With Love, Meghan

I loved With Love, Meghan, Netflix’s goofy new lifestyle series. .... (If you watch any one episode, make it that one, because Choi really can cook, and his chemistry with Meghan is the kind people watch morning television for.) But her series, ultimately, is best appreciated as anthropological study—what impossibly wealthy women do for love and fulfillment—rather than a model for how the rest of us should enact our labors: half as care and half as performance.

Markle is clearly able to bond and connect with people – and there’s no doubt about her hosting capabilities – so had these been the focus this could have made a very good food programme. But they are outweighed by the focus on aspirational, good living that is otherwise so parodically behind the times it actually features a scene of Markle eating avocado toast.

The main crime the duchess commits in “With Love, Meghan” is creating a middling show that is, at worst, inoffensive.

For some, With Love, Meghan may hit the spot as an escapist irony watch. Others may balk at the interminable lifestyle churn (homemade bath salts, herb picking with trugs).

Overall, the show is calming and aesthetically pleasing, but it’s also completely eye-rolling.

No doubt in its attempt to protect its host from greater critique, presents her as nothing more than a stereotype of a perfect wife and mother. Without the ingredient of relatability, which audiences crave more than anything, the series doesn’t serve up much more than fancy recipes.

With Love, Meghan is a dusting of flower sprinkles that can’t hide the blandness of the cookie—a polite but distant dispatch from a rented kitchen down the road in lieu of truly welcoming us into her life.

One of the oddest things about With Love, Meghan is that parts of it are a cooking show – think Gwyneth Paltrow does Saturday Kitchen – but she doesn’t appear to be very good at cooking, or particularly to enjoy it, other than arranging vegetables and fruit on platters.

A disappointment for those of us hoping for something more authentic.

It is all the relentless smiling, the desperate upbeatness of this high-spec, lavish production, that jars. At least I suspect it will with a more cynical British audience. Americans may feel differently.

The result is not aspirational; it's grating and tiresome, as pleasant ideas for hosting are packaged with unattainable and frankly impractical additions.

It’s a failure at both being particularly instructive and at giving us any glimpse into the “real” Meghan—let alone any sort of personableness or starpower that we’ve, for whatever reason, been deprived of seeing. It’s not entertaining or revelatory.

She’s so cautious, so focused on superficialities, and so unconscious of her disconnect from everyday life. She comes off, in short, like a member of the British royal family: afraid of showing vulnerability, obsessed with appearances, and seeking affirmation from a public she cannot be part of. Nothing could be weirder or more depressing.

There isn’t enough here to justify the running time, nor its star’s belief we’ll keep watching. The show plays out like a forced march, one in which Meghan’s guests must, as the price of getting to share an afternoon in a made-for-TV kitchen with her, praise her first.

It’s the lack of humour, irony, self-awareness and apprehension of the reality of this deeply unequal and apocalyptic world that makes With Love, Meghan so unlovable in the end.