Meghan Markle Finally Figures Out With Love, Meghan Is a Talk Show, Not a How-To Guide

Five months after Meghan Markle’s Netflix show With Love, Meghan first premiered, she’s back with another suite of eight episodes, in which she feels less like one of the most famous women in the world and more like a skilled talk show host. Though the food certainly looks good, the show seems to understand that the duchess’s activities—frying potato chips or pouring soap into silicon molds—work best as a display of her ability to keep a smile on as she’s doing something incredibly complex.

Earlier this year, Meghan’s critics complained that the show’s pace was slow and she didn’t exactly come across as a Martha Stewart–level talent in the kitchen. Now, her As Ever brand has gone through multiple drops, giving her a bit of credibility in the lifestyle space. In With Love, Meghan, she is most successful when she is putting the attention on others, on a field trip to watch olive oil production, or learning about seafood from a fishmonger.

In season two, the weather changes from Santa Barbara summer (an average daily temperature of 76 degrees) to winter (a still balmy 70 degrees), but the structure of each episode remains the same—a few crafts, a few unusually fancy gifts, a simple yet effective meal, and effusive praise. The alterations are simple but effective, with more attention paid to conversation and eye contact. Season one’s running theme was Meghan’s emphasis that viewers can recreate the crafts and cookery at home, but for season two, that refrain is mercifully dropped, though the activities are still fairly simple. She emphasizes that she is trying many of these recipes and crafts for the first time, supplying enthusiasm rather than expertise.

When Meghan married Prince Harry in 2018, her newfound mega-celebrity status gave her a paradoxical mystique. The media was tracking her every move, even when she wasn’t going anywhere. Her name was everywhere, and her stated desire for a more private life only seemed to heighten the public interest. After a spring publicity blitz and many, many hours of content, she has finally managed to puncture the myth that thrived when she wasn’t able to speak for herself, and it makes every word she says feel less risky. Back in January, her return to Instagram got minute-by-minute coverage, but now her posts feel less like an event and more like the average musings of a mother, business owner, and philanthropist. With Love, Meghan season two leans into that delightful mundanity.

The guest list includes fewer displays of her real-life friendships, though makeup artist Daniel Martin is a notable returning cohost. Other episodes also feature pilates instructor and longtime friend Heather Dorak, her charity collaborator José Andrés, and chef Clare Smyth, who catered her wedding reception in 2018. Instead, we see more Netflix talent, including David Chang, Christina Tosi, Tan France, Samin Nosrat, and personalities like model and cookbook author Chrissy Teigen and podcaster Jay Shetty and his wife, cookbook author Radhi Devlukia.

This time around, the show is more explicit about the duchess’s thought process for welcoming guests she has never met. She starts with a dossier of their qualities and develops a series of gifts and activities with them in mind. Tosi, the founder of dessert mecca Milk Bar, is known for always wearing a scarf in her hair, so Meghan uses a marbling technique to tie-dye scarves and pocket squares for everyone to take home. France has two young sons and a love of spices, so she spends the episode finding and wrapping gifts for his family, including a vintage spice cellar for him to take home. Nosrat, author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, is known for including references to her Iranian heritage in her flavor palette, so Meghan makes lavashak, an Iranian fruit leather that can be made from pomegranate and apples. “No one’s ever made this for me, other than my grandmother,” the chef says. “This is perfect—I can’t stop eating it.”

Because she has history with a few of the guests, she does supply a few dishier moments than ever before. Her husband’s quirks come up a few different times; with Andrés we learn that Harry isn’t a fan of lobster and that he said “I love you” first. Teigen and Meghan discuss the time they both spent as models at the game show Deal or No Deal, and the way they would all stand in a row for the application of fake eyelashes. Smyth reveals that she catered a private surprise dinner in an old chapel for the couple’s first anniversary back in 2019.

The payoff comes in the moments where the show really leans into the simulacra of it all. In episode seven, Meghan drives two hours to Los Angeles for a girls’ weekend with Dorak, where they take a pottery class and meet an expert mixologist. Before she leaves, she enters a bedroom in the rented house to explain how she packed for the weekend. She opens up a leather Burberry weekender on wheels and shows off her beige packing cubes, cobalt blue pajamas, and her strategy for dressing for morning coffee runs.

“I normally dress monochromatically—not because I think it’s the most stylish thing in the world, but because it’s really easy. When I pack for a trip I do the same thing,” she says. “I used to be one of those—especially on a last-minute trip—who would say, ‘Let’s just throw it all in a bag.’ Then you get there and think, Oh gosh, I forgot that thing. I’ve become really conscious of all those things, that are just uniforms and staples that you can mix and match.”

The setup gives Meghan the opportunity to provide what feels a bit like a princess lesson when you consider exactly how much world traveling she has done since she met Harry. Eventually she even mentions that she took the leather satchel with her on a trip to Botswana with Harry early in their relationship.

Despite a wave of reviews that painted the show as out of touch (there was commentary about her extensive use of Le Creuset bakeware, or the elaborate fruit-and-vegetable platters she says she makes for her children), With Love, Meghan succeeded upon its March premiere, with the first season attracting 5.3 million views in the first half of 2025. Still, even the show’s most ardent defenders had to admit that there was something a little contrived about the whole production. To film the show, Meghan rented a house down the road from her Montecito home that lacked the residue of her real life, and Harry only appeared in the last episode.

Perhaps in response to that complaint, Meghan has been posting Tasty-style cooking videos from her own kitchen on Instagram, but the show remains its own island. This time around, there are no appearances from Harry, though Teigen’s husband John Legend does make a cameo. By welcoming a different mix of talent and speeding up the pace, the show proves that it doesn’t need to be a view into Meghan’s real life to still have something true at its heart.