Meghan Markle gets refreshingly more real in Season 2 of With Love, Meghan | Canada Voices

The Duchess of Sussex is back for Season 2 of With Love, Meghan, her Netflix lifestyle exercise, to tell us that we should always have puff pastry in our freezers; that water-marbling fabric is “easy” (if you have custom trays, the correct mysterious chemicals, a dozen colours of special inks, a “crafting barn” large enough to hang a clothesline, and staff to spread the drop cloths); that making Thai iced tea is “simple” (even though her version involves buying boba, whipping up brown sugar simple syrup, brewing specialty teas, and having on hand adorable wide straws); that home cooks should “work with what you have” (when her set kitchen has literally everything); and that a jar of edible flower sprinkles – which sells for US$15 in her As Ever product line, but Amazon offers for $8 – can help us find “tiny bits of magic in the everyday” (even though the internet lambasted her about them in Season 1, giddily comparing them to gerbil food).

Wait, wait, wait. I was mean to Ms. Sussex when the series first premiered in March, and I meant to be nicer to her this time. But: Though some corrections seem to have been made for Season 2, both seasons were shot back-to-back, so enough of Meghan’s tone-deafness around her extreme privilege remains that it’s hard not to call her on some of it. She always wanted to make homemade graham crackers and marshmallows! She always wanted to make homemade naan!

In fact, throughout the season, she makes homemade versions of things no one else on Earth has the time to home-make, including McDonald’s style apple pies, s’mores, rosewater, Parker House rolls, and salt and vinegar potato chips. (Do you have two kinds of vinegar powder in your pantry? I do not.)

She keeps saying things like, “Everything is easier than it seems,” directly after making things that are diabolically complicated, and things like, “We just find ourselves under a beautiful canopy of passionfruit,” when it’s obvious that many people built that canopy for her and many other people directed her to her mark underneath it.

Ack, I promised to be nicer! Okay: Meghan is extremely pretty. She looks pretty at every moment. She looks pretty sipping coffee; she looks pretty chewing. The way she moves her hands is pretty and her clothes are pretty and her Montecito, Calif., set is insanely pretty, with its sunset-painted ocean and abundant flower and vegetable gardens and all-white-but-stain-free Le Creuset cookware. The escapism her series offers feels more welcome now, even necessary, bruised as we are by the oil spill of bad news pumping ceaselessly from the south.

Last season, the episodes were built around occasions – kid’s birthday tea, women’s mahjong night – and the lavishness was risible. This season, each episode features an ingredient, which feels better. The guests are great: fewer of Meghan’s pals — though model Chrissy Teigen is a hoot, plus she drags in her husband, musician John Legend — and more star chefs, including David Chang (Momofuku), Christina Tosi (Milk Bar), Samin Nosrat (author of Salt Fat Acid Heat), and, most delightfully, José Andrés, award-winning restaurateur and founder of World Central Kitchen, a non-profit that provides meals during natural disasters.

He arrives with a full leg of Iberian ham and a barrel of blue cheese over his shoulder like a Spanish Santa Claus, and bounds around the kitchen like a joyful springer spaniel. Husband Harry does not appear, other than in a Polaroid with guest chef Clare Smyth (her London restaurant, Core, has three Michelin stars), who makes the cheffiest meal, and also made the Sussex’s wedding and anniversary dinners.

Meghan does tell us the following about Harry: He was the first to say, “I love you” — on their third date, which happened to be camping for five days in Botswana (oh, we see a snapshot of him in their tent, too). The night he proposed, she roasted a chicken. She had ball caps made for his 40th birthday party pals that read PH40. He mocks her for not pronouncing the “h” in herbs, and he cares not for cinnamon nor lobster. Her utter sang-froid as she says, more than once, “When we used to live in London …” made me snort every time.

I do have to give Meghan this: Her rapport with her guests this season is mostly lovely, less stiff than last. She’s very good at getting them to talk about their childhoods, the foods they loved and why, often involving grandmothers.

She nudges Jay Shetty, the entrepreneur and life coach, to reveal that when he was a kid, chai was his family’s only-on-Sunday treat. When she home-makes lavashak (Iranian fruit leather) for Nosrat, and presents Tan France, the Queer Eye star, with an antique masala box, both are moved, and so was I.

It’s also pretty moving what Meghan reveals about herself. Forget her lines like, “My ayurvedic doctor made me eat so many dates when I was pregnant” and “I rubbed hinga on Archie’s bellybutton when he had a tummy ache” and “I always travel with my own silk pillowcase.”

Listen instead for moments like these: She used to be so nervous auditioning that her chest would go blotchy. Her post-audition treat was that drive-through McD’s apple pie. She and Teigen were two of the suitcase-holding background girls on the game show Deal or No Deal, and she was thrilled to have the job, because she got medical insurance. After insisting (on repeat) that she likes to be unfussy, she admits that she snuck back outside to tweak a flower arrangement she made.

Those are the moments that let us imagine what it must be like for Meghan to find herself where she is now: an ex-actress as mocked as she is loved, whose US$100-million Netflix deal is set to expire in September. An ex-Royal who probably sincerely hoped she could help update that extremely problematic yet weirdly beloved institution. A woman who needs to appear confident, and also needs to believe she’s “winging it,” because maybe that’s the only way she can reconcile a divide she feels within herself.

At its best, her series encourages viewers to honour nature and its bounty, and to try, in the midst of their harried lives, to find moments where they can slow down, be present, add beauty. Because who doesn’t need that?

What we don’t need is for Meghan to wallpaper over her (understandable) anxieties with useless faux-fanciness, like the ridiculously finicky teensy dried-flower resin charms she makes with Teigen. Though she genuinely seems to want to be generous, no one, but no one, wants “gifts” like those. Get realer, Meghan. That’s your true best look, your true best life.