And I was just saying the other day that we’d yet to see a trailer for Polo, the docuseries about the sport produced by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. 

 

Polo starts streaming on Netflix on December 10 and here it is, a preview of what to expect from the show: 

 

As I’ve been saying ever since they announced production on the project, Polo isn’t going to work if it’s a NatGeo style doc – you need tension, personalities, characters who clash with one another, because that’s real actual life. If the polo pitch is the workplace, then you have to expect that sometimes people who work with each other, or against each other, are in conflict. This is what makes Drive To Survive so compelling: the drivers and their teams aren’t just competing with each other on the track, they’re also getting into each other’s heads off the track; they’re playful but also petty, they’re performing at the highest level, under enormous pressure, and sometimes their emotions get the better of them. In other words, they are human. And that’s why the show works so well. 

 

The Polo trailer is hinting at some of that. Obviously these people are super intense about the sport, and they’re already setting up a few rivalries, including a rivalry between a father and son. This is promising, hopefully they can lean some more into that. I don’t want the Hallmark movie version of a father and son playing against each other. Like they don’t have to go full Succession with Logan and Kendall Roy but, you know, a hint of it would be good. 

 

There’s also some father-son drama between Timmy Dutta and his dad, Tim. Timmy is the pretty boy here, and perhaps they’re setting him up to be the Timothée Chalamet of polo, LOL. The trailer suggests that his dad is riding his ass too hard and his whole sh-t is trying to live up to his dad’s expectations while carving out his own identity. Shades of Succession, again. There’s potential here but the biggest challenge will be convincing the audience that there’s actually something on the line here. 

In Drive To Survive, people could lose their jobs. They’re fighting for driver spots, for some teams, their very existence is on the line. If we’re using F1 as a comparison, notice how little airtime Lance Stroll gets on the show? One of the reasons for this, in my opinion, is that it’s low stakes. How high could they be when his father owns the team? This is my worry about Timmy Dutta’s storyline on Polo. It might be entertaining for a few minutes watching him clash with his dad, but ultimately his dad owns the team. And if his dad is actually Logan Roy IRL, I’m not sure he’d allow himself to be portrayed that way on a docu-reality series. Succession was about a fictional family of despicable people being cruel to each other, which is what we think might be happening inside the Murdoch empire they’d never ever really let us see it on camera. 

 

And that was part of the appeal of Succession, because it would not have worked if it was just a story about a disgustingly rich family. Succession was satire, a classic punching up deep dive into the corrosive impact of wealth and privilege and how the power plays among the 1% have devastating consequences for society at large. I’m not saying the polo community is only hideous people but I’m talking about an audience’s appetite for watching five or six hours of super rich people playing the most exclusive sport on the planet without any real stakes. 

Still, as a first look, Polo is encouraging. An obscenely wealthy pretty boy raised in the era of social media is always good for gossip. And of course he contributes to the overall visuals of the show – everyone here is attractive and glossy, some of them speak with European accents, they wear tight shirts and pants. That’ll get us through the door, and the goal will be to keep us there with the story. 

 

And then there’s the Harry factor. You will note that he does not appear in the trailer and there may be very little of him on the show. I’m not sure there was ever an expectation that he would be front and center since he’s not a professional polo player but it’ll be interesting whether or not he shows up at all. I saw something, I think it was at the Daily Mail, where of course they were trying to put out the most hatery takes on the trailer and some people were clocking the “executive producer” credit for Harry and Meghan and being like, if they don’t appear in the show what do they actually do as producers which… is such a f-cking dumbass thing to say and a dead giveaway that these clowns don’t know about the business because producing does not necessarily involve being in front of camera. Here’s an example: Margot Robbie produced Saltburn; Margot Robbie is not IN Saltburn. 

Will you be watching Polo? Let us know what you think at The Squawk. (App link here)