What to do with Meghan Markle? Or, sorry — Meghan Sussex, as in the Duchess of, which she informs Mindy Kaling she prefers to be called on her new Netflix lifestyle show, With Love, Meghan.
It can be difficult to know what to think of Meghan Markle/Sussex from day to day.
Meghan (let’s keep things simple and stick to first names, shall we?) has been caught in such a bizarre public trap for so long that it’s hard to get an objective look at her. A lot of the criticism of her is rooted in racism and misogyny, levied in such bad faith that it’s easy to brush aside: the fury, for instance, over her decision to step down as an active member of the royal family in 2020. On the other hand, there’s also criticism that is more worrisome if true, like all those disconcertingly consistent rumors that she’s cruel to her employees.
In the midst of this good faith/bad faith slurry — a word Meghan apparently learns for the first time on With Love, Meghan — there’s more questionable stuff that’s hard to evaluate, the criticism based on the sense that Meghan’s vibes are just kind of unpleasant. People think that she acts too perfect, that she’s boring, that she relies too much on people’s goodwill from her time as a punching bag for the royal family without producing anything new to justify her and Prince Harry’s multimillion-dollar media deals.
Anyone is within their rights to say that a public figure rubs them the wrong way. All the same, the whole country just watched savvy crisis management firms bend public opinion against first Amber Heard and then Blake Lively, each time working with little more than a sense that both women were sometimes rude in public. Does someone like Meghan Markle (shoot, Sussex), who has had the British tabloids writing nonstop hate propaganda about her for eight years, really stand a chance?
And yet: I see her tell guest Mindy Kaling that her name is Meghan Sussex now, and I cringe. I cringed my way through a lot of With Love, Meghan.
I don’t know if Meghan Sussex is a bad person, or an annoying one. That’s frankly not my business and probably not yours either. But right now, she is not doing a good job of being a good celebrity, and the show she hosts is boring. Since that’s the capacity in which she is asking for our time and attention, that’s all of our business.
With Love, Meghan could use some Martha Stewart style
Part of the problem is that as a celebrity, Meghan has two clear antecedents: Princess Diana and Martha Stewart. Within the showcase of With Love, Meghan, she fails to invoke the spirit of either one with any particular skill.
With Love, Meghan lends itself to Martha comparisons, since it is, like Martha’s oeuvre before it, dedicated to elevated living. In each of the eight episodes, Meghan invites a friend or two over to the lush rented estate that serves as the show’s set. She prepares a handmade hostess gift to welcome the friend in question — bath salts, lavender towels, a lavish flower arrangement — and then collaborates with her friends on cooking and serving a pleasant California-casual meal of home-grown garden ingredients. Sometimes she brings in an expert to help with the cooking (chefs Roy Choi and Alice Waters both make appearances), although they are not invited to stay for dinner. Should you be so moved, you can generally order a version of the craft Meghan does onscreen through her new lifestyle brand, As Ever. (Or, at any rate, see a preview — the actual products don’t yet appear to be available for sale.)
Meghan is charming and breezy in front of the camera. It’s soothing to fall into the trance of watching her capably harvest her own honey and then melt the beeswax into candles scented with essential oils, or cut caprese tea sandwiches into cunning little ladybug shapes.
Yet over time, a sort of black hole in the center of the show begins to assert itself. There is no central expertise governing the elevated living that we are shown. In its place, there is only nonspecific pablum about the power of community.
When Meghan makes candles on camera, she is doing it for the first time, following directions she printed off the internet. She keeps sprinkling edible flowers on everything, even as she admits that they are tasteless. At one point Meghan laughingly protests that she is no professional chef, just comfortable in the kitchen. She’s right: she doesn’t have the culinary range to anchor a true cooking show, and yet the entire show is built around watching her cook. That’s the thing that takes up the bulk of each episode — which means, in practice, we watch her make the same very pretty and doubtless delicious crudité board at least five times over the course of eight half-hour-ish episodes.
With respect, if the only thing Meghan is an expert on is crudités, then why are we watching her host a whole lifestyle show?
It’s here that the Martha Stewart comparisons are most unflattering. Martha brought a steely, neurotic perfectionism to everything she ever did, a kind of fanatical commitment to the belief that there was a correct way to do everything in one’s home, and that only Martha could show you how. This was the quality that made people dislike her in the ’90s, but it’s also the quality that made her so compelling on television. And it was grounded in true expertise. Martha really did renovate a house by hand and run her own catering company for years. She really did have exceptional skills that were both versatile and wide-ranging.
Meghan has the skill set of being a beautiful and charming rich woman who probably hosts a very nice dinner party. As the premise for a TV show, the returns diminish.
The problem with Princess Diana as a reference
Meghan does not invoke Princess Diana once over the course of With Love, Meghan. Which is surprising in a way, because Diana used to be a central part of Meghan and Harry’s narrative.
When Harry and Meghan stepped down from their positions as senior members of the royal family in 2020, they explained that they had to leave for the same reason Diana had to leave — because it was impossible to stay, because no one with a free spirit could survive in the British royal family. The story Meghan and Harry were telling was that they were the redemption of Diana’s legacy. Unlike Diana, though, they would survive, because Diana had been alone when she left, and Harry and Meghan had each other and the redemptive force of their love. It was a powerful story, and one that they told well.
It has now been five years since Meghan and Harry stepped back from the royal family, and the story they have been telling about themselves needs to evolve and grow. By the time Diana left the royal family after her 1996 divorce from then-Prince Charles, she had found an impressive way to handle that problem.
Diana’s story is tragic and compelling for a lot of reasons: because she died so young and so pointlessly, because her marriage was so public and so unhappy, because she was so beautiful and her fairy-tale princess dreams went so wrong so fast. But what gave Diana’s story its heft and gravitas, what makes her such a memorable figure in addition to a tragic one, is that she was able to harness her ability to provoke public attention to genuinely productive ends.
Diana was photographed shaking ungloved hands with AIDS patients in 1987, at the height of the epidemic when lots of people believed you could catch AIDS through touch. She walked through a field of live land mines in Angola to campaign for a ban on land mines. She understood how to put herself at the center of a publicity stunt, and how to make that stunt pay dividends for overlooked human rights problems. That’s how she made her undeniable glamour matter, which in turn is why she is remembered as a martyr.
Meghan and Harry are both actively involved in important philanthropic causes. In 2022, they won the NAACP President’s Award for their work on causes related to social justice and equity. They have campaigned for vaccine equity, for mental health, for women in the workplace. Yet aside from the choice to devote one of their Netflix shows to the Invictus Games, the sports competition for wounded veterans that is Harry’s signature accomplishment, they have not tied philanthropic work to their public storytelling.
It’s little wonder that Meghan in particular has struggled there. So many people are waiting with bated breath to criticize her slightest move that she can’t even publicly send gifts to victims of the LA fires without being accused of making it all about her. This is the problem we always run into, dealing with Meghan: it’s almost impossible to tell what is her being inept, what is her being malicious, and what is the result of eight years of misogyny and racism poisoning the well for her. In the end, it leaves Meghan in the same place: in front of the camera to hawk her new line of edible flower sprinkles, which you can’t even order yet.
Meghan is not Princess Diana or Martha Stewart. She’s not even Meghan Markle anymore. Yet after all those years of relentless tabloid criticism, all those media deals that never amounted to anything all that exciting, the fumbled business launches, she appears to be blocked when it comes to showing us exactly who Meghan Sussex is and why we should care about her.
She does appear to make a lovely crudité platter, though.
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