Oprah Winfrey has landed another crowning achievement.
The longtime talk show host’s Sunday night interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle was a ratings hit, pulling in 17.1 million viewers. That includes an admirable 2.6 rating among the coveted demographic of adults aged 18 to 49, according to CBS.
By comparison, that’s more than double the ratings of this year’s Golden Globes on NBC. The show brought the largest primetime audience for an entertainment special since the 2020 Oscars.
The much-anticipated two-hour interview on CBS brought an avalanche of revelations, not to mention plenty of potential for royal fallout. The exposé with the couple — who currently live in a nine-bedroom $14.6 million Montecito mansion — revealed plenty of palace intrigue, including the startling revelation that Markle contemplated suicide due to the pressure she faced.
“I just didn’t want to be alive anymore,” she told Winfrey.
Viewers who tuned in also found out that someone in the royal ranks shared with Prince Harry their “concerns” about their then-unborn son Archie’s mixed race and how dark his skin might be. Archie was born in May 2019.
“All around this same time — we have in tandem the conversation of, ‘He won’t be given security; he’s not going to be given a title,’ and also concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he’s born,” Markle, 39, told Winfrey. Harry added, “That conversation I am never going to share, but at the time it was awkward. I was a bit shocked.”
Prince Harry, 36, also said that racism was “a large part” of why he felt the need to leave the UK, blaming the media for it “filtering out to the rest of society.”
The couple also revealed that Markle, who is pregnant with their second baby, is expecting a girl, due sometime this summer. They also confessed that they were wed in secret just a few days before their lavish 2018 Windsor Castle nuptials. “We were both really aware that this wasn’t our day,” Markle said. “This was the day that was planned for the world.”
Markle also apparently set the record straight about a long-running rumor that she had brought her sister-in-law, Kate Middleton, to tears before their wedding. “The reverse happened,” Markle explained, saying that Middleton had, in fact, made her cry over an issue regarding flower-girl dresses.