Meghan Markle is having a rough week.
The actress turned royal turned tony Montecito resident debuted her new lifestyle show, With Love, Meghan, on Netflix last Tuesday. By Wednesday afternoon, every corner of the internet had excoriated her for the effort.
And when it comes to effort, Meghan puts forth a lot.
Not unlike Anne Hathaway or Sally Field circa the 1985 Oscars shouting, “You like me! You really, really like me!” Meghan is a classic try-hard. I don’t say this disparagingly; as someone who regularly brings home-baked treats to professional settings, I respect her domestic hustle. And however disparate our points of view on politics or publicity stunts, I also tip a hat to anyone willing to enter the public arena and welcome scrutiny, a subject with which the duchess is well-acquainted.
Her new show is the latest in a string of attempts at reinvention that Meg and her husband Prince Harry have made since stepping down from their royal duties in January 2020. The much lambasted lifestyle show is preceded by three other documentary projects, all part of their reported $100 million five-year deal with Netflix, and Meghan’s short-lived Archetypes podcast, which rests under the banner of a reported $20 million deal with Spotify. Each project sparked more irritation than the last, but Meg’s new hospitality and cooking show takes the critical cake.
While Meghan and Harry have long held sympathies from legacy media and celebrity circles alike, even mainstream and left-leaning publications including Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, ScreenRant, Vulture, and The Cut have no soft spot for their latest production.
Some outlets slam Meghan for her unrelatability and luxurious lifestyle, while others chastise her for not allowing enough access into the rarified world of a real-life American princess. Reviewing the collected criticism of this attempt at a lighthearted escape of a television show feels a little like getting Lindsay Lohan’s emotional whiplash upon her first high school cafeteria foray into the world of The Plastics in Mean Girls. One almost expects the sporadically featured cameraman, who, when asked if he’d like to share a glass of beer left over from a recipe for chicken brine, to respond to Meghan by saying, “So, you agree. You think you’re really pretty.”
While certain criticisms are warranted, they do lack an essentially nuanced understanding of both the show’s genre and its titular star.
Meghan Markle and Ramon Velazquez in “With Love, Meghan” Netflix. Photo by COURTESY OF NETFLIX copyright 2024 Netflix, Inc. IMDB.
Superfans hoping the show — whose trailer billed it as a straightforward lifestyle series — would spill tea on the royal family drama were left sorely disappointed. Just minutes into the first episode, Meghan announces that the sun-drenched kitchen in which she flits about is not inside of her actual house, and she goes on to refer to it as the “set” throughout the rest of the series. The most personal detail she shares about her royal husband is that he sometimes comes strolling into the kitchen when he smells that she’s frying bacon.
Even the most tuned-in Royal-watchers stopped speculating on the family drama about 20 minutes into the famed Oprah tell-all when most of it boiled down to salacious headlines, hearsay, and quite a bit of melodrama — all well-honed by an actress who earned her previous paychecks on a soapy legal drama series. All that said, did critics hoping for a fly-on-the-wall perspective of the royals’ new Montecito digs think that one of the most scrutinized families in the world would again open wide the doors of their life for a Bravo style reality show? They tried that before and it only served to plummet their social stock, most aptly and satirically evidenced by Southpark’s “World Wide Privacy Tour” episode in which Harry and Meg’s animated avatars travel the globe’s media outlets demanding that people leave them alone.
The more frequent complaint of the show and its host is the unrelenting lack of self-awareness: the in-your-face luxury of the one-percent that Meghan treats like it’s accessible to anyone with a pot to boil water in. Among other accouterments of said ridiculousness cited by critics is a backyard honey farm from which a quirky on-staff beekeeper extricates wax for Meghan’s homemade non-toxic candles. Her first guest is Daniel Martin, her longtime makeup artist, with whom she chuckles about how she called his talent agency herself (gasp!) to inquire for her first booking since she didn’t even have a publicist at the time. (How pedestrian!) From celebrity guest Mindy Kaling feigning awe at the fact that Meghan makes her own balloon arches for children’s parties, rather than farm out the chore to a hired hand (the ingenuity!) to Meghan sprinkling edible flowers atop literally everything (and you can too, once her merch website launches!) the show is ripe with out-of-touch excess.
To which, this author says: so what?
One has to wonder if critics claiming offense at Meghan’s unrelatable lifestyle have ever actually watched a lifestyle show; the genre is not supposed to be relatable. At most, it’s aspirational; at minimum, it’s a distraction. With Love, Meghan is not something you settle down to view with a critical eye. It’s something you put on the television while you’re folding heaping baskets of laundry or washing a sink full of dishes. Sure, the patio in the sweet little home my husband and I share doesn’t have enough space for a beehive, nor does our guest room provide occupancy for its quirky keeper, but darn if I wasn’t inspired to see if our local grocery store carries mãnuka honey.
Other critics come after Meghan for positioning herself — by virtue of hosting this show — as something of an authority on hospitality and cooking. While it’s clear that she genuinely loves both, one does begin to question what qualifies her as the show’s star when she painstakingly arranges (yet another) crudité platter.
From the obsessively perfect and famously difficult Martha Stewart, to the unabashedly entitled and comically out-of-touch Gwyneth Paltrow, to the unmatched Ina Garten, who personifies the comforting charm of “eat, drink, and be merry,” the greats of this space have already been established during its heyday. Everything else is copy. That’s why With Love, Meghan feels, admittedly, a bit misplaced: unaware of what it isn’t and hitting our airwaves about 10 years too late. In an era when anyone can access all-star recipes from the homecooks of Instagram — shared from modest kitchens across our country — it does make the notion of a duchess casually modeling how to create a harvest basket using produce from her own palatial garden feel more than a little tone-deaf. Then again, Hilaria Baldwin, the Boston-born-and-bred wife of actor Alec Baldwin, once hosted a cooking segment on The Today Show and proclaimed to forget the English word for “cucumber,” so immersed in her Spanish culture is she. If there’s anything we’ve learned from celebrities, it’s that proximity to power can create all manner of ego-driven delusions of grandeur.
So, while aspects of the show are inauthentic and silly, and it’s largely devoid of pace and purpose in the way that an eight-episode series that should have been four often are, I didn’t go into the viewing experience expecting anything other than a beautiful West Coast backdrop, a few outfit ideas (even Meghan’s harshest critics admit that her style is impeccable), and a handful of tips and tricks for putting together gifts for loved ones. For all the eye-rolling criticism that her show has garnered, I would bet money on the fact that women all over America are, at this very moment, decanting store-bought peanut butter pretzels into little labeled gift bags. It’s an adorable idea and I dare even the most cynical of snackers not to be touched when they find it on their bedside table along with lavender towels and a carafe of sun tea next time they visit a friend who has watched (or hate-watched) Meghan’s show.
Sure, the duchess’s swooning commentary on the beauty of the weather, dimpled focaccia dough, or an egg yolk is tiresome, as is her penchant for speaking in platitudes that belong on tea towels. She’s understandably guarded enough to appear performative, and the amateurish tips presented as sacrosanct should be taken less seriously, but I didn’t tune in expecting to find this era’s Martha, Gwyneth, or Ina. As a Royal-watching, Nancy Meyers aesthetic-obsessed, amateur home cook, and aspiring excellent hostess, I am exactly the woman for whom this show was made. I watched it for the same reason that I saw Barbie in theaters without expecting it to rival an adaptation of Pride & Prejudice, or enjoy reading a novel with a Nantucket beach scene on the cover without comparing it to Dickens or Dostoevsky.
It’s just a bit of fun, and sometimes, that’s enough.
So, to the show’s harshest and high-minded critics, I offer an invitation: stop watching.
Or, at least find a hobby to keep you busy while you do, because With Love, Meghan has already been renewed for a second season.
