I was terrified I’d hate With Love, Meghan, in which Meghan Sussex, neé Markle, hosts a plethora of celebrity mates in a Montecito bungalow and offers homemaking advice to camera. I really didn’t want to be another hater in the ginormous queen’s-funeral-sized queue of haters, another person lining up to deride her presence, to scoff at her attempts at relatability. We love to hate-watch TV, to take to Twitter and tear the protagonist to shreds. A princess living in central California and dolling out domestic advice feels ripe for our ire.
Admittedly, the show has the kind of Instagram aesthetic you unfollow out of softly focused boredom. Meghan appears in a Barbie-esque variety of guises—Beekeeping Meghan, Fruit-Picking Meghan, Candlemaker Meghan, Microwave-Popcorn Meghan—portraying a barefoot, Americanized kind of Englishness less the sardonic edge we Brits are so well-known for. There’s a lot of chopping. There’s a lot of layering and arranging, pouring and storing, spacing and placing. Dinky glasses of fruit and cream, frozen orange juice roses, and a she’s-beautiful-on-the-inside cake. It’s hard not to constantly double-guess what you’re seeing on With Love, Meghan, questioning what ideas in the Netflix development room didn’t feel like appropriate metaphors for how the public already perceives her (did I mention the she’s-beautiful-on-the-inside cake!?). I could be reaching, but Meghan’s preoccupation with “the guest experience” feels like a quiet aside about the royal family, and seeing her alchemizing anti-inflammatory properties feels ironic considering her (unintended) ability to inflame great swathes of the media. Or, maybe it’s not that deep: “It’s just chopping veggies,” she admits, as she fans a rainbow of crudités for the unmpteenth time.
The show does feel like Meghan’s attempt at relatability, having joined (and swiftly exited) a family so mind-bogglingly bogged down with duty, they remain more freakishly fascinating than friend-able. But rather than embodying an untouchable royal, Meghan’s embraced the 1% lifestyle the entire streaming-TV industry gleefully derides. Unsurprisingly, considering her years in the public eye, she’s incredibly at-ease on camera, neither overly keen to be liked nor awkwardly robotic. But if anything, I wish there were more unstructured asides, more glimpses of impromptu unscripted Meghan, more room for mess. Even a snarky Come Dine with Me-style voiceover would pump up the jam (literally and figuratively).
Having sat through the entire season of low-skilled, high-presentation moments, I’m wondering what I’ve learned. I have to admit I’ve learned little about Meghan, and little about how my own home life might be transformed. Unlike Martha Stewart’s quasi-stern advice for at-homebodies, With Love, Meghan, doesn’t give you new tips, new household solutions, a new flair with guests. It’s neither comforting enough nor new-fangled enough to fully grip you. Great domestic shows give you newness—an original hack, a different perspective, a way of being. Where Queer Eye subjects emerge reborn, where the gang at the Goop office does shrooms and purges their trauma, I’m left remembering, un-aspirationally, that I can chop veg.
