There was a time when a pop culture moment could simply be a pop culture moment. A casting announcement might prompt excitement, skepticism or just a shrug. A bad interview could simply be embarrassing without becoming a referendum on someone’s politics. A movie could flop without immediately being recruited into a wider argument about “woke” culture or the collapse of Western civilization.

Today, that feels increasingly rare.

Now, almost everything we watch, hear or follow seems to be quickly attached to an argument. A trailer drops and, within hours, there’s “fury” online, “backlash” to the “fury,” headlines about the “backlash” and then deep dives explaining what the whole thing apparently reveals about society.

Somewhere along the way, entertainment stopped being something we could simply like, dislike or have fun talking about and became something we were expected to take a position on — and I’m so bored of it.

There’s a reason it keeps happening: outrage travels. It creates urgency where there often isn’t any, cuts through a sea of feeds and headlines and turns something you might have scrolled past into something compelling to click on. In a media business fighting for fragmented attention, that matters.

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Before my royal years, I was an editor at Us Weekly during its heyday. Think 15 million readers, extraordinary access to Hollywood, and a celebrity culture where Brangelina, Jennifer Lopez, and Paris Hilton could feel less like distant stars and more like people letting us into their lives.

Like many legacy media brands, Us was very late to the digital game. By the time the importance of online publishing became impossible to ignore in the early 2010’s, print was already in its slow decline, and titles like ours were desperately trying to catch up online. That changed the way small stories were sold. A fun anecdote or trivial revelation that might once have lived inside the magazine in a feature or photo caption suddenly needed enough bite to survive as a headline of its own. Suddenly everyone was SLAMMED, HITTING OUT or CLAPPING BACK — even when the details underneath were considerably more mundane.

And it worked. Those words manufactured conflict, turned minor developments into standalone stories and, crucially, got people to click, share and leave comments.

But what began as a way of dressing up relatively minor news items or photos with louder headlines — the original clickbait — became something much larger. As publishers fought to keep readers returning, that framing stopped being just a way to get you to read the story and started becoming part of the story itself.

Social media has made the cycle even easier to sustain. A few angry comments on Twitter (sorry, never calling it by its other name) or Instagram can be enough to manufacture the appearance of a major backlash, which becomes a headline, which prompts more reaction, which produces more headlines. You could see it happen with the latest Avengers: Doomsday trailer, where a handful of negative comments in a sea of positive and excited reactions were enough to fuel “fans divided” and “backlash from fans” headlines.

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The royals have always occupied a space adjacent to entertainment. The titles and palaces make the setting different, but the fascination has been long been rooted in many of the same things: personalities, relationships, style, status and family drama. And I’ve watched that coverage change in many of the same ways.

It now takes remarkably little for a newspaper or outlet to declare PUBLIC FURY over whatever Harry or Meghan are doing. Just a casual Google search over the past month turned up story after story built around just two or three online comments. Not experts. Not people with any knowledge of or involvement in the story of those involved. Just a few irritated strangers with Wi-Fi, suddenly enough to constitute major backlash.

The definition of expertise has loosened too. Once, being billed as a “royal expert” generally meant years of boots-on-the-ground reporting, understanding the institution from the inside, or some form of specialist knowledge (whether self-taught or academic). Now an armchair pundit or fan with a YouTube channel can be fast-tracked into the role by a newspaper looking for a quote that fits their angle. In plenty of cases, their claim to expertise rests mostly on having a strong opinion and a willingness to say what the outlet wants to hear.

That may sound like a niche royal media problem, but it’s really the same attention economy at work: find conflict, find certainty, find someone willing to say the thing loudly enough, then package it as authority.

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But if everything becomes a feud, a humiliation, a backlash or a culture-war flashpoint, eventually none of those words mean very much. The emotional temperature stays permanently at a ten, and everything gets flattened into the same handful of plots.

The irony is that a system built to keep us clicking has made the conversation around entertainment increasingly repetitive — and somewhere along the way, we’ve started talking that way too.

Taste increasingly feels like a declaration. Enjoying something or someone can become an endorsement of everything and everyone associated with them. Disliking either can become a statement about your politics, values or identity. People don’t merely think a Taylor Swift song is good or bad anymore; for some, its success or failure has to prove something.

If a movie struggles at the box office, one faction declares that audiences have rejected progressive Hollywood. If it succeeds, another insists the opposite has been proven. The movie itself becomes almost beside the point (poor Rachel Zegler knows this all too well). Media outlets, commentators and audiences alike start treating it as another data point in an argument they were already having.

And that is a strange way to experience culture.

Part of the pleasure of entertainment is that it can be frivolous, excessive, trashy, brilliant, embarrassing, moving, camp or completely disposable. Not everything needs to become a moral emergency or carry the weight we now insist on giving it.

The people making and selling entertainment have adapted too. One prominent publicist I spoke to recently described a PR campaign in which the detail most likely to divide audiences was deliberately pushed to the front of the rollout. The calculation was simple: some would hate it, others would rush to defend it, and the resulting coverage would keep their release in circulation. Hollywood studios also know which elements of a marketing push are likely to ignite, while stars increasingly know how to give the machine just enough to run with.

And perhaps that’s the dullest part of all. When everyone knows the sequence in advance — the outrage, the counter-outrage, the think piece, the reaction video, the inevitable analysis of what it all supposedly means — controversy feels predictable.

What entertainment needs most right now is permission to be trivial again. Not meaningless. Not beyond criticism. Just free from the expectation that absolutely every film, interview, casting choice or celebrity misstep must amount to a verdict on our times.

That doesn’t mean ignoring what genuinely deserves scrutiny. Entertainment has always reflected the world around it, and sometimes something seemingly small really does expose something larger. But if everything is treated as consequential, eventually very little feels consequential at all.

I miss the messier, more organic version: the one where we could argue about whether an album deserved the hype, obsess over some absurd celebrity stunt, laugh at something gloriously ill-advised and then move on.

The stakes were lower, but somehow the whole thing felt more alive. More spontaneous.

The outrage economy that drives so much of our media promises constant excitement. But mostly, it has given us constant escalation. And if everything has to become a battle, eventually being entertained starts to feel like damn hard work.

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Harry and Meghan’s return to Britain may become one of the most significant chapters in their lives. There are still major questions ahead: what role Harry might take on in public life, whether relationships within the Royal Family can soften, and what this next phase will actually look like. But before any of those can be answered, the meaning of their return appears to have already been decided.

Headlines and commentary have been strikingly familiar: the King was blindsided; they failed in America; they’re broke; how dare they! Six years may have passed, but the characters in this story remain frozen in the roles they were assigned long before the Sussexes even arrived in California.

But Harry and Meghan themselves are not the same people who left. They are older, raising two children, building businesses and careers independent of royal life, and relate to Britain differently than they once did. While carrying out research for a book in 2023, I was told that California was not intended to be their only base. It was the right home for that chapter of their lives, but their children’s education and evolving priorities would shape what came next — including where they chose to live, and for how long. The reality was always more complicated than the simple idea that leaving meant rejecting Britain, and returning meant admitting defeat.

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I know something about how consuming the media cycle can become because, for a long time, I was inside it too. I spent thirteen years covering the royals, but the Sussexes quickly changed the nature of that work. From their wedding onward, the couple became a focal point for debates that often had little to do with what was actually happening.

That made things complicated for me fast. I had extraordinary access to a subject many journalists were competing to cover in an intensely competitive space. And my approach to the beat also brought its own challenges. I treated the Royal Family as I would any other powerful public body: with scrutiny, context, and a willingness to question the way it was being covered. That meant reporting details others didn’t have, presenting missing perspectives, challenging inaccurate headlines and — in the case of the first biracial duchess — questioning racially charged commentary and articles.

Over time, the focus shifted from what I reported to what people believed my reporting represented: that I was anti-monarchy, acting on behalf of the Sussexes, or part of a wider agenda. My professional credentials and private life were picked apart, leading to years of harassment from many of the same outlets and commentators covering them. At the time, some of Harry and Meghan’s aides — and, on occasion, the couple themselves — were among the few people I spoke to who understood that experience.

It was a bizarre place for a journalist to be, in an environment where the facts seemed secondary to the meaning others forced onto them. At a certain point, defending myself and doing my job stopped feeling like completely separate things.

The problem with a story that has become a symbol is that the people involved are eventually inseparable from what they are perceived to represent. By the time they left royal life, the Sussexes had become useful shorthand for much larger arguments about race, class, feminism, diversity, tradition, national identity and more. Parts of the press and the online ecosystem surrounding them had influenced the narrative from the beginning; over time, the line between reporting on the story and shaping it through commentary became increasingly blurred. What the couple actually did came to matter less than the ideas people attached to them.

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No matter what happens, Meghan can still be made to represent identity politics, progressive America, victimhood or “wokeness,” depending on who is behind the opinion piece. Harry can still be cast as the prince who abandoned duty, family, and country — often through the lens of his relationship with her. They can be brave truth-tellers or irredeemable narcissists; victims of an institution or architects of their own downfall. The sides were largely chosen years ago, and every new development is simply written into the story people already believe.

If I had one piece of advice for the couple as they begin this new chapter in England, it would be to resist the urge to respond to every inaccuracy this time around. When a narrative has already been established across the media ecosystem, new information is rarely enough to change it. You cannot fact-check your way out of a culture war.

And that challenge will be even greater because the British media landscape they are returning to is not quite the one they left in 2020. Political and cultural divisions have become more entrenched, while a diminished newspaper industry has become increasingly reliant on opinion, personality and provocation in a world where basic news is available everywhere for free. Commentary no longer reacts to the news cycle; it creates one.

For two people who have already become extraordinarily useful (and lucrative) as culture-war symbols, the incentives to keep the old arguments and grievances alive are arguably greater than ever. The smallest development in Harry and Meghan’s world still eclipses coverage of other senior royals and generates days of outrage, analysis, and reaction. The machine remains well fed.

After the release of my book Endgame at the end of 2023, it felt like the right moment to step back from the beat. I had told the story I wanted to tell and didn’t want to spend years revisiting the same debates. My own move from London to California gave me the space to pursue things I’d always wanted to do, including writing my first novel and developing scripted television. Creating that distance wasn’t conceding the argument; it was deciding I no longer needed to spend my energy fighting it.

Nor did moving abroad mean turning my back on Britain. America was never meant to replace my home — but it gave me a different perspective and the freedom to explore a different part of my life. It’s one reason I’m wary of seeing Harry’s return as proof that leaving was somehow a mistake.

Leaving somewhere and returning to it later are not contradictory acts. Sometimes distance is what reshapes the relationship. The place you come from can mean something different in your forties or fifties than it did in your twenties or thirties, after years away and as priorities shift.

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Fixed narratives don’t resist change because they’re accurate. They resist it because they’re useful — to newspaper editors, commentators, and a cottage industry that has built years of content around a particular caricature of who Harry and Meghan are.

The old scripts are already written. They leave little room for the possibility that people grow, relationships soften, and the place you once needed distance from can become somewhere you want in your life again.

What comes next will be fascinating in its own right. But just as revealing will be the distance between the lives Harry and Meghan are actually living and the version of them that the culture around them remains invested in preserving — and whether, this time, the story being told about them will finally be allowed to catch up.

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