‘With Love, Meghan’ is A Show About Vessels

Discussing Meghan Markle’s Netflix series with Gossip Time’s Allie Jones.

Tomorrow at 3PM ET: I’m going live with

Under the Desk News

’s

V Spehar

! We’ll talk about the Oscars, Conclave, and other media news.

Meghan Markle in Netflix’s With Love, Meghan. Photo: Netflix.

I got motion sickness from the agenda of a single episode of With Love, Meghan. In the new Netflix series, ex-royal Meghan Markle is joined by friends for various domestic pursuits. She’s a cheerier Martha Stewart, I guess, or a more chic HGTV host.

If you don’t like Meghan Markle making bath salts, maybe you’ll like her making beeswax candles! If you don’t like her making beeswax candles, surely you’ll like her arranging “good morning and good night moments” (a bud vase) for a houseguest? And if none of that appeals to you, she’ll also take a cob of dried corn, put it in a brown paper sack, pop it in the microwave for two minutes to make popcorn that she’ll finish with truffle oil and salt. With Love, Meghan’s pilot, “Hello, Honey,” is 38 minutes that feels like running circuits; you’re back at the starting line of a new activity every few minutes. (In addition to all that, she makes pasta. And a cake.)

With Love, Meghan is no The Baldwins: The Hilaria-and-Alec Baldwin TLC reality show is a shameless freak show of one couple’s maladjustments that is transfixing in its utter weirdness. Markle’s Netflix show, by contrast, is relentlessly cheery.

Allie Jones

and I met in a Google doc to give our thoughts on the first couple episodes.

Hunter Harris: I need to be in the pitch meeting where someone says Meghan Markle’s introduction to her Netflix audience needs to involve … bath salts. Perhaps coincidentally, trailing Meghan Markle around a kitchen (not her kitchen) is what I’d imagine huffing bath salts feels like. Bizarre, exhilarating, confusing, maddening, describing everything as “joyful” and “happiness.”

I’m kind of obsessed with its blandness. It is perfect background, white noise watching, the kind of noncommittal TV that gives me no reason to ever really turn it off. In the first episode, she makes pasta with her friend and makeup artist, Daniel Martin, and I was obsessed with the fact that she’s doing all this in the kitchen while wearing gigantic sleeves. This is a show essentially about decanting: there is Himalayan salt in one vessel that we need to put into another vessel. That beeswax? Needs to be warmed over a pot of boiling water and promptly moved into a candle container. I drink juice from plebeian plastic. Everything in Meghan’s test kitchen is in an elegant jar. What do you think of it so far, Allie? And how many episodes have you watched? I’m only on the third one.

Allie Jones: I am shocked that each episode is only about 35 minutes, as I am midway through the second one and feel as though I have been watching for days. The pace is as slow as honey dripping through a sieve by the beehives on Meghan’s sprawling Montecito property, which we are only allowed to glimpse occasionally. My first big disappointment with the show is that they rented a house for the majority of filming. Show us Meghan’s real kitchen! We want to see the inside of the fridge! (The one on the show is, of course, meticulously organized à la Yolanda Hadid.)

I am also curious to know if we are seeing Meghan’s real personality on screen. She presents as extremely elder millennial. I started writing down all her little “jokes” and catchphrases: “A latte love,” “But first, coffee,” “My bacon brings all the boys to the yard,” “parfait par-tay,” “now we’re talkin’ turkey.” And then she appears genuinely confused when Mindy Kaling asks her about her “lewk” in the second episode. It’s possible this woman stopped absorbing popular culture sometime during the third season of New Girl. What do you think of Meghan’s performance as host?

HH: I’m cautious of judging her more harshly than other food-lifestyle hosts. I didn’t like that we don’t see her real kitchen, but does Ina Garten shoot in her real kitchen? My only frame of reference for this kind of programming is the hours of HGTV I consumed after school as a tween, the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen pre-cancellation, Martha Stewart’s doc (fresher in my memory than her series), and Alison Roman’s videos. I like a host who knows what she’s doing, who speaks with authority. Martha Stewart is going to show you the best way to do something; Alison Roman tells you that if you’re afraid of the eggs in your carbonara scrambling, just don’t let them scramble. That tone works for me.

Meghan presents herself not as an expert but as an obsessive tinkerer. She clearly has a sense of how she wants things to go (when her makeup artist friend asks to do something she knows he’ll fuck up, she redirects) but couches everything in a cheery “this is really so easy!” that becomes so tiresome. I like her strictness and her perfectionism. I prefer that to her showing Mindy Kaling how to throw a garden party for children (?) with ornate place settings and daisy flower crowns (??), but two wealthy women are telling me how you can do all of this from one trip to Trader Joe’s (???).

I did really like the brief moments of videos shot by Prince Harry on his iPhone, like the one of Meghan trying to make a balloon arch. Meghan basically willing the arch into existence, and that panicked, what the hell we gon’ do now-quality was fun to watch. That’s what I wanted more of. Not everything needs to have the “This is relatable! I’m relatable!” sheen.

Who did you prefer her paired with? Daniel the makeup artist or Mindy Kaling?

AJ: I think she is great with Mindy because — I agree with you here — she should really play the straight woman. She is so meticulous and could lean into that even more. I think we also need to just pause and acknowledge how absolutely stunning she is. Like, I would just watch her silently move around the kitchen in her perfectly draped linen pants. No commentary or catchphrases needed.

While we’re on the Mindy episode, we should mention a moment that’s getting picked up in the tabloids: Meghan corrects Mindy on her last name. It’s “Sussex,” not Markle, and this is important to Meghan because it’s the name she shares with her kids. This confused me, as I thought Archie and Lilibet had the last name Mountbatten-Windsor. I guess they’re all going by Sussex now? What did you make of this gentle correction, and do you like how the show is handling the undercurrent of royal drama that’s always flowing in Meg’s life?

HH: See this is what I’m talking about … I need a version of this show where she leans into just not having a last name. Can you imagine?? Every single other person on this planet has a last name but she married into the only family on earth that just … doesn’t. But it is unclear to me if the family is unified under “Sussex” or “Mountbatten-Windsor” … but at the end of the day the alliteration of “Meghan Markle” is too great to give up. (Says Hunter Harris, I know, lol.)

Her styling here is both amazing and anxiety-inducing. She’s wearing too much white to be in a kitchen! But I love her manicures. You can’t run around juicing with a cashmere Jenni Kayne sweater draped over your shoulders! The level of remove from being in a polished, chic Restoration Hardware-y Nancy Meyers-y set that’s not exactly her own zaps the show of any intimacy. I almost wish she was in an obsessively organized stainless steel test kitchen environment that wasn’t close to her own home (or how I imagine it) but not exactly her own home. Does that make any sense at all?

AJ: Yes, totally. She’s trying to have it both ways, which makes the whole experience somewhat uncanny. Unfortunately for M, she is never going to read as relatable. This is what makes me wish she was still a working royal — she was really good at it! But instead she has doomed herself to running a lifestyle empire.

Speaking of which, whyyyy can we not buy any products yet? Meghan is working those flower sprinkles into every episode, and still I can only look at a picture of them on AsEver.com. “Available Spring 2025.” Babe. Spring 2025 is here! If I can’t have Limited Edition Wildflower Honey With Honeycomb at Easter brunch I’m going to sue.

You would think she would be more motivated to make money as that Netflix deal is set to expire this year. What do you think: Will Netflix renew? Could With Love, Meghan get a second season? I already can’t really imagine watching the rest of this one.

HH: With Love, Meghan has a clearer perspective and reason for existing than “Archetypes,” a podcast about stereotypes. Meg doesn’t have kitchen bonafides, necessarily, but it at least feels in conversation with her old lifestyle blog “The Tig.” That era of the internet, of the Buzzfeed-y DIY listicle has really passed, though. I don’t want to make bath salts and I don’t want to watch her cut color-coordinated fruit. (Although she has really sold me on whatever knife she’s using.)

Big Night,

Katherine Lewin

’s excellent “dinner party store,” seems more in line with what With Love, Meghan ought to be. What if she just shows you the best version of something? The best salt, the best jam, the best knife? I just want to watch her arrange flowers and decorate tablescapes. The emphasis on joy and cheer, plus the thousand activities she does in every episode, is dizzying. Is it mean to tell a professional actress that she actually would perform best in short-form? That’s the only conclusion With Love, Meghan leaves me with. That, and I need more little jars and plates.