“LIKE many girls her age, our heroine Pearl is on a journey of self-discovery as she tries to overcome life’s daily challenges,” said Meghan Markle of her planned cartoon series for Netflix.
But Pearl’s proposed voyage has hit the buffers before it’s even started.
Following a steep drop in subscriptions by those choosing to heat or eat during a cost-of-living crisis, the streaming giant has announced it is cancelling the show.
No explanation was given, but money talks and perhaps someone high up the Netflix food chain has remembered the sage words of best-selling author John Ringo who, in 2018, coined the phrase “get woke, go broke”.
Which, in so many words, means that when a business tries to avoid backlash from noisy celebrities/activists by adopting their virtue-signalling group-think it suffers the financial consequences because it has alienated the ordinary people who actually buy its product.
And there are no greater group-think virtue-signallers than the Sussexes.
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The get woke, go broke mantra is particularly noticeable in the entertainment industry when viewers want to be, er, entertained rather than watch something that preaches a PC message at the expense of a good story and interesting characters.
The all-female versions of Ghostbusters and Ocean’s 11 were commercial flops because, presumably, cinemagoers didn’t feel the originals needed fixing.
Unlike terrestrial TV ratings that are still based on the viewing habits of around 5,000 sample households, the streaming giants have a far better idea of who, where, when and how many are clicking on each show, and for how long.
The current top five in the UK are Ozark, Anatomy Of A Scandal, Selling Sunset, Heartstopper and Bridgerton.
Perhaps Pearl — an animated 12-year-old “who finds inspiration in influential women from history” and is reportedly based on Meghan as a young girl herself — might have been a ratings winner.
But clearly there were concerns that she might have been languishing on the statistical equivalent of the seabed, alongside other televisual krill produced by people who think the public share their woke world view.
They don’t. And any business that alienates the masses that watch or buy their product to pander to the virtue-signalling few will suffer the financial consequences.
Just ask Gillette owners Procter & Gamble.
Public fed up of being lectured by hypocrites
Instead of just focusing on flogging razors, it saw around £6billion wiped off the brand’s value after an ill-advised advertising campaign that supposedly tackled “toxic masculinity” by featuring oafish men harassing women and “mansplaining” with the slogan, “Is this the best a man can get?”
Critics said it demonised its core male customers by depicting them as closet rapists.
And guess who has now been signed up to advise P&G on inclusivity and gender equality etc? Step forward the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
Or how about the vegan cafe in Melbourne, Australia, that decided to charge men 18 per cent more to highlight the gender pay gap and “confront and dismantle patriarchy”. It closed within two years.
No one is suggesting that individuals and companies shouldn’t strive to make the world a better, fairer place. They absolutely should and plenty are doing excellent “social responsibility” work.
But when the public sense they are being lectured by those who don’t practise (or even believe) what they preach but are simply doing it to look good, then they will vote with their wallets and walk away.
A pearl starts with a grain of sand. And a hit TV show starts with a grain of understanding for what your audience wants.
