“This is about connecting with friends … making new friends … and just learning,” says Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, in the trailer for her forthcoming Netflix series, “With Love, Meghan.” The nearly two-minute ad, set to the hopeful tones of “Do You Believe in Magic” by the Lovin’ Spoonful, which rolled out to much fanfare this month, casts Meghan as something of a domestic goddess. We see her wearing an apron and carrying artfully presented baskets of intimidatingly fresh-looking vegetables, creating colorful floral arrangements and even harvesting her own honey. As she decorates freshly baked treats, we hear one of her many hashtaggable phrases: “Love is in the details.”
In many ways, the trailer looks like any other celebrity-fronted lifestyle series, like those from Selena Gomez and Stanley Tucci. But since it was announced, the existence of the show has been met with a noisy, and perhaps predictable, backlash. The criticism has been most intense in British legacy media, which is already panning Meghan’s turn as the millennial Martha Stewart of Montecito. “What I’ve always wanted, a lesson from Meghan on freezing an edible flower inside an ice cube,” wrote Judith Woods in The Telegraph. (The right-leaning publication has since run several articles about the trailer, dissecting its most “baffling moments” and Meghan’s “trad wife” look.) On social media, the backlash spread to Americans, especially those on the political right. Meghan McCain called the series “completely and utterly tone deaf” at a time when so many Americans are struggling, and flatly announced, “This is why the world doesn’t like you.”
Watching Meghan’s many critics rage-post about fairly standard elements — like the show reportedly being filmed in a rented property not far from the Sussexes’ actual home — it’s clear that most of them were always going to hate the show. But this rebrand as the duchess of domesticity is a very shrewd move for Meghan nonetheless. The show’s concept appears to combine the fantasy of Meghan as a princess in exile while reactivating parts of her pre-royal public persona, when she ran her own lifestyle website, The Tig. With so many eyes on Meghan, she might finally be allowed to change — and more crucially, sell a different narrative about herself. After years of Meghan and her husband, Prince Harry, pleading for privacy while also seeking publicity, she will now participate in the attention economy in a more clear-cut, direct way.
Since their relationship began in 2016, the story of the Sussexes has been defined by feuds. They’ve claimed that the British tabloids waged a racist and misogynistic smear campaign against Meghan. They’ve also suggested that the Firm, as the royal family is sometimes known, collaborates with the tabloids in return for favorable coverage. Since stepping down as working royals in 2020, the couple have told their story many times. There was a 2021 sit-down interview with Oprah Winfrey, where the phrase “Were you silent? Or were you silenced?” entered the pop-culture canon. Next came the Netflix docuseries “Harry & Meghan,” followed by Prince Harry’s sales-record-breaking memoir, “Spare.” With each new appearance, the duo have provided a steady drip of scandalous allegations.
The problem the Sussexes have run into is that eventually, retelling your story starts to bore — and annoy — your audience. Even those who had sympathy for them and believed they had been badly mistreated began to tire of the couple monetizing their victimhood.
The biggest strength of “With Love, Meghan” is that it appears to be something completely different. The series is produced by Archewell Productions, the couple’s production company, so what we’ll see is likely to be tightly controlled. But the show allows Meghan to break out of the cycle of re-litigating the royal feud on different mediums, which put the couple at risk of irrelevance. With frequent references to love, friendship and joy, the message of the show seems to be relentless positivity.
The show also allows Meghan to step out on her own. In the nearly two-minute trailer, there’s only one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance from Prince Harry, which feels like a pointed choice. As her longtime fans know, a show about homemaking is far from a random pivot; she ran The Tig from 2014 to 2017. It was deactivated alongside her personal social media accounts as she prepared to marry into the royal family. But on Jan. 1 Meghan returned to Instagram, signaling a new era where she will be speaking for herself.
Since the Sussexes settled in California, the British press’s main beef has been that they gave up their royal status to become “celebrities,” a class of citizen considered uncouth by comparison. What’s often overlooked in the case of the British press versus Meghan is an underlying snobbery and distrust over the fact that she’s American. In recent years, Prince Harry has drawn parallels between the treatment of his wife and his mother, Princess Diana, whose tragic death was a result of being hounded by the tabloids. The British press, however, have more closely aligned Meghan with another woman who married into the family: Wallis Simpson, the American socialite who married Edward, the Duke of Windsor, after he abdicated the throne to be with her, causing a crisis that jeopardized the monarchy itself.
Like Simpson, Meghan has been portrayed as a grifter who is both disrespectful to the royal institution and determined to profit from her association with it. The dream of finding sanctuary in domesticity isn’t a new product, but it’s one she’s well positioned to sell. Halfway through Meghan’s trailer, there was one line that stood out to me: “We’re not in pursuit of perfection,” she proclaims. “We’re in the pursuit of joy.” It’s a marketing statement that seems like it was workshopped by a team of writers — yet even if it sounds inauthentic, it also underlines her intent to become a serious player in the lifestyle space. As the founder of a new brand, American Riviera Orchard, and as a TV personality, she is reintroducing herself to the world, “With Love,” as Meghan. It’s a blueprint that proved profitable previously for Martha Stewart and Nigella Lawson, two women who also overcame their share of public crises and whose recipes are woven into the lives of fans who connect with them on a first-name basis.
To understand the show’s chances for success, consider that Meghan has not one public persona but two. Yes, there’s the version of her that enrages her detractors, who have zero desire to be told how to elevate their lives by a duchess who frolics around a mansion with immaculately blow-dried hair and annoyingly perfect makeup. But in the eyes of her fans, she is an unfairly persecuted runaway princess who was swept into a storm. Her life was a fairy-tale turned into a nightmare — and now it’s back to a fantasy again. “With Love, Meghan” reintroduces her to those in the middle while still giving her true believers a chance to participate in that fantasy, in which their heroine is finally finding her feet on the other side of adversity, one edible flower at a time.
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