I am not a particulary interested follower of the British Royal Family

[conuly]

Not that you have to be - you have to purposely live under a rock to avoid their brand of celebrity gossip! - and so I did not watch the interview. I figured that the highlights would be all over everywhere within minutes, and that the interview would mostly only confirm what's long since been obvious to anybody with eyes and even the tiniest media consumption, namely, that the British Royal Family is highly dysfunctional and toxic and that if you grow up within it you might think it's normal.

Which is pretty much what we saw, but with an added dose of "Wow, Meghan's estranged father and half-sister are really something else! I can see why she doesn't talk to those people", which I was not expecting.

Anyway, other people's chatter about this sort of "news" is always more interesting than the news itself, and tells you a lot more about the commenters than about the supposed principals.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

Well said.

[wpadmirer]

I haven't seen any of the clips, but I've seen that Piers got chased off tv over his comments about it. So clearly it doesn't please the white supremacist world. (grin)

[cellio]

I like that Google News shows me that stuff in the entertainment section, not the "actual news that matters and stuff" sections. (I haven't read any of it either; what I get from headlines and the zeitgeist is enough.)

[the_siobhan]

Somebody in my family posted a link to some youtube video "debunking the lies" about the interview and I'm like... Why? Do you care?

[conuly]

Were any of these "debunked lies" of any interest at all? Probably not....

[the_siobhan]

To be honest I didn't watch it.

[silveradept]

Yes, the metadata is fascinating here, and I feel like I've learned the important parts of the interview just by reading headlines and Twitter posts. (And by having tried to read and understand more about the topic under discussion over the last few years.)

[thewayne]

While I avoid celebrity gossip as much as it's possible - i.e., I don't seek it out - you always get splashed by it. They are people, and every bit as screwed up as everyone else, if not more so.

I did make an exception for reading about Lady Gaga's dognapping. I couldn't believe her dog walker would be shot to steal her dogs, and while I heard he was improving, I haven't heard if he's fully out of danger. I'm glad the dogs were recovered, but dogs are replaceable and human life is not.

[conuly]

What got me about that is that all the headlines were about the damn dogs (which appear to have been stolen because they're a popular breed rather than because they were hers?) rather than the dogwalker. Uh....

[shadowkat]

I didn't watch either - my mother apparently did. She told me about it. Also I got it via late night talk show hosts videos on Face Book. Stephen Colbert's was specifically brutal. He made a point that made me laugh outright - "How could Meghan not know that the Royal Family was problematic and dysfunctional?"

[conuly]

Maybe her barometer for fucked up is different from most people's. I mean, her own (estranged, white) father is calling her a liar because he personally doesn't think people are racist in England, and threatening to give nasty interviews monthly to blackmail her into talking to him. When that's your idea of normal family life....!

[shadowkat]

True. I admittedly didn't know about the father and half-sister bit. That may have been what drew her and Harry together - mutual dysfunction, and mutual issues with difficult fathers? (Apparently that bit wasn't in the 20 minute interview...but in the longer version on CBS All Access - or my mother and the late-night talk show hosts missed it?)