For all this delving into the psyches of various subjects, and although both Winfrey and Harry both log time on-camera, it’s Harry (credited here as Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex) who is the show’s connective tissue. The episodes, structured around stages of the search for help, track Harry’s own experience — in the first episode, recognizing the need for help; in the second, actually asking for it; in the third, finding a method that work. For Harry, this includes EMDR therapy, a practice combining the recollection of upsetting memories with physical stimulation that can be used to address post-traumatic stress disorder. He also discusses a set of incidents that will be familiar to anyone who saw the earlier Winfrey interview, though, here, they’re told solely from Harry’s perspective; at least in the first three episodes, Meghan, whose past thoughts of suicide Harry describes, does not appear.
The impact of these revelations is blunted, somewhat, both by repetition and by context. Both co-creators seem to be striving for the point that trauma is a universal fact of life, that we all have something terrible that we’ve been through. This is not, strictly speaking, new: Winfrey has made her name on shared intimacy with her audience. But this show struggles to make its case, growing more successful the more time elapses between Harry’s appearances. Even a viewer who believes that all pain is valid to the person experiencing it, and who believes that Harry’s life of constricting privilege and rigidity left real scars — neither of which seems like it ought to be a controversial point — may run up against the limits of their sympathy when the show cuts from Harry’s narrative to an adult Syrian refugee mentoring children who’ve fled their homeland.”
