Harry & Meghan, the new documentary from Netflix that chronicles the love story, marriage, and eventual departure from the royal family of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in their own words, has a lot of grand ambitions. It wants viewers to see Harry and Meghan as two normal people who just happened to fall in love — a “modern fairy tale,” says Meghan. It wants to convince us that being part of the British royal family is a terrible burden rather than an immense and unjust privilege. It wants to drive home a message of social justice about representation and diversity in the twenty-first century. And it wants to indict the vicious and profit-oriented media that intrudes on celebrities’ privacy. Unfortunately, it’s only really successful at the last one.

The nearly six-hour-long limited series becomes extremely tedious and boring by its second half, as it becomes clear that the two will make no direct criticisms of anyone or anything other than the British media. As far as they are concerned, the world is running pretty smoothly, except for the vulturous paparazzi who are always trying to get in their business, preventing them from doing the good philanthropic work on behalf of the British monarchy that they “could have spent the rest of their lives doing.”