Enrique de Sussex

In September 2020, two executives at Los Gatos signed a nine-figure check in the name of a prince without a crown. Enrique de Sussex wasn't looking for a refuge in California to make courtesy cameos or to pose on festival red carpets. His goal was to build his own media stronghold. He founded Archewell Productions with Meghan Markle and sealed a priority partnership with Netflix valued at 100 million dollars.

Before settling in Montecito, the duke had already dipped into nonfiction storytelling by covering the Invictus Games. But the American entertainment industry runs on unforgiving rules. In the offices in Los Angeles, dynastic lineage matters little when the platform's retention curves demand conflict right away, by minute three.

Nobody hands out viewing minutes out of noble birth.

The confessional of the mass audiences

In 2021, the documentary series The Me You Can’t See premiered on Apple TV+, produced side by side with Oprah Winfrey. Harry stepped in front of the camera as the thread and patient guide for unpacking post-traumatic stress, mental health and the loss of his mother. That project served as a dress rehearsal for the real ratings earthquake.

And the detonation came in December 2022. The docuseries Harry & Meghan, directed by documentary filmmaker Liz Garbus, racked up more than 81 million hours viewed in its first week on air. The edit combined home footage shot on cell phones, complaints about the British press, and a carefully calculated reconstruction of their exit from the Royal Family.

But nonfiction entertainment isn't driven by personal catharsis alone. In August 2023, Heart of Invictus hit the screen, led by director Orlando von Einsiedel. Critics praised the technical restraint of the story about war veterans, although general audiences largely passed on the project in the global catalog.

Intimacy sells; other people's sports drama, a lot less.

From blank check to studio discipline

Telling fictional stories takes craft in the writers' room. In January 2023, his memoir Spare flew off bookshelves with the help of ghostwriter J. R. Moehringer, but bringing that storytelling ability to the feature film format took longer than expected. The rights to Carley Fortune's novel Meet Me at the Lake were acquired for a film adaptation, although preproduction took years to get going.

In December 2024, Archewell Productions premiered Polo, a five-episode documentary series filmed at the clubs in Wellington, Florida. The show explored the inner workings of this equestrian sport alongside player Nacho Figueras. The viewing numbers were lukewarm, and the series was relegated to the lower ranks of the streaming service's semiannual viewership report.

Hollywood pays every invoice in cash up front.

So the contract terms changed. In August 2025, the platform turned Archewell's exclusive deal into a first-look agreement that eliminated fixed allocations and required every script to undergo individual approval. Netflix stopped funding the internal structure and began paying only for finished projects.

In 2026, the company restructured its team in Beverly Hills and handed development of a scripted series set in professional polo to producers Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage. Production reports put the technical cost per episode for that project 30% lower than the budget allocated to his first documentary ventures.