KARA KENNEDY: Harry and Meghan’s twenty excruciating seconds on Family Guy are proof of their descent into the cultural trash can – and America’s irritation at their lazy self-entitlement

It’s happened faster than many of us perhaps thought.

At the start of the year, Harry and Meghan were on everyone’s lips.

Thanks to the double-barrel onslaught of their Netflix documentary whine-a-thon and Harry’s misery memoir Spare, people simply couldn’t get enough.

Love them or loathe them, they were the conversation.

Yet in less than ten months, it seems their inevitable implosion in relevance, their downward spiral towards the cultural trash can, is all but complete.

And how sad.

A pair whose refreshing presence once said so much, who – as the 21st Century royal couple – offered a bright, modern future of influence (in the truest sense), reduced to the butt of a throwaway gag on a comedy cartoon series way past its prime.

Gone are the days of full-episode South Park takedowns. On Sunday, Family Guy – limping on in its 22nd series – featured a twenty-second satire of the pair.

Gone are the days of full-episode South Park takedowns. On Sunday, Family Guy – limping on in its 22nd series – featured a twenty-second satire of Harry and Meghan.

At the start of the year, Harry and Meghan were on everyone’s lips. Thanks to the double-barrel onslaught of their Netflix documentary whine-a-thon and Harry’s misery memoir Spare, people couldn’t get enough. Yet in less than ten months, it seems their inevitable implosion in relevance, their downward spiral towards the cultural trash can, is all but complete.

We see a cartoonified Duke and Duchess sipping iced tea poolside at their Montecito mansion. A butler comes over with a stack of envelopes and says to Harry: ‘Sir, your millions from Netflix for… no one knows what.’

‘Put it with the rest of them,’ Harry says, waving the butler away.

Meghan, lounging in her bikini, gets an alert on her iPhone: ‘Baaabe, time to do our daily $250,000 sponsored Instagram post… for Del Taco.’

‘I shouldn’t have left the made-up nonsense,’ Harry drones.

No, he shouldn’t. Because look where it’s got him.

The worst thing about the scene is that it’s excruciatingly unfunny.

The unfairly gained Montecito millions, the moody prince, his fame-obsessed actress-wife. It’s all pretty obvious stuff – and tells you a lot about the quality of the writer’s room on a show that’s been running since 1999.

No subtlety, no comic timing, just one smack-you-in-the-face obvious ‘punchline’: America thinks you, Harry and Meghan, are grifters!

Back in June, when Meghan’s Spotify show Archetypes was axed after one underwhelming series, American sports supremo and Spotify’s own ‘head of podcast innovation and monetization’ Bill Simmons explosively lambasted the pair as ‘f***ing grifters’.

It was rude, perhaps uncalled for, and no doubt deliberately provocative.

It could also have been dismissed as the outburst of one angry old man.

This latest Family Guy clip changes things. It tells us that Americans everywhere now agree with Simmons. They’ve lost the culture.

But it didn’t have to be this way.

While Britain washed its hands of the boresome pair, excitement in America was palpable at the prospect of gaining a slice of Royalty stateside.

Hollywood was practically polishing the Walk of Fame stars ahead of time.

The worst thing about the scene is that it’s excruciatingly unfunny. No subtlety, no comic timing, just one smack-you-in-the-face obvious ‘punchline’: America thinks you, Harry and Meghan, are grifters! (Pictured: South Park satires the Sussexes in February).

Back in June, when Meghan’s Spotify show Archetypes was axed after one underwhelming series, American sports supremo and Spotify’s own ‘head of podcast innovation and monetization’ Bill Simmons explosively lambasted the pair as ‘f***ing grifters’. It was rude, perhaps uncalled for, and no doubt deliberately provocative. This latest Family Guy clip tells us that Americans everywhere now agree with Simmons.

But guess what: In the Land of the Free, even this fame-prepared-on-a-silver-platter level of success doesn’t actually come free.

This is a nation of hard workers. And when it became clear that Harry and Meghan wanted it all – to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars – without doing, well, very much at all, Americans woke up from the runaway-Royal daze.

How could they not? Even the most patient will admit that the moaning, the woe-is-me-ing, the Mandela cosplaying all became way too much.

There was Oprah, The Cut, Netflix, Spare, tell-all after tell-all interview amid bouclé couches and $1,800 Hermes blankets, hashing and rehashing the same tall tale of grievance.

Hollywood sure loves a sob story… until it doesn’t.

Whatever you think of them, America’s true cast of A-Listers – the Gwyneths, the J-Los, the Beyoncés – work bloody hard to maintain their influence and wealth, often over decades-long careers.

A lot of graft goes into the constant flurry of exciting brand evolutions, new album announcements, vaginal jade-eggs releases.

Paltrow co-owns California’s biggest cannabis company and she never even talks about it.

So what certainly doesn’t fly is calling up a few famous gal pals to whinge with lazy self-entitlement on hour-long podcasts about your unmatched struggles, globetrotting like a gap-year teen on pointless preening ‘tours’ (see Harry in Japan), spewing word-guff at meaningless ceremonies (see Meghan’s Women of Vision Award), while still expecting the butler to deliver the check on the golden tray.

Of course, there has been much chatter of a coming Sussex reinvention.

In April, Meghan signed on with Hollywood Rottweiler Ari Emanuel’s talent agency WME. And we’ve heard countless rumors about a revival of ‘The Tig’, a much-touted return to Instagram, even a separation of Brands Sussex (Meghan bolstering her celebrity, Harry prioritizing philanthropy and other noble causes).

But we’re still waiting.

This is a nation of hard workers. And when it became clear that Harry and Meghan wanted it all – to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars – without doing, well, very much at all, Americans woke up from the runaway-Royal daze. (Pictured: At the Invictus Games, held in Germany in September).

What certainly doesn’t fly is calling up a few famous gal pals to whinge with lazy self-entitlement on hour-long podcasts about your unmatched struggles, globetrotting like a gap-year teen on pointless preening ‘tours’ (see Harry in Japan), spewing word-guff at meaningless ceremonies (see Meghan’s Women of Vision Award), while still expecting the butler to deliver the check on the golden tray. (Pictured: On World Mental Health Day earlier this month).

Coverage of the couple’s recent public appearances has been notably scant.

September’s Invictus Games came and went with one brief frenzy over Meghan’s J Crew sweater. A World Mental Health Day event in New York earlier this month probably happened – but who knows or cares?

Harry and Meghan fled Britain for America to escape their gilded life of privilege and unearned influence.

Perhaps the sunny hills of Montecito will now become an even worse palace-prison, one where their assets and friends surely dwindle, their familial ties become ever-more strained, and the chance of reconciliation sinks further away.

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