Good summary.
https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/royals/prince-harrys-polo-doco-about-worlds-stupidest-sport-roasted/news-story/8f6de3f81bcb8b5ad9ffdb1d3dabb79b
The cast features an interchangeable roster of generically good looking young polo players with nary one full personality to share between them and a series of women of an indeterminate age whose faces are not their original ones. They are allowed to sit on the sidelines and clap.
Overall, the cast is, generally speaking, an unappealing, unlikeable bunch of self-absorbed men and there is a certain sad grasping for plot lines. One episode’s narrative arc involves a resentful player being forced to attend his wife’s baby shower – and the airconditioning breaks down. In another episode, the player attacks an Esky with a polo mallet after losing a game and then cries on his own.
The biggest problem with Polo: It’s boring. It’s not glamorous or sexy or delicious trash to be savoured in all its Botox-ed glory TV.
From the parts I have seen, the question of animal cruelty is dodged – interesting given that Meghan remains the patron of a British dog rescue home.
And women? You know, that 50 per cent of the world’s population? (And 49 per cent of Netflix’s subscribers?) They are reduced to such retrograde stereotypes, I want to do a spot of screaming. All women do in Polo is sit on the sidelines and shop and drink and cook and entertain. One gets to ride a horse, once.
None of the players followed by the Netflix cameras are female. (47 out of the 48 players in the tournament the show is about are male).
Sometimes, women are put on camera to express the feelings that their menfolk patently cannot because they are off winning or talking about winning or practising winning or dreaming about winning hostile takeovers or some such.
At one stage, a young player discusses his mother’s idea for a new team strategy at a cocktail party. “What the fk does she know?” another man says, and they all guffaw. Women! Them and their funny ‘ideas’.
I wonder what their neighbour and Meghan’s friend Gloria Steinem might think?
(Of how much Harry was a part of things behind the camera, showrunner Miloš Balać has told Variety that the duke was “involved … in a pretty incredible way”, so are we to assume he saw no issue with any of this?)
One of the Sussexes’ Archewell Foundation’s pillars is “uplifting women and girls” and yet they have put out a show where women are supporting characters who are generally being ignored or overlooked by their husbands and boyfriends. You know, when they are not supportively clapping from the stands.
She makes good points in how the women are presented in the show and how that fits with Meghans brand of feminism.