"With Love, Meghan" Gets a Raspberry from Audiences

How the first season fared with critics and viewers, and why we'll see more episodes in the autumn

Meghan celebrates the second season of “With Love, Meghan” by wearing a bespoke hat

Only Meghan Markle (not technically surnamed Sussex as she now claims) could turn a niche cooking and lifestyle show into a culturally polarizing phenomenon. Just 72 hours after its debut on Netflix, she announced on Instagram that “With Love, Meghan” will return for a second season in the fall. “Lettuce romaine calm,” she wrote in her familiar punster fashion. But she could not remain calm for long. “Oh, I love ASMR!” she declared. For readers unfamiliar with social media lingo, ASMR refers to mild euphoria accompanied by positive vibes and a tingling sensation from the scalp and down the spine.

It is not strictly speaking a “renewal,” since production of the second season wrapped up in January. According to the Hollywood publication Deadline, the series “was originally greenlit for dual seasons.” It will face strong headwinds created by a critical mauling of season one and an online slugfest between fans and foes, many of whom won’t forgive Meghan for trashing the royal family in her interview with Oprah Winfrey and the Netflix series, “Harry & Meghan”. The statistics on this dynamic are fascinating, and I’ll highlight them below.

“Look how fun that is!”

I watched all eight episodes of season one—from “Hello Honey!” to “Feels Like Home.” It wasn’t exactly “fun,” as Meghan urged on her viewers no fewer than twenty times. (“Look how fun that is!”) But it was revealing in ways I’ll examine. I’ll even disclose who in the royal family took Mah-Jongg lessons a century before Meghan learned to play as a “really fun” game that became “the background of the expansion of friendship.”

Critics savaged “With Love, Meghan” across the board. The Guardian called it “toe-curling stuff,” exuding “a vacuous over styled joylessness.” Writing in The Telegraph, veteran arts and entertainment editor Anita Singh said it was an “exercise in narcissism, filled with extravagant brunches, celebrity pals, and business plugs…It is all about ‘the joy of hostessing’ because Meghan is extremely welcoming to everyone, which you will know unless you are her father, her siblings, her father-in-law, her stepmother-in-law, her brother-in-law, her sister-in-law, 99 per cent of her husband’s old friends or Piers Morgan.” Harper’s Bazaar’s Bianca Betancourt offered one outlier view, saying that Meghan “really does strike a fine balance of giving audiences what they want to see…All the recipes do look quite good without being unobtainable for the regular person at home.” Vanity Fair backhandedly paid tribute to Meghan’s “monument to effort.”

“An unrelatable lavish lifestyle series”

Most ominous for Meghan were the reviews in Hollywood’s two most influential publications. Variety’s lengthy dissection of a “celebration of all things Duchess of Sussex” concluded that “no amount of praise seems enough…The show plays out like a forced march…. made with a great deal of love—in the sense that the greatest love of all is the one that a person has for herself.” The Hollywood Reporter dismissed “With Love, Meghan” as “an unrelatable lavish lifestyle series.”

Parodies were inevitable. Michael Pavano on Instagram (wearing a Meghan wig) mocked the “harvest basket” she created in episode seven for her “dear friend and neighbor” Vicky Tsai, a “skin care guru” who is “one of the most grounded people I’ve ever met.” With fruits and vegetables picked from her enormous garden, Meghan took her viewers through a carefully constructed arrangement including Napa cabbage and cucumbers “stem side down, more aesthetically pleasing.” In Pavano’s reel for his 265,000 followers, “Meghan” displayed “peanut butter pretzels from the garden” in a labeled plastic bag, frozen raspberries and blackberries in a mason jar tagged “farm fresh berries,” and canned Hunt’s tomato sauce described as “Homegrown Heirlooms.”

Meghan with Vicky Tsai removing pot-stickers from a skillet

“I enjoy doing things with intention”

Notwithstanding the comic potential of Meghan’s lofty pronouncements— “I enjoy doing things with intention”—she is actually a believable foodie with a sophisticated palate. She knows her way around terms like “macerate,” she can fillet a salt-baked fish, and she seems skilled with seasonings. While not professionally trained, she learned from her mother, who made gumbo and soul food with “a lot of flavor and a lot of kick,” and she “watched a lot of cooking shows.” Her admiration of “the translucence” of radishes felt genuine, as did her focus on the creative presentation of meals— “when food can be art.”

But Meghan is neither as theatrical as Julia Child nor as intellectual as the character Elizabeth Zott who used cooking to leaven Lessons in Chemistry. “With Love, Meghan” dawdled along with drawn-out scenes of beekeeping, chicken feeding, and egg collecting, then hurriedly explained recipes, some of them fussy and complex. Viewers know Meghan is a trained actress and the show’s conversational format is tightly scripted—even the “accidents” like milk nearly boiling over and pot-stickers sliding onto the kitchen counter seemed contrived. Everything was too pristine in the rented house with the deluxe kitchen. Meghan actually said she wanted to evoke the romcom feel and luxurious interiors of a “Nancy Meyers movie.” She boasted that she was not “messy… I always clean as I go” and said her toddler daughter Lilibet invented a song called “Clean as you go.” But we never saw Meghan actually tidying and washing up like a normal cook. The great irony is that despite her insistence that “we’re not in the pursuit of perfection,” she imposed and praised perfection at every turn. “Love is in the details, gang,” she said.