With Love, Meghan: Just Watch Something Else

I want to begin this review by stating that I am not a natural born Meghan Markle hater. I’m not an avid reader of the British tabloid press, and ‘Megxit’ pretty much passed me by. I’m a fair weather royalist: I like Kate and Wills, don’t mind a Corgi, and watched all of The Crown. Megan’s decision to abandon her royal duties, or whatever people are so angry about, doesn’t bother me all that much. However, even I have to draw the line at With Love, Meghan, Markle’s new Netflix docuseries, which The Guardian termed “toe-curling unlovable” and The Times “smug and syrupy”. It’s eight episodes of Markle doing her best Martha Stewart impression as she conducts small acts of ‘homemaking’ that no mother or wife have actually done — unless they’re running an Etsy business or have far too much time and money on their hands. I’m sure you can guess that Markle is the latter. I’ll save you all the time (four hours I’ll never get back) by summarising it neatly for you here. 

The series opens with Markle harvesting honey from the bees in her backyard, not her real one though because, by the way, it’s all filmed in a fake Montecito mansion seeing as her real one is too private for us plebs. Apparently she started beekeeping a year ago, but already has, as she puts it, “good vibes for good hives” — an awfully millennial slogan which I’m sure is being printed on a shedload of t-shirts as we speak. After all this beekeeping, we return to the kitchen to watch Markle make loads of incredibly useless stuff, such as homemade truffle popcorn, beeswax candles, and bath salts, which no-one but a twelve-year-old who just discovered Pinterest has ever thought of making. 

This trend continues through the rest of the series, as she invites a series of ‘guest friends’ (all of which appear more guest than friend; the conversations are awkward and stunted, and the guests are plied with a lot of wine) to help her in her endless arduous arts and crafts projects. Mindy Kaling watches as Markle prepares the fake house for a kid’s birthday party that never happens. She creates a balloon arch for the non-existent children to walk through and artisan garden themed goodie bags for them to take home afterward. She seems to suggest that balloon arches are an essential part of motherhood, unlike all the washing, cleaning, cooking, and school-runs that most others have to do. 

This episode brings the series’ most horrifically tone-deaf conversation when Kaling asks Markle what she’s wearing. The duchess tells her, beaming proudly, that she’s actually into “high-low” fashion, so the pants she’s wearing are Zara. Kaling gasps as if appalled, yet manages to regain her composure when she finds out that the cashmere sweater draped around Meghan’s shoulders is Loro Piana. It’s incredible that they’re not joking.  

Meghan later arranges about £50 worth of tropical fruits in the shape of a rainbow for her children’s breakfast, boasts about being a “present parent”, and then tells her viewers that it’s possible to recreate this kind of magic “on a budget”. Funnily enough, it’s easy to demand that we all fill every moment “with wonder” when you have been paid $100 million to do so, as you waft about in perfectly tailored trousers, just about managing to not drop the sleeve of your cashmere sweater into all of those homemade preserves you won’t stop banging on about. A hint of self-awareness wouldn’t have gone amiss in this production. 

The point of all this wealth-flaunting and self-aggrandising nonsense appears to be all about teaching her viewers the little rituals she employs to help make a house a home. It’s a bit like Nara Smith’s trad-wife content, yet her whispery voice overs and ‘from scratch’ cooking in ball gowns do have at least an ounce of irony. Markle, however, really appears to think that calligraphy labels on beeswax candles, lavender sprigs on fresh towels, and home-making preserves are the kind of daily rituals other “working moms” (as she terms herself) can employ in their daily lives — something which anyone else not dosed up on essential oils can see is most definitely not the case. I’d advise you all save yourself the time, vomit, and eyeball-gouging, and watch something else.