This image released by Netflix shows Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, in a scene from her series ‘With Love, Meghan.’The Associated Press
In episode two of her new Netflix series, With Love, Meghan, the actor and Duchess Meghan Markle presents the actor and producer Mindy Kaling with a twee footed glass dessert bowl filled with a dollop of fruit preserves, a dollop of yogurt, two raspberries and a carefully placed mint leaf. “If I were not the recipient of this,” Kaling says, “I’d be so mad at this.”
Oh, Mindy, how right you are. With Love, Meghan had me blowing raspberries, and not the garden-fresh kind, at all eight episodes when it dropped on Tuesday. (It wasn’t made available to critics beforehand, even though Netflix reportedly spent US$100-million on its deal with Markle and her husband, Duke Harry.)
The series has a simple structure. Each episode features a guest star, including the L.A. chef Roy Choi; the legendary Northern California restaurateur Alice Waters; Markle’s male bestie/makeup artist; and three female “entrepreneurs” in Markle’s new mah-jong group. Markle “shows” each guest how to prepare a few dishes for an occasion – friend sleepover, children’s party, girls’ night – along with a smidge of decorating and/or flower arranging. (My own mah-jong group, who enjoy potato chips and frozen pizzas when we play, hooted up a storm at the chicken tinga tacos and ceviche Markle serves.) Markle also prepares “a simple pleasure” for each visitor – a jar of homemade bath salts; a basket of vegetables topped by six freshly laid eggs from “Archie’s Chick Inn” – to “elevate the guest experience.”
Yet the show manages to be infuriating for so many reasons. The main one: Markle is tone deaf to this moment. The average Netflix viewer in March, 2025, is likely struggling with something and flat-out panicked about everything else. Watching Markle glide around an US$8-million Montecito “cottage” (a rented location, not her home) with jaw-dropping views and a “garden” dressed with lettuces purchased and planted in full leaf, or seeing her “cook” in a Loro Piana cashmere sweater (minimum US$1,500) using only pure white Le Creuset pots, all while insisting how down-to-earth she is – how adorable, she’s barefoot! – is not escapism, it’s what made the French decapitate Marie Antoinette.
Moreover, Markle doesn’t usefully teach viewers how to do anything – she merely shows us how beautifully she/her food stylist does everything. She arranges several splendid crudités platters – repeatedly, she tells us that she does this every day for the Duke and the heirs, and as a result they positively crave vegetables! – but does she slow down and demonstrate, step-by-step, how to do it? No. Does she acknowledge that the heirloom lettuces and fresh herbs she uses as a base layer cost more than the average person spends on dinner for four? Again, no. Yet does she “cry” when a guest says, “Perfect isn’t beautiful – things that have lived and been dropped and put together again are more beautiful?” You betcha.
Markle loves the camera and it loves her back, I will give her that. But instead of being forward-thinking or even current, the farmhouse-chic decor and pale blue/creme/soft grey palette she employs is straight out of Real Simple magazine circa 2000, and her big recipe hacks are 1) tomatoes taste good if you roast them in a low, slow oven, 2) top all food with hemp seeds “for crunch” and 3) sprinkle dried flowers on everything until the cows come home. In other words, she’s not Waters or Martha Stewart, showing us a new way to cook, decorate and be. She’s just a very pretty, very rich lady doing pretty, rich lady things.
That might not be so bad, if she owned it. Instead, she keeps insisting that she’s still an ultragenuine L.A. latchkey kid who grew up eating TV dinners, and that everyone can “elevate” (her favourite word) their lives like she does. To this I offer my three favourite spit takes.
Markle tells us that after her son, Archie, caught two trout on a camping trip, she cooked them in a salt crust. Then she cooks two branzino in a salt crust, and she uses a full box of salt for each fish. So did she have two boxes of salt on her camping trip?!
Moving on: Even carnations from the grocery store can be beautiful, Markle tells us, and to prove it she puts four carnations into a vase with about $200 worth of peonies and other luxe blooms, and then she has to spin the vase to show us two poor carnations barely visible near the bottom, and then she has the stones to look at her director and say, “Carnations!” with a can-you-believe-it sigh.
Finally: As Markle picks some ingredient or other out of the world’s most art-directed “pantry” – Mason jars of dried white beans in decorative baskets, an antique food mill, hanging herbs no one will ever eat – the camera pulls back to reveal, written on a chalkboard on the door in her superfancy calligraphy, the sentence, “I’m just winging it.” Bah ha ha ha ha!
As a palette cleanser, I spun over to TLC to watch the first two episodes of The Baldwins, the new reality series starring the actor Alec Baldwin, his yoga-teacher wife, Hilaria, their seven young children and their eight pets. It, too, is obviously a PR campaign: Baldwin’s career tanked after he accidentally fatally shot the director of photography, Halyna Hutchins, on the set of his film Rust. He’s clearly hoping that by showing constant remorse (which, to be fair, does feel authentic) in the midst of his messy family life, he may become hireable again.
I’m not sure it will work, but unlike Markle, at least Baldwin lets himself schlump around looking like hell; he seems involved in his kids’ lives (though he makes sure to pin the public fallout he had with his eldest daughter squarely on her mother, his ex-wife, Kim Basinger); he’s upfront about having two nannies and relying on his wife for everything; and he allows the camera to linger on a heap of dog poop on his dining-room rug.
Back to Markle. In the final episode, we watch her toss a block of vegetables frozen in ice to her chickens to peck at, and Duke Harry finally shows up for brunch (she shows us how to make the heirloom tomato quiche, though not the potatoes with caviar crème fraîche). But I can’t stop thinking about a moment in Kaling’s episode. “It’s so funny,” Markle says to Kaling, in a voice that’s not at all lighthearted, “you keep calling me Meghan Markle. You know I’m Sussex now.” As she goes on to explain how “meaningful” it is to share a last name with her children, the camera cuts away from Kaling’s startled-but-trying-not-to-show-it face. Kaling recovers gracefully. Viewers may never.
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