LONDON — The explosive interview given by Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, gripped millions of viewers in the United States and the United Kingdom alike this month.
Touching on mental health, race, finances and the couple’s public family fallout, the blockbuster program has created an ongoing media frenzy of intrigue over what goes on behind palace walls.
But the reactions to the interview have revealed another divide: distinct cultural sensibilities on both sides of the Atlantic.
While the self-exiled royals received mostly favorable press coverage and social media commentary in America, in Britain, the couple’s confessions were met with more than a dollop of disapproval.
Some U.K. tabloids branded the pair “selfish,” “nauseating” and said the interview was harmful to the queen, as they derided the Duke and Duchess of Sussex for going against the traditional British “stiff upper lip” stance to expose personal family matters to the American media mogul Oprah Winfrey.
In doing so, the argument goes, they reduced the more than 1,000-year-old institution of the monarchy to celebrity talk show fodder.
“This interview has removed all remaining sympathy I had for the couple,” Mark Graham, 52, an educational trainer from Cambridgeshire in eastern England told NBC News.
“I thought it was very staged and calculated. Most definitely one-sided and targeted.”
Far from damaging the monarchy, Graham said, the “sorry affair” had only reinforced the royal family’s standing and popularity in…
