When Harry and Meghan were first putting together the pieces of their burgeoning content empire, it was regarded as a page out of the Obama playbook: make films and TV shows for Netflix, make podcasts for Spotify, light up the bestseller lists with blockbuster memoirs. (I was assured that Meghan is not in fact working on a book, despite reports in the British press to the contrary.) In March 2021, on the heels of a stage-setting Oprah Winfrey interview—which drew a global audience of nearly 50 million in the first two days after it aired and presaged the juicy tell-alls to come—Tina Brown told me, “They reached a whole new audience who now can’t wait to see what happens next.” Media analyst Rich Greenfield was similarly enthusiastic: “I think this clearly shows, whatever their profile was beforehand in the US and globally, it’s clearly that much larger now.”

Two years later, the Sussexes’ output has been comparatively small, even when you consider the past month’s high-octane releases of Harry & Meghan and Spare. Before that, the most they had to show for themselves as media players was Meghan’s long-awaited Spotify podcast, Archetypes, which finally premiered in August, heralded by digital billboards from Times Square to Los Angeles to Toronto. The season finale landed on November 29, days before Page Six reported that Archewell Productions’ inaugural head of audio had moved on and “it remains unclear whether Markle will host a second season.” (There’s a new head of audio who’s already working on further Spotify content from Archewell.)

Given all the hype around Harry & Meghan and Spare, you could be forgiven if you didn’t know that Netflix dropped a second Archewell production on December 31, Live to Lead, a Nelson Mandela–inspired docuseries about “seven leaders who’ve dedicated their lives to social justice,” including Jacinda Ardern, Gloria Steinem, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in one of her final interviews. Heart of Invictus, a Netflix docuseries about Harry’s Invictus Games competition for wounded military veterans, is on tap. (No release date yet but it’s slated to come out later this year.) There are scripted and unscripted projects in development at Netflix that haven’t been announced, according to someone with knowledge of the deal, who told me it’s good for another two years or so. (Earlier this year, Netflix nixed Markle’s animated series, Pearl, amid cost-cutting to mitigate its subscriber and stock losses.)

In signing with Netflix, undoubtedly the highest bidder, Harry and Meghan took a pass on other opportunities. I’m told there had been talks with the brass of Disney (at Bob Iger’s home) and Discovery, the latter of which may have even positioned Harry for a David Attenborough-like role. One of the possibilities discussed, sources familiar with the talks told me, was for Harry to work on documentary programming about Africa (a passion of his) and Great Britain. Meghan expressed interest in lifestyle programming.

Perhaps they’ll end up doing some of that stuff for Netflix now that they’re on the other side of their grievance rodeo, which, whether you liked it or not, must have been a cathartic exercise. Harry touched on another motivating factor during the Oprah interview two years ago: “At the time during COVID, the suggestion by a friend was, ‘What about streamers?’ And we hadn’t thought about it. There were all sorts of different options and from my perspective, I just needed enough money to pay for security to keep my family safe.” (Life started to look scary without the backing of the royal security apparatus.)

This raises the question of whether Harry and Meghan are even committed to building a media business in the long-term, after their initial contracts with Netflix and Spotify expire. (They still have all that philanthropy to busy themselves with.) Perhaps the bigger question is whether they could pull off another hit to rival their Netflix debut.

One of the knowledgeable executives I spoke with speculated, “This is where they might have a shot: It’s not inconceivable that someone like Oprah or Tyler Perry”—who, thanks to the docuseries, we now know is one of their close friends—“that one of these people brings them something and says, I’m gonna executive-produce this, and you’re gonna executive-produce this, and we’re gonna get so and so to write it. They’re motivated at Netflix to make that work. So you have a dynamic which probably could inform momentum, but it’s hard.” One of my other sources similarly noted, “I’m sure they’re taking meetings on what the next project is gonna be. While it’s very popular to bemoan Harry and Meghan right now, Hollywood cannot resist anything that has commercial value.”

For additional perspective, I called someone who’s not from the entertainment world, but has deep familiarity with royal media relations. “There is certainly a view that, unlike the Obamas, say, they don’t actually have much of a backstory beyond being royal, and nor have they got a particularly illustrious list of achievements to their names,” this person said. “But that doesn’t necessarily translate into lost sales or lost bookability. Given that their constituency is young, progressive, minority, I think there’s probably quite a lot more for them to do.”