Megxit was all for this?
Meghan Markle’s new show about entertaining has just started streaming. The irony is palpable as ‘entertaining’ is likely the last term one would associate with this project.
With Love, Meghan is the intriguing title of her recent Netflix venture. This is interesting given that the Meghan Markle that has become familiar to many is more of a disruptor at heart.
Her expertise seems to lie not in homemaking, but rather in its antithesis: straining familial bonds, making accusations of racism, and seemingly making moves to dismantle a beloved monarchy, all while maintaining a serene facade.
‘This isn’t my house,’ she tells us in episode one, setting the stage for the utter inauthenticity to follow: cooking with ‘dear’ friends who she seems to know little about, frying up bacon despite her size-zero frame, and whisking up eggs while wearing all white, as one does.
The conversational filler is even more underwhelming. Here she is at her organic beehive: ‘Oh, they’re busy. Busy bees.’
She appears to struggle as she tries to show real interest in her guests, even her famous ‘pen pal’ Mindy Kaling, identified as ‘Actress, Producer, Friend’.
In order of importance, perhaps.
Meghan’s new show about entertaining has finally begun streaming – and oh, the irony, because ‘entertaining’ is the last word anyone would use to describe this vanity project.
‘With Love, Meghan’ is a curious name for her latest Netflix endeavor, because the Meghan Markle we have all regrettably come to know is, at heart, a chaos agent.
Kaling arrives heavily made-up, a bit too eager in her garish Valentino denim ensemble, playing along as Meghan plans a children’s party with no children around.
Meghan: ‘I don’t know if you go all out for your kids’ parties or not?’
Mindy: ‘The woman I hire does.’
And there we have it: This is a show for the one percent. It should have been called ‘Let Them Eat Cake’.
Netflix opted for a Motown soundtrack, perhaps meant to convey the warmth, the soul, the ‘joy’ that our ostensible hostess can’t, or won’t, extend.
No guest is ever offered a bar stool or a seat. It’s so strange — almost as if Meghan isn’t used to having houseguests.
As if she doesn’t know that it can be rude to make people stand around awkwardly – and that’s before you add the lights and a camera crew and the sheer exertion of trying to engage Meghan in entertaining conversation.
Indeed, Meghan barely seems to know much about her first guest, her ‘dear friend’ Daniel — also the help, her make-up artist since her Suits days.
Daniel, she tells us, ‘has been in my life for the before, the during, and after, shall we say.’
Meghan, as ever (see what I did there?) is not subtle.
There’s lots of talk about broken things being valuable and cake that’s pretty on the inside.
It all calls to mind that great Courtney Love lyric: ‘I want to be the girl with the most cake / I fake it so real I am beyond fake.’
Because Meghan doesn’t know basic stuff about her ‘dear friend’ Daniel, such as whether he likes tomatoes, or that he’s left-handed, or that his kitchen in New York City is so small he doesn’t have counter space.
No matter. Daniel will take his scraps and like it!
He watches admiringly as Meghan makes pasta in white Le Creuset cookware, ‘folding’ ingredients and zesting lemons while nothing ever spills or sloshes or stains, wearing a white linen shirt with billowing sleeves over a lit stove top.
Then they make candles from her homegrown organic honey. And if you don’t have your own beehive, she tells us, don’t worry: ‘You can get wax from your local beekeeper.’
When future historians calculate the moment Brand Sussex collapsed beyond repair, this will be it.
It feels like programming meant to make the modern woman hate herself. But it’s not going to work — because it’s all so obviously fraudulent.
Mean Girl Meghan can only stay submerged for so long, and when Kaling deploys her acting chops — feigning surprise at Meghan’s oft-told origin story of eating fast food and TV-tray dinners as a poor little latchkey kid — Meghan seems to snap.
‘It’s so funny that you keep saying Meghan Markle,’ she says, sounding like it’s not funny at all.
‘You know,’ she corrects, ‘I’m Sussex now.’
Meghan barely seems to know much about her first guest, her ‘dear friend’ Daniel (pictured) – also the help, her make-up artist since her ‘Suits’ days.
Freeze-frame that moment. You’ll catch the micro-expression, Meghan seeming to realize what an unbearable snob she sounds like, because she immediately invokes her children.
‘You have kids,’ Meghan rambles, ‘and you go, “No”, I share my name with my children, and that feels so — I didn’t know how meaningful that would be to me… This is our family name, our little family name.’
Resentment and rage seem to simmer just below that faux-placid surface, threatening to erupt in full boil against the undeniable truth: her fame is waning, her talents are questionable, and she’s married to a beta-royal.
You know I’m Sussex now.
The editing makes the sequence of events unclear, but Kaling tells Meghan that ‘your fashion is one of my favorite things’ — cue Meghan’s exaggerated look, a masterful mix of scorn and humility — and that the day she got one of Meghan’s jarred preserves ‘was probably one of the most glamorous moments of my life’.
If she says so.
This re-re-rebrand feels more obscene than usual: Meghan devotedly cooking and baking and feeding her chickens with iced organic vegetables — I am not making this up — so that, she tells us, their yokes will be that much more golden.
She also tells us that she feeds said chickens on a miniature picnic table — her ‘chicknik’ table — at a time when many Americans can’t even afford to buy eggs.
But sure, we’re supposed to marvel at Meghan, baking a cake in her beige Loro Piana sweater ($1,325) topped with another beige Jenni Kayne sweater ($395) and her $20,000 gold Cartier Tank dangling from her wrist as she describes her oven-baked crostini as ‘darling’.
This show should come with a complimentary sickness bag.
‘I love birdsong,’ Meghan says. An Olympic-size pool glistens in the background. She stuffs gift bags for small children, filled with miniature garden tools and small burlap satchels of sugar snap peas, plus compostable pots and Manuka honey sticks.
Just what every toddler wants.
‘It’s a real delight in being able to be a present parent,’ she says at one point. ‘And it’s a luxury sometimes because we all have to work. We all have a lot of stuff to do.’
Tell that to actual working parents who are grinding it out day after day, who collapse exhausted after feeding their kids and helping with the homework and paying the bills.
And what does Meghan do all day, really?
If the scene in which she hand-lines a piece of paper in ‘soft pencil’ before writing, in calligraphy, a menu that she calls ‘user-friendly’ and not ‘fussy’ – featuring ‘English muffins with estate honey’ – is anything to go by, then Meghan Markle’s got waaaaay too much time on her hands.
And what does she do all day, really? If the scene in which she hand-lines a piece of paper in ‘soft pencil’ before writing, in calligraphy, a menu that she calls ‘user-friendly’ and not ‘fussy’ – featuring ‘English muffins with estate honey’ – is anything to go by, then Meghan’s got way too much time on her hands.
As for our hapless Prince Harry?
He makes one brief appearance that feels almost contractually obliged, in the show’s final episode, when Meghan hosts a brunch in honor of — who else? — herself.
While, of course, appearing to slight the royal family once again.
‘This feels like a new chapter… I just thank you for all the love and support,’ she toasts. ‘And here we go — there’s a business!’
Is there? Those hastily re-named products aren’t available yet, promised on the new As Ever website for ‘Spring 2025’.
Meghan goes on: ‘All of that is part of the creativity that I’ve missed so much, so thank you for loving me so much and celebrating with me.’
Such is the anti-climactic end to a show that has no reason for existing. With Love, Meghan may belong with the waste in her chicken coop, but hey — at least that means it’s organic waste.
