With Love, Meghan, is the latest Netflix series from Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, and it’s an aspirational, inspirational show about finding and amplifying the beauty in life. The show features Meghan cooking with famous friends, keeping bees, and crafting around the house, making everything cozy but not necessarily perfect. We all have that one friend who is really good at making their apartment look like it’s a catalog showroom, the friend whose cupcakes could sell in a bake shop; they are self-taught and passionate, but not professional. Essentially that’s the gist of With Love, Meghan; she is cooking and creating for the love of it, but not necessarily because she’s an expert. But in the end, she seems to just be going through the motions, not offering true how-tos, while also forcing us to wonder who she really is, and if what we’re seeing is the real her or just Meghan playing the role of lifestyle maven.
WITH LOVE, MEGHAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A bee hovers over a flower collecting pollen, and an off-camera voice explains quietly, “The biggest thing is keeping a low tone. Talk in our bee voice.”
The Gist: The first episode of Meghan Markle’s lifestyle series, With Love, Meghan, starts off with her visiting her bees. Dressed in a beekeeping suit, she and a professional beekeeper tend to her hive, and she admits to him that she’s still too scared to keep these bees without him. Much of the segment is filmed in slow motion; when Meghan is not marveling at the natural beauty and miracle of bees, the bees buzz about slowly while smoke wafts by their hive.
Keeping bees is just one of Markle’s hobbies, all of which could be classified as upscale homesteading. This cake? It’s covered in jam from the berries I grew. These candles I’m making? They’re from beeswax from the hives I keep. (But also, here’s a close-up of my Cartier watch.)
During the first episode, she invites her friend and makeup artist Daniel Martin to stay over and creates a tray of welcome goodies for him – hand-mixed epsom salts infused with herbs and tinctures for the bath, which Meghan shows us how to make (and you can find actual how-to instructions on Netflix’s website), as well as packaged snacks: home-popped truffle popcorn and the peanut butter pretzel nuggets we all buy from Trader Joe’s. But Meghan portions these out in cellophane bags and adds a handwritten label to them to personalize it and it gives me Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee vibes except literally just pouring a snack into a different bag? (It’s not mentioned on the show, but Markle has worked as a calligrapher, so we’ll assume the labels she creates on the show are actually her own writing. That’s interesting! More of that!)
Each episode follows a similar formula: a visit from a close pal; crafts and cooking ensues. It’s gentle, there is no pressure to be perfect. I get by with a little help from my (expert, celebrity) friends.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? With Love, Meghan, is, aesthetically, a West Coast variation on the white-kitchened Hamptonian Barefoot Contessa, with its neutral-toned pantries filled with Mason jars of grains and sea salts. But also wants to project a glossy, graceful Martha Stewart Living life, without going to Martha’s perfectionist levels.
Our Take: I don’t dislike Meghan Markle, I think she seems like a decent person and I came away from her other Netflix series, Harry & Meghan, with respect for her past and sympathy for the often cruel media scrutiny she faces. So I went into With Love, Meghan with an open mind but came away from it unmoved, on the cusp of disappointment.
With Love, Meghan features some clever DIY activities and suggestions, it also never really allows us to know Meghan herself, a move that feels intentional because, again, the public scrutiny is no joke and anything she says can and will be used against her in the court of public opinion. That can’t be a fun way to live, but it’s also something that’s certainly an obstacle to a lifestyle show. Unlike Martha Stewart, who built her home(s) and gardens from the ground up, or Gwyneth Paltrow, whose entire persona is now synonymous with her luxe GOOP brand, Markle seems to really like crafts and cooking, but is not expert enough or really curious enough for us to truly learn anything from. Sure, she has good taste and makes things pretty, but it’s not quite enough to build a show around. (Meghan admits her lack of experience throughout: “I’ve never made candles before,” she says before her candle-making segment. You wouldn’t know that to watch her do it, which makes me wonder if she’s lying to give an aura of “So easy, even a novice can do it!” or if she really hasn’t and the segment was just cooked up by a producer because BEES.)
In the first episode, she invites us into a home (not her own) and explains several tips about how to make a guest feel welcome in their guest room while visiting. Meghan has to toe a pretty difficult line between being an actor who wants to perform and being a public figure whose life has been over-exposed, but what the show reveals is that she’s also a little afraid to say the wrong thing or have too much personality. She speaks deliberately and with so much diplomatic poise, she often feels as stiff as the crisp white shirt she is for some reason cooking in.
Meghan is attempting to project an image of beautiful imperfection, but it doesn’t seem to come from a place of expertise nor true passion, it’s simply a mish-mash of her hobbies, scripted and assembled into a pretty package. (And yes, if we’re being really critical, it does feel derivative: she has faced criticism for copying Pamela Anderson’s own cooking series, and the first recipe to appear on the show, a one-pot spaghetti, is a recipe that was originally printed in Martha Stewart Living in 2013 – I know that because it’s been a part of my own meal plans for years.) Who among us has taken a knitting class or cooked a fantastic recipe and entertained the thought that maybe there’s a side hustle for me in selling my wares at the local farmer’ market? The show is basically giving “I could totally sell my jewelry on Etsy” vibes. There’s not an inherent problem with that: this is Hollywood, unqualified people are the face of all kinds of brands, but the hope for me here was that Meghan would allow herself to loosen up and we would truly feel like we’re seeing her reflected in this. But, like her jam company, with it’s changing name and identity, it feels like Meghan is unsure what her brand even is, and this show is another example of that uncertainty.
Parting Shot: Meghan and her friend Daniel sip tea and eat the raspberry cake they decorated together against a backdrop of the mountains in Montecito. They toast, and as she drinks her tea, she declares, “Can’t end on a better note than that!”
Memorable Dialogue: “It’s so f—in’ good!” Markle’s pal Daniel Martin says after he tastes the spaghetti she makes for him (his curse is bleeped because this is a family show). She laughs and tells him, “It’s your choice of adjectives that I really appreciate.” I get that Markle is trying to project a wholesome, classy image, but her response to Martin implies the she’s not one to drop an f-bomb herself, though she has admitted in the past that she does and it’s a habit she had tried to break.
Our Call: There’s going to be a certain subset of the viewing audience who will watch this show regardless, whether because of a Royal obsession or out of love for Meghan, and they will probably not be disappointed to see her having fun in her element. But this is not a show with a specific “how-to” point of view, nor does it even show us anything real about Meghan’s life (remember how obsessed we all were with the patio chairs from her Oprah interview? No patio chairs here.), a disappointment for those of us hoping for something more authentic. SKIP IT.
Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘With Love, Meghan’ on Netflix, Meghan Markle’s New Lifestyle Series That Feels Like Your Rich Friend Started A YouTube Channel To Brag About Their New Hobbies appeared first on Decider.
