There’s no shortage of commentary about the Duchess of Sussex’s latest Netflix show, With Love, Meghan. I think most British networks had special coverage of WLM, and of course British outlets are flooding the zone with bad reviews. I haven’t finished WLM, but I’m enjoying it, and my favorite episode thus far was the one with Roy Choi, an LA restauranter. That showed Meghan learning from a chef she admired, and acting as sous chef, helping to make Korean food and sauces. The pacing on that episode was a lot different and they made so much food… and Meghan gave almost all of it to the crew!!
Anyway, what’s remarkable is just how many people have already watched every episode… just to scream about how “boring” it is or how Meghan is [insert insult here]. It’s also sadly notable that the bad reviews aren’t just coming from British outlets. It looks like there was an international effort to disparage a little cooking and entertaining show:
Meghan Markle probably only ever expected her new show, With Love, Meghan, to get terrible reviews in the U.K. press, which has a longstanding animus against the duchess, who is tremendously unpopular in Britain due to her and Harry’s perceived sell out of the British royal family. However, she can hardly have predicted the scorching nature of the potentially career-ending reviews she is receiving in America, led by Hollywood industry bible Variety, which compared watching her show to a “forced march.”
In a brutal takedown of the new show, Variety paints the duchess as a narcissist for whom “no amount of praise seems enough” and questions why a show purportedly about Meghan’s life would be shot at a stand-in home up the road. It mocks the struggle “to fill eight long episodes with only a certain number of new ideas” and notes that “Meghan’s quirks come to seem like affectations, from the multiple times she remarks on the beauty of an egg yolk to her dedication to placing ‘edible flowers’ on just about any comestible.”
The review then says, “The show plays out like a forced march, one in which Meghan’s guests must, as the price of getting to share an afternoon in a made-for-TV kitchen with her, praise her first.” It concludes with another dig at Meghan’s self-absorption, saying: “With Love, Meghan is 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.”
Another U.S. publication, Time Magazine, found the show and its star wanting, saying of Meghan: “With each glossy new program, podcast, and lifestyle brand, the promise of authenticity has given way to an impersonal performance of perfection. With Love, Meghan might be the most performative example to date.” Later, the review declares itself baffled by the blandness of the whole affair, saying: “There has to be something remarkable, besides her jam-making skills, about a woman with the strength of will to extricate herself, her children, and a husband who’d spent his whole life within the institution from the notoriously controlling British royal family.”
Another savage review from an outlet with no axe to grind on behalf of the British royal family appeared in Tuesday’s Irish Times which declares, “a black hole of beige throughout.” It adds: “The big conceit is that we, the impoverished viewers, can hang with Meghan for a few precious hours. And yet the velvet rope is always in sight. Filming takes place not in Meghan’s actual house but in some sort of guest mansion adjoining her property, and if there are passing references to her husband and children, we never see them on screen. With Love, Meghan is trying to sell us on Meghan’s lifestyle without actually showing us any of it…the ‘banter’ between host and guests has all the spark of a dead battery on a frosty morning.”
Again, I expected the negativity from the Mail, the Telegraph, the Mirror. I guess I didn’t expect it from the Guardian, Variety, Time Magazine, etc. That’s the good thing about Meghan’s promotional blitz this week though – she’s doing her own “flood the zone” campaign with positivity. One way or the other, people are going to have opinions about her and they’re definitely going to watch WLM. I’m getting a similar vibe to Archetypes too – as in, there’s a learning curve and Meghan is still figuring out what works within the show. Archetypes had a steep improvement the further people got within the pod, and I suspect that if Netflix greenlights a second WLM season – which they should do – Meghan will make some adjustments here and there, as she did on Archetypes.
Photos courtesy of Netflix.
