Can I say something?

A brief review of With Love, Meghan

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I’m going to thread a very delicate needle today after watching With Love, Meghan, the new lifestyle show on Netflix featuring the Duchess of Sussex herself.

As an overseas correspondent, I get a lot of questions about the goings on of the royal family, particularly Meghan and Harry. And my thoughts are generally: who cares? I am, in the original sense of the word, a Republican. I thought it was a little kitsch to have a Queen but having a King is downright embarrassing. Real heads will know that I was at a meeting in Parliament on the day the Queen died (and I have an incredible photo taken 7 beers deep of a rainbow ending on Big Ben), and that I once shook Camilla Parker Bowles’ hand in that weird fingertip way they shake hands outside Graam Bangla on Brick Lane. These were hilarious things but outside of that I don’t engage with royals because I’m a well-adjusted adult. I’ve had the displeasure of being in a handful of intense conversations with older English people who hate Meghan Markle for whatever reason and those conversations have scared me out of my mind.

There are people in this world who are truly consumed by their hatred of Meghan Markle. It’s like their entire thing. They run hateful Instagram accounts and lurk in comment sections or are Piers Morgan. I look at these people the way I imagine George looks at Lenny.

Even before With Love, Meghan premiered (it was supposed to premiere in January, but was pushed in deference to the LA wildfires), people were forgetting to put on their normal hats to talk about it. On January 3rd, Eater posted on Instagram,”Meghan Markle Has a New Netflix Cooking Series and We’re Already Bored,” to considerable pushback. In the accompanying article, Amy McCarthy writes, “In this glimpse of what’s to come, though, Markle doesn’t communicate a clear point-of-view. It is lovely, yes, to watch her lovingly snip carrots and exchange enamored glances with her husband, but it is not exactly exciting television.” At the time I thought to myself, I agree, but let’s work on that social media copy.

I think normal people have come to feel very protective of the Duchess, myself included. Her treatment by the royal family, the British press, and many of the British public was abhorrent beyond belief. I probably shouldn’t say what I think she should be allowed to do to Prince Andrew. I’m wary of any criticism of her because I think so much of it is part of a consent manufacturing machine for her torment and also, leave her alone!

Meghan is a perfect example of where things are discourse-wise right now. Some topics are so unfairly maligned that you feel yourself getting really bullish about them, even if you don’t really care that much. I’ve said far more in defense of the Duchess of Sussex than I ever intended because I find her critics so bizarre and distasteful. But I worry about what this—all of this, not just Meghan—means for our ability to engage with something critically at a time where critical thinking is of paramount importance. Like, you don’t have to ride out for the Coca Cola Company just because RFK Jr. says it’s bad!

So here are my thoughts on the first three episodes of With Love, Meghan, as well as the series overall, if you’ll indulge me.

“Hello, Honey!”

We open on sunny Montecito, CA—The American Riviera as it is known in polo (?) circles and on the labels of Meghan’s homemade preserves. Our Duchess is checking on her beehives with some awesome guy, and it’s implied that he does most of the grunt work for this apiary but in a fun way. It’s very nice to watch the honey harvest. Meghan is preparing for her friend and makeup artist, Daniel Martin, to visit. The format of each episode is that she shows us some of the pre-work she does for each guest, from prepping for their meals to making them bespoke little favors and snacks. There’s soooo much decanting happening. I will say, I felt a little crazy watching snacks, intended to be eaten at her house, be decanted into so many single-use plastic bags, and to be honest it put me on plastic watch for the rest of the show.

Anyways, it’s very evident that Meghan and Daniel are really friends, but their dynamic was sort of like when I join a webinar for my friend’s work and ask really specific questions in the Q&A as a favor to them. This episode has a lot of the clips I’d already seen online, namely the zesting. What the hell is going on with the zesting bro. It’s two separate times as well. I’d seen the clip of Meghan zesting in a truly bananas way like thirty times before watching, but no one is really talking about what Daniel does with a Microplane. He turns a lemon into a smooth, pithy egg. It’s beautiful. Also, okay, I famously make all my pastas in one pot and haven’t boiled water separately in like five years, but if you’re making a one pot pasta you can still sauté your alliums first and add things in stages, believe me. The last thing I’ll say about the cooking is that Meghan clearly likes to cook and be in the kitchen, and she does everything with a requisite amount of panache, but it always kills me watching celebrities mince garlic with a paring knife. And it’s always the Shun blonde paring knife, and I don’t know what that’s about so if you have any PR insight there, please hit my line.

Much of the criticism of With Love, Meghan is about relatability. Personally, I don’t care. I can relate to very few Duchesses. But I will say that I actually related so deeply watching the Duchess navigate a group cooking experience with her friend who she clearly deeply loves but who is not doing things the way she would have done them. Been there, D!

“Welcome to the Party”

I didn’t care for the Mindy Kaling episode. Kaling positions herself as this sort of court jester; she fawns over Meghan, she makes self-deprecating jokes, and as all the guests seem to do, she asks leading questions that help keep the episode’s narrative tight. I found the self-deprecation quite annoying because first of all ew, and second of all isn’t Mindy Kaling known for being well-dressed and a good cook? And they’re making her sit there and be like, “I always season my food wrong. How do you get it so right?”

If you’ve seen any clip of this show, you’ve probably seen the one of the exchange between Meghan and Mindy about Meghan’s last name. It’s very awkward. It’s clear that the surname issue is a sore spot and that Meghan and her team wanted to use the show as an opportunity to define, in her own terms, that Sussex allows her to feel nominally united with her children, and I get that, but I would have written it in another way. That’s what I’ll say.

I was charmed by their little ladybug crostini. I was charmed by the logo-just-out-of-frame Taittinger used for bellinis. I was uncharmed by the forced talk of “oh and you could do this for so cheap, you could get this all at Trader Joe’s.” It felt like Meghan was trying to head off the inevitable criticism of un-relatability (we’ve established that I do not care) but doing so in such a stilted, 90-second caveat way came off perhaps worse than not doing it at all. The premise of this episode was throwing a children’s garden party, so I also found it odd to see two grown women sit down at the end of it to a very quiet tea. You couldn’t have your kids and Prince Harry and BJ Novak running around out of focus in the background?

“Two Kids from LA”

I liked this episode. I could watch a lot of these episodes. At this point I thought to myself, okay, she’s found her groove (if you keep watching you will see that the show loses it again but does find it a few more times). Meghan is joined by Roy Choi, LA chef and writer, one of the early famous food truck guys. Both Angelenos, Choi and the Duchess are visibly excited to meet each other. This is what the entire show should be. They bond over a shared childhood in the city, he clowns her for thinking a pepper is spicy, they do MSG discourse. The celebrity + professional chef cooking show model is pretty well-worn at this point, but Meghan’s is fun to watch.

This episode had the least amount of calligraphy, however, which is a shame. Everything in her kitchen (not her real kitchen) is decanted into slightly mismatched glass jars, and I couldn’t help but think that the decision not to label anything with her stunning handwriting was a missed opportunity. We finally get a full Taittinger logo reveal for a fried chicken and champagne moment. I had to pause a few times and get really close to my TV because all the blogs are saying that she uses a full set of Le Creuset pans in Brioche, but I actually think it’s the now-discontinued Merengue, which is slightly glossier. Choi uses all her big knives.

I like the dynamic between Meghan and her film crew, which is less jokey than all the other cooking shows right now (everyone has that same razzing dynamic with their crew and frankly, the same editor but that’s for another time) and more warm. I loved watching her pour them teeny tiny beers.

🫒

Was I bored watching With Love, Meghan? Not really. To be honest, I was pretty laser-focused on the paring knife. So many of the positive reviews I’ve read of the show have described it as beautiful gowns type background content.

The show tries to strike a balance between Meghan as an authoritative, Martha-type figure and Meghan as a bright-eyed student of life. I wouldn’t necessarily say it succeeds. Personally, I think Meghan is a Martha-type and she has some (not all) of the bona fides to back it up. I liked the scenes where her type-A jumped out, but I also remember the headlines that were like, “Duchess of Sussex sent five AM type-A emails and that’s why it’s actually incumbent upon all of us in Britain to be more racist to her,” so I can see why these moments were always buttressed with a faux modesty. And while she might have a Martha Sun, she clearly has an Ina Moon. The parts of her series where she lets herself be the giddy student are the best by far.

With Love, Meghan does not have a clear point-of-view. This is not a gripe with Meghan but rather an observation on what the economics of being a celebrity now mean for our content landscape. Celebrities, you see, seem to all be living beyond their means, or perhaps their means as per the realities of modern film, TV, music etc. And so celebrities must monetize! Musical artists are hawking spirits and actors are buying wineries and everyone has a podcast, or a paid newsletter, or something. Something that makes money. And very few of these monetization streams have a clear POV other than, “hey! It’s me. From TV or whatever.”

The series is, ostensibly, a look at her private life in Montecito. But it’s not. And I can see why! The formerly-royal couple gave us a small look at their domestic setup, the chickens and whatnot, during their bombshell Oprah interview, and everyone lost their minds.

An earnest look at her house, her garden, and her own changing relationship to domesticity would have been a good show. An eight-part cooking series with eight local chefs would have been a good show. With Love, Meghan tries to do both of these things and therefore does neither. It’s not her Nancy Meyers kitchen but a Nancy Meyers kitchen nearby, and the nods at this fact feel like weird admissions of guilt. Just be on a soundstage, it’s fine! Martha and Ina have whole barns for that sort of thing!

I think my issue with the show is something that goes far beyond the show. We are absolutely up to our eyeballs in lifestyle content that pretty much falls into two camps: conservative and [BLANK]. That’s not an auspicious dynamic. There are very real politics to motherhood and cooking and growing your own food, and in the case of Meghan Sussex, she obviously knows that. You see flashes of it throughout the show, like her eyes lighting up as she tells Choi about her teacher who taught her to compost. Meghan doesn’t personally owe us a rehashing of her traumas or too close a look at her family. But the idea that no one owes each other anything is frankly unsuited to our current moment. We owe each other lots! When I say that this show needed Meghan’s own POV, I don’t mean her deep wounds, I mean her politics. I’m sorry, crudités are political! 🫒