No, in With Love, Meghan, she’s just a simple country wife who likes to throw garden tea parties and make fruit platters. Her Montecito home is the new Petit Trianon, Marie Antoinette’s cottage on the grounds of Versaille, to which she would flee when the rigours of a hidebound monarchy became too much for her delicate sensibilities.
The show features lots of close-ups of lavender growing in the Californian sunshine and shots of Markle picking berries off the vine, doing things with intention and making things special for the little ones. It features healing elixirs, cozy baths, flower sprinkles, ladybird crostinis. She wears billowing white sleeves while making frittatas. She loves birdsong. You get the idea.
At one point, Meghan sweeps through a garden, holding a wicker basket laden with fruit, and then announces: ‘This is sort of what inspired my jam and preserve making.’ She makes tea using only dried fruit and the warmth of the Sun.
She has Beekeeper Branden, who tends to her many bee colonies. When visiting said bees, she uses her ‘bee voice’ for ‘good vibes’. ‘When you burn a pure beeswax candle, [it purifies] the air’, the beekeeper tells her. Such joyous news elicits a hug from the duchess.
Each episode features a semi-famous guest. The show revolves around the great lengths Meghan will go to so that they understand that she is deeply committed to making them feel special. And Meghan really, really, really wants her guests – and by extension, her viewers – to know she loves them.
If the guest has a dog, Meghan makes dog biscuits from scratch. If a guest is staying the night, she picks ‘bedside blooms’ to place on the nightstand, before whipping up a batch of homemade bath salts for the guest bathroom. She labels her creations in a flowery script and ceremoniously hands them over. ‘The joy of hosting for me is surprising people with moments that let them know I was really thinking of their whole experience, from morning until evening’, she says. That sounds vaguely menacing to me, but okay.
Meghan and the guest also perform a series of tasks and crafts, because apparently she needs to be doing something at all times. Each episode drives towards the point where the guest says – often unconvincingly – how kind Meghan is, how hard she works, how great she is at being herself, as she looks on with wide eyes and expectant face for the words of affirmation to gush forth.
It becomes clear that hanging out with her, which is what she really wants us to want to do, would be an endurance exercise. She is, to put it mildly, an over-thinker. ‘When I’m putting together a kids’ party’, she says, ‘I always think about all the senses. The sights, the smells – what is the music you’re hearing? Is that just as inspiring?’ Other planning tips for a kids’ birthday party include a parents’ coffee bar with a garden motif on the to-go cups. ‘I’m always thinking about the parent experience’, she says with an unsettling gravity.
The thing is, I actually believe her. She is clearly a woman who knows no chill. A woman who cannot do a single mundane thing – like making coffee for parents at a kids’ birthday party – without turning it into a signifier of great importance. She strains to show how much she cares. No one cares more than her! You, the guest, must be comfortable, the most comfortable you have ever been since you were floating in the warmth of your mother’s amniotic fluid. Every single step you take in this woman’s house – from the front door to the shitter – has been obsessed over, to make sure you come away knowing deep in your bones that no one wants you to enjoy yourself more than Megan Fucking Markle, the duchess of flower sprinkles. ‘I never get fussy with place settings’, she claims, before describing in detail what each place setting needs: ‘A beautiful flower on each one, or a sprig of rosemary or mint…’
‘I need to impress this man!’, Meghan says before the arrival of one of her celebrity guests who I’ve never heard of. ‘Not just with my donuts, with my tidiness, with my kitchen savvy, my cleanliness.’ I wonder to myself whether she realises she is saying this out loud. It starts to feel like being inside this woman’s head would be incredibly stressful and unpleasant. She is quite mad. Most of her guests seem to register this at some point, as there is always a slight awkwardness that they attempt to cover up with mundane stories and unconvincing flattery.
The best episode is with television star Mindy Kaling, who at one point asks with a hint of an edge in her voice: ‘Are you Tinkerbell?’ The duchess attempts to convince Kaling that she’s just a normal gal, who grew up eating Taco Bell and microwave dinners. But then Meghan ruins it by asking, ‘I don’t know if you go all out for your kids’ parties?’. And Kaling replies in a deadpan voice: ‘The woman I hire does.’ This leads to an uncomfortable moment when the duchess realises she might be doing a working woman out of a job.
Undeterred, she ropes an unconvinced Kaling into a series of homemaking tasks. They make sandwiches cut into cute shapes and flecked with flower sprinkles (sprinkles feature heavily in the show). They (well, mostly Meghan) make a balloon arch, while Kaling pounds back the Bellinis. Then, another craft! This time, daisy chains. Christ, will the tasks never end? Mindy is of the same mind. ‘This part of the visit has been a low point for me’, she says. Another couple of Bellinis and Kaling is sent on her way, with a gift bag of course.
Every second of this show is a breathtaking spectacle of privileged self-regard hiding under a bushel of organic, homegrown produce. Every line out of Meghan’s mouth could easily be satire. It is so over the top, so extra, that I quickly start to feel kind of bad for her. She is obviously trying to be a mix of Martha Stewart and Gwyneth Paltrow, but she has none of the natural confidence or knowing charm of either of them.
With Love, Meghan is a clawing, desperate attempt by Markle to seem relatable, kind, wholesome, generous. It’s so off-putting and over the top that it fails to do this miserably. But it does at least make it clear why she did not want to live her life in the shadow of the British monarchy. Even if she had married the future king and not the spare, not even a throne and a crown would have been validation enough.
Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.
Watch the trailer for With Love, Meghan here:
