Netflix's Scoop Lays the Groundwork for the Kate Middleton Fiasco

A bizarre sense of déjà vu accompanies Netflix's Scoop, a behind-the-scenes look at Prince Andrew's "car crash" interview about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Director Philip Martin and writer Peter Moffat painstakingly recreate the infamous BBC Newsnight interview, loading up Rufus Sewell with prosthetics to make him look more like the Prince and nudging Gillian Anderson, as journalist Emily Maitlis, toward the right mix of shock and delight that Andrew has made her job so easy.

As reproductions go, the tense sit-down between Andrew and Emily — the result of months of negotiation between talent booker Sam McAlister (Billie Piper) and the Duke of York's private secretary Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes) — remains incredibly faithful to the 2019 broadcast, which led to Andrew's downfall and withdrawal from public duties.

But the feeling of familiarity extends beyond Scoop's precise depiction of the interview and its major players. At its core, the film is about the conflict between the British monarchy's preferred method of crisis management ("Never complain, never explain") and their effort to adapt to the modern world — the same tension on display throughout the recent #WhereIsKate fiasco. Scoop was produced long before conspiracy theories about Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales, began circulating online, but it's difficult to mentally divorce the royal controversies, particularly as the public has become increasingly aware of the palace public relations machine and their clumsy machinations.

Anderson has described Scoop as a "nailbiter" of a thriller, and though viewers know how this story ends, she's right: The air is thick with tension as Sam works to convince Amanda, not to mention her Newsnight colleagues, that an interview would be advantageous for both parties. Even after Andrew agrees to speak with Emily (after consulting with his "mummy," a looming off-screen presence) the latter half of the film maintains an uneasy energy, as the palace could cancel at any moment, sending this carefully constructed house of cards tumbling down. Controversy or not, the royals still have the upper hand in their relationship with the press and the public — it's just a question of how they choose to wield their influence.

The film's most exciting scenes come when the shifting nature of that power dynamic is made explicit. During a pitch meeting in the wake of Epstein's arrest, Sam, the iconoclast of the Newsnight team, is the only person willing to confront Andrew with the reality of his position: "You can't turn it around by staying silent," she says, explaining that the public already sees him as "Randy Andy," and his ties to Epstein and the Virginia Giuffre allegations only reinforce that idea. "That's the story, and it doesn't change unless you change it, unless you tell us a different story."

Sam's honesty is enough to convince Andrew and Amanda, who have been unsuccessfully battling these allegations for a decade, that they must move away from the palace's detached PR approach and try something new. ("I'm afraid those days are over," Sam says of the Queen's media mantra.) But what the Prince's camp fails to grasp is that a new strategy requires a different outlook.

Andrew walks into the interview with the unearned confidence of a powerful man who has never been questioned, certainly not publicly. He's so insulated from the real world that he not only fails to see why his responses are insufficient and obtuse — the "Pizza Express" alibi, his apparent inability to sweat at the time of Giuffre's alleged assault — but thinks he's done a splendid job of telling his side of the story. His failure to read the room continues after the interview concludes: "You know, I thought that all went very well," he says as he leads Emily, now visibly uncomfortable, on a tour of Buckingham Palace, his aides smiling placidly as they walk along.

Of course, palace officials aren't smiling for long. When the interview airs two days later, it's an unmitigated disaster, and Andrew, who's so sure he nailed it that he takes a bath rather than tune in, is quite literally caught with his pants down. (Sewell says he wore a prosthetic bottom for the scene.) The Prince becomes a global laughingstock, skewered by the public, the press, and members of Parliament for his lack of remorse for maintaining a relationship with Epstein and indifference toward his victims. In both the film and real life, Andrew stepped back from royal duties just days after the interview aired; a few years later, after a federal judge denied his request to dismiss Giuffre's abuse lawsuit, he was stripped of his royal titles. (They settled out of court in February 2022, with Andrew agreeing to pay an undisclosed sum to Giuffre.)

In this particular battle between tradition and modernity, the latter won out — and proved "nuclear explosion level bad." With Andrew's recent downfall in mind, it's no wonder that Kensington Palace, which runs press for the Prince and Princess of Wales (as opposed to Buckingham Palace, which handles PR for the King and Queen), reverted back to the old way of doing things as the "Kate Middleton is missing" discourse spread, refusing to issue further clarification about Kate's "planned abdominal surgery" in January 2024 or comment on her whereabouts.

But, as Sam warns Andrew in the film, in the digital age, silence only creates an information vacuum, and social media users quickly filled it with conspiracy theories about the royals soft-launching their divorce, Kate employing a body double, and her being in a coma. Kensington Palace's ham-fisted attempt to de-escalate the situation by releasing a Mother's Day photo of Kate with her children only added fuel to the fire when the image was revealed to be digitally altered — at which point the palace threw Kate under the bus with a tweet in which she claims she "occasionally experiment[s] with photo editing."

By the time Kate announced she has cancer and is undergoing "preventative chemotherapy treatment" on March 22, the damage had been done. The Princess' PR and communications team could've stepped in at any point in the weeks preceding her announcement — as Buckingham Palace did with King Charles' cancer diagnosis in early February — but instead, they dug in their heels, never complaining, never explaining until the frenzy spiraled so far out of control that certain segments of the internet still believe the March 22 video is AI-generated, despite the lack of evidence supporting this theory and the royal family's request for privacy.

There's no way to know for sure whether Prince Andrew's disastrous Newsnight interview played a role in Kensington Palace's refusal to address the rumors and online speculation about Kate. But considering how easily the matter could've been put to rest with an unedited photo or proof-of-life update at any point during the weeks-long debacle, something clearly prevented them from engaging directly with the public.

Perhaps the Waleses' communications team saw the events depicted in Scoop as a cautionary tale — though if that's the case, they took the wrong message from it. The future of the British monarchy depends not on the royals' ability to keep their head down and weather the storm, but on their willingness to adapt to the changing times. Doing so requires the royals and their handlers at the palace, whom the film portrays as equally out of touch, to come to terms with the fact that their lives are wholly disconnected from the lived reality of their subjects. That's a tall order for a group that derives its legitimacy from the divine right of kings, but now that the world has seen how they work up close and can offer feedback in real time, eating a bit of humble pie is more essential than ever.

Scoop is streaming on Netflix. Join the discussion about the film in our forums.

Claire Spellberg Lustig is the Senior Editor at Primetimer and a scholar of The View. Follow her on Twitter at @c_spellberg.