There is a word in entertainment circles now. It is a verb. The verb is “Markled.” It means: to charm your way into a lucrative institutional relationship, make yourself impossible to work with, and leave the institution holding the bag while you give interviews about how unfairly you were treated.
Netflix just got Markled.
The streaming giant that handed Harry and Meghan a reported $100 million deal to produce content — apparently on the theory that two people who walked away from the most famous family on earth would make great business partners — has quietly ended its partnership with Meghan’s lifestyle brand As Ever. The official line is mutual. The sources are less diplomatic. “The mood in the building is ‘We’re done,'” one Netflix insider told reporters. The company’s teams had “gotten Markled enough.”
Page Six reported that Meghan would routinely disappear from Netflix Zoom calls mid-meeting. When colleagues asked where she went, they were told she had been “offended by something that was said.” At in-person meetings, sources say she would talk over Harry — sometimes while he was mid-sentence — to recast or correct his thoughts, usually preceded by a practiced touch to his arm.
Harry’s spokesperson called the reports “categorically false.” Their lawyer accused the coverage of being “misogynistic.” This is, of course, the standard response to any unflattering Meghan story — the characterization is always the problem, never the behavior being characterized.
Netflix’s ratings data was less diplomatic than the lawyers. The shows underperformed. The lifestyle brand failed to gain traction. The $100 million bet on the progressive celebrity grift did not pay off.
This is not a Netflix problem. It is a pattern. The Royal Family. Spotify — which ended their $18 million podcast deal in 2023. Netflix. Every institution that handed Meghan Markle a platform and a budget eventually arrived at the same destination. The destinations differ. The journey is always the same.
What makes this a story worth watching beyond the celebrity gossip is what it represents. For five years, major institutions paid enormous sums to align themselves with the progressive royalty brand — the idea that Meghan and Harry represented a more enlightened, more diverse, more sensitive version of influence. The returns have been consistently negative, and the institutions are finally doing the math.
Netflix joins a growing list of organizations that learned the hard way that victimhood is not a content strategy.
The good news for Meghan: she’ll have a great podcast episode about this someday. The bad news: she’ll have to find someone else to host it.