We really wish Prince Harry had made some of his awful podcast ideas happen

It’s been a couple of years now since the person we still lazily think of as “Prince Harry” and his spouse, Meghan Markle, announced they were breaking up with Spotify. The split made sense: Despite a reportedly massive deal, the duo had only produced one podcast in their two-plus years with the audio streaming service, the Markle-fronted Archetypes. Which is a shame, because Harry apparently had at least a couple of really bad podcast ideas kicking around in his head that we would have loved to hear him try to execute, including a show he tried to develop where he would talk to famous men with awful reputations and, essentially, ask them, “Why are you such a sociopath, huh?”

This is per a fairly acidic takedown of the couple that ran in Vanity Fair this week, which, if we’re being honest, mostly lands in the “too nasty to enjoy” column for our tastes. (There is a lot of childhood psychoanalyzing going on for both members of the couple, and whole paragraphs given over to anonymous residents of their high-class California neighborhood whining about how they can’t get into the nice restaurants anymore because of the attention the pair have brought to the town.) Still, the anonymous-but-miserable reports from people who worked directly under the couple, specifically on the few public media projects they’ve executed since they decided to be Public Media Types instead of Public Crown Models, have some enjoyable moments. With one former staffer asserting that, “They had this idea to do a podcast because they knew celebrities did them,” it becomes clear that neither couple member actually had any strong ideas of what to do with the audio format. Which is how you get the “sociopaths” show, which supposedly grew out of Harry noticing that, despite suffering some of the world’s most famous childhood trauma, he didn’t grow up to be a sociopath, so why did guys like Vladimir Putin? We really, genuinely wish this show had gone forward, not because it would have necessarily had a lot to say about the human condition or the corrupting influence of power, but because it would have been an incredibly awkward series of denials, deflections, and rejections, and we’re just sick enough to want to hear that.

Hilariously, the projects pitched to Harry appear to have run the gamut, too: After Spotify noticed that it wasn’t getting any damn podcasts out of its celebrity podcasters, it politely brought the pair in to talk. When Harry asked for a cup of cocoa for the meeting, some desperate spit-baller suggested “What if he reviewed a hot chocolate every week while chatting with a different friend?” and, buddy, we’ve been in pitch meetings like that too, but c’mon. (“He and his team considered and rejected” the idea; R.I.P. Prince Of Cocoa.) The actual issue with all these shows, in the estimation of the VF piece, seems to boil down to the fundamental paradox of Harry and Meghan: That they still possess an extremely Royal Family sense of “This has got to be capital I Important,” mixed with an understandably gun-shy bulwark of public reserve, even though a) they do not appear to have many Important things to say, and b) those impulses runs totally counter to them doing the one thing people actually want from them, which is talking like normal people about how fucking weird being part of the British royal family is/was.  Mostly, it just makes us want to hear The Ringer‘s Bill Simmons finally unload on the people he refers to as “The Fucking Grifters” some day; right after the Spotify deal broke up, Simmons suggested he might eventually “Get drunk one night and tell the story of the Zoom I had with Harry to try and help him with a podcast idea,” and we now feel even more desperate to hear that story than we already were.