Seven very important lessons we learnt from Meghan’s Archetypes podcast

We have talked a lot about collective grief in recent years, about how it binds strangers together, leaves its mark on whole generations, and how surprising its power can be.

Well, today we grieve together again, for the Duchess of Sussex has released the “season finale” of Archetypes with Meghan, the first podcast to fruit from the actress-philanthropist-chicken farmer-truth teller’s £18 million deal with Spotify.

If we are honest with ourselves – and if we have learnt anything from Meghan, it’s that we should be honest with ourselves – for the past three and a bit months, Tuesday has become Archetypes Day in households up and down the country. Don’t be like that, they have. They have.

But, sadly, all good things come to an end and, after 12 instalments, we must face a future without Archetypes guiding us through the dark. While we come together and plot a path forward, then, let us not focus on what we’ve lost, but celebrate what we had. Or at the very least, what we learnt.

1. Every episode was essentially the same 

Archetypes, which was the product of a one-woman machine plus 27 helpers, promised to “investigate, dissect, and subvert the labels that try to hold women back”. And it did that, at least for a few minutes, but each episode also fitted into this basic structure:

Step one: An introduction that goes on for somewhere between eight minutes and eight years, in which the host speaks so close to the microphone, in such a classic, soft “podcast voice” (upspeak, dramatic pauses, giggle-chat), that she could be doing a parody of a podcast. She is not.

Step two: The opening parable from the host’s life is at best heroically boring, at worst already incredibly well-known. In the first episode she divulged that, aged 11, she wrote to Hillary Clinton to complain about a sexist advert. “Would you believe it?” she asked, but we would, because every news website in the world covered it in 2017. Then we hear a short, bone-dry interview with a famous friend. Evidently every effort is being made to ensure nothing unexpected or revelatory happens in these conversations. This is achieved.

Step three: Meghan gets chills. Literal chills.

Step four: Finally, we hear a conclusion monologue delivered with the gravitas of a UN address and the vocal equivalent of a mic drop.

2. The host is married

A resolutely private person, Meghan – please, just call her Meghan – revealed for the first time that she is in fact married (“my now husband”). Further research confirms the lucky man is in fact to the King’s second son, Prince Harry.

In another historic first from all her many print, broadcast and audio pieces, Harry happened to accidentally interrupt a recorded interview early on. When you live in a 11,416 sq ft mansion, it’s easily done.

“Hi! You wanna come say hi?” Meghan said, 11 minutes into the first episode, in the manner of a parent mid-dinner party who has noticed their seven-year-old lingering on the stairs in their pyjamas, apparently unable to sleep. “Look who just popped in…”

The guest was Serena Williams, who is a good enough friend to not find the set-up absurd. “I like what you’ve done with your hair, that’s a great vibe,” Harry tells her. “Thank… you, good to see you as always. I miss you guys,” Serena says.

“Well, come and see us?” Harry instantly responds, giving the impression that a) his Chief Impact Officer work in Silicon Valley doesn’t exactly chain him to the desk, and b) Serena has cancelled on them many, many times.

“I… will!” Serena says, with an expert lack of commitment. She is quite literally there to announce her retirement and yet you know she has no intention of opening her calendar.

“We’ll make a plan,” Meghan interrupts, putting an end to the conversation just as it got good and awkward.

“Have fun!” Harry adds, on his way out.

“Thanks, my love!”

And that is genuinely the most interesting bit of that episode.

3. It’s possible Meghan was being paid by the minute

If not, how do you explain phrases like “I wanted to revisit a large piece of my origin story” when she means “I went to my old school”?

Every writer knows that if you’re struggling to meet a word count, you find longer and longer ways of saying the same thing. Or rather, if the situation arises in which the author is experiencing a literary constipation while the challenge of reaching an ideal final word figure as ordered by an editor is proving less than easy, you spread your sentences so thinly that they lose almost all meaning. Trust me.

4. She doesn’t exactly love it when things go off-script

In what was perhaps the best episode of the series – given Mariah Carey is always a superb interview and hearing her and the Duchess of Sussex discuss the particular experience of growing up as mixed-race women in 1990s America was actually quite good – Meghan had her interrogative spotlight turned back on her during a conversation about divas.

“It’s not something I connect to…” Meghan said, of the term.

“You give us diva moments sometimes, Meghan, don’t act like…” Carey replied.

For a moment the host seems thrown, as if this was absolutely not what was agreed before the interview, Mariah, and you very well know that. “What diva moments do I give?” she protests, in a butter-wouldn’t-melt-let-alone-start-an-argument-over-tights-and-hems voice.

She was, it turns out, quite shaken by this challenge. “It was all going swimmingly [...] until that moment happened, which - I don’t know about you - but it stopped me in my tracks when she called me a diva,” Meghan said in her voiceover later.

“I started to sweat a little bit, I started squirming in my chair in this quiet revolt. Like wait, what? No what? How could you? That’s not true. Why would you say that? My mind was genuinely just spinning with what nonsense she must have read or clicked on to make her say that?

“I just kept thinking in that moment, was my girl crush coming to a quick demise? Does she actually not see me?”

This existential crisis went on for a good minute longer.

5. Meghan has a mysterious, very famous friend who is inspirational and good at advice

“It reminded me of a message that was shared with me a few days before my wedding by a very, very influential and inspiring woman, who for her own privacy, I won’t share who it was with you,” Meghan said in one episode, exercising her famous discretion. She is married, you know. “But she said to me, ‘I know that your life is changing but please don’t give up on your activism, don’t give up because it means so much to women and girls’.”

A powerful and definitely not made up anecdote. They must have edited out the part where she says “Let’s call her ‘Shmoprah’”.

6. There’s some terrific art in the Sussex household

“There’s a piece of art in my sitting room,” Meghan began in the penultimate episode of the series, “it’s not fancy, it’s kind of this rectangle shape, almost plaque-like, and it just says a few words, very simply across it: ‘Humankind: be both.’”

Just let that sit with you for a moment. You’re moved, aren’t you?

7. There may be more of this

A lot more of this. Ahead of the podcast’s launch, the Duchess tried to trademark the 476 year-old word “archetypes” with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

The application included podcasts, television series and “live stage performances”, as well as the distribution of the audio or video through “broadcast television, satellite, cable television, global computer networks, the internet, websites, wireless devices, mobile applications, set top boxes, webcasts and on-demand streaming media.”

Saying “the internet” and “websites”, when they surely mean the same thing? Yeah, Meghan definitely wrote that.