During an interview at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit Tuesday, Meghan Markle finally commented on the future of her Netflix lifestyle series, With Love, Meghan—though she didn’t speak definitively about whether it will have a third season. When the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Alyson Shontell, asked about the show, the duchess replied by plugging a previously announced holiday special, due out next month. Otherwise, she left the matter of more full-length episodes unaddressed, while focusing instead on the effort that went into the show’s initial seasons.
“We were able to say ‘eight episodes for two seasons,’” the duchess said. “It’s a lot of work, and having done Suits for seven years, I remembered what goes into a production.”
Meghan did allude toward a potential ending for the series, though, when speaking about her hopes for her lifestyle brand, As Ever. “You have the show complementing the brand, where content and commerce are meeting, and then still enabling me to have autonomy to build out my own team,” she said. “The business will of course go on longer than the series.”
She also mentioned an interest in sharing her recipes and other lifestyle content in shorter-form videos, instead of through a full production like With Love, Meghan. “Part of what we’re testing out now—it’s amazing to be able to sit and watch a show for 30 minutes, but how can I give you a recipe in two minutes? Where can I share that with you and how does that continue to grow As Ever? So [I’m] exploring all the options of what it could look like.”
When Netflix released the first eight-episode season of With Love, Meghan in March, it was met with mixed reviews and high viewership numbers. The reception was more muted when season two premiered in August, and failed to break into the Netflix Top 10 list. The series was conceived as part of the overall deal Meghan and Prince Harry signed with Netflix in 2020, shortly after they left their royal roles and moved to the US. This summer, they announced that their partnership with Netflix would continue as a first-look deal, plugging a series of projects are currently in development—including an adaptation of Meet Me at the Lake, a best-selling book by novelist Carley Fortune. Netflix is also the sole investor in As Ever, which sells jam and flower petal “sprinkles,” among other items.
On Tuesday, Meghan noted that her and her husband’s initial overall deal with Netflix was “not dissimilar” to the first deal the streamer signed with Higher Ground, Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company. Moving to a first-look deal, she said, is “such a incredible sign of the strength of our partnership.” (In 2024, Higher Ground signed a new first-look deal with Netflix.) Meghan added that she is looking forward to working under the new deal: “It gives us flexibility to go to our partners first, and then at the same time to be able to shop content that might not be the right fit for Netflix, but has a home somewhere else.”
Onstage at the summit, Shontell also asked Meghan if this career is what she had in mind when she and Prince Harry made their royal exit in spring 2020. “Five years ago was a very different situation for all of us,” the duchess said, adding that their main goal was to “create community” in their new home. “We were nesting and healing. I don’t know if I had the bandwidth to think about what the big picture dream was. There was no plan.”
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