Since the Duchess of Sussex’s With Love, Meghan trailer dropped, there has been a lot of rage and mockery from the usual suspects. I think even some of Meghan’s supporters feed on the drama of arguing with or about her most hateful critics, but I’ve always tried to balance “gossip/clapback” with not wanting to amplify the cruelest and stupidest narratives out there. Basically, people should be wary of the back-and-forth outrage machine. In many ways, Meghan has already overwhelmingly won – act like you support the victorious. What I find most interesting about the current outrage cycle is how bored her critics are with always forcing themselves to hate every single thing Meghan does and says. With Love, Meghan is just a show about cooking and entertaining, why all the drama? Which is sort of the point of this latest column in the New York Times: “Martha, Nigella, Meghan Markle?” It was written by Louis Staples, who is “based in London and writes often on the royal family, social media and pop culture.” Note: this was written and published before WLM’s release date was pushed back to March. Some highlights:
The WLM trailer: The nearly two-minute ad, set to the hopeful tones of “Do You Believe in Magic” by the Lovin’ Spoonful, which rolled out to much fanfare this month, casts Meghan as something of a domestic goddess. We see her wearing an apron and carrying artfully presented baskets of intimidatingly fresh-looking vegetables, creating colorful floral arrangements and even harvesting her own honey…Since it was announced, the existence of the show has been met with a noisy, and perhaps predictable, backlash. The criticism has been most intense in British legacy media, which is already panning Meghan’s turn as the millennial Martha Stewart of Montecito.
Setting a different narrative: Watching Meghan’s many critics rage-post about fairly standard elements — like the show reportedly being filmed in a rented property not far from the Sussexes’ actual home — it’s clear that most of them were always going to hate the show. But this rebrand as the duchess of domesticity is a very shrewd move for Meghan nonetheless. The show’s concept appears to combine the fantasy of Meghan as a princess in exile while reactivating parts of her pre-royal public persona, when she ran her own lifestyle website, The Tig. With so many eyes on Meghan, she might finally be allowed to change — and more crucially, sell a different narrative about herself. After years of Meghan and her husband, Prince Harry, pleading for privacy while also seeking publicity, she will now participate in the attention economy in a more clear-cut, direct way.
The problem with the Sussexes’ royal tell-alls: Since their relationship began in 2016, the story of the Sussexes has been defined by feuds… With each new appearance, the duo have provided a steady drip of scandalous allegations. The problem the Sussexes have run into is that eventually, retelling your story starts to bore — and annoy — your audience. Even those who had sympathy for them and believed they had been badly mistreated began to tire of the couple monetizing their victimhood.
Meghan’s solo strength: The biggest strength of “With Love, Meghan” is that it appears to be something completely different. The series is produced by Archewell Productions, the couple’s production company, so what we’ll see is likely to be tightly controlled. But the show allows Meghan to break out of the cycle of re-litigating the royal feud on different mediums, which put the couple at risk of irrelevance. With frequent references to love, friendship and joy, the message of the show seems to be relentless positivity.
The British press’s beef: Since the Sussexes settled in California, the British press’s main beef has been that they gave up their royal status to become “celebrities,” a class of citizen considered uncouth by comparison. What’s often overlooked in the case of the British press versus Meghan is an underlying snobbery and distrust over the fact that she’s American. In recent years, Prince Harry has drawn parallels between the treatment of his wife and his mother, Princess Diana, whose tragic death was a result of being hounded by the tabloids. The British press, however, have more closely aligned Meghan with another woman who married into the family: Wallis Simpson, the American socialite who married Edward, the Duke of Windsor, after he abdicated the throne to be with her, causing a crisis that jeopardized the monarchy itself. Like Simpson, Meghan has been portrayed as a grifter who is both disrespectful to the royal institution and determined to profit from her association with it.
The runaway princess narrative: To understand the show’s chances for success, consider that Meghan has not one public persona but two. Yes, there’s the version of her that enrages her detractors, who have zero desire to be told how to elevate their lives by a duchess who frolics around a mansion with immaculately blow-dried hair and annoyingly perfect makeup. But in the eyes of her fans, she is an unfairly persecuted runaway princess who was swept into a storm. Her life was a fairy-tale turned into a nightmare — and now it’s back to a fantasy again. “With Love, Meghan” reintroduces her to those in the middle while still giving her true believers a chance to participate in that fantasy, in which their heroine is finally finding her feet on the other side of adversity, one edible flower at a time.
I excerpted this op-ed because A) it was in the NYT and that’s a big deal and B) because I thought Staples was relatively fair to Meghan. I expected much worse, especially from a London-based writer. That being said, Staples still pushes one particular agenda which we’ve heard for years now. That agenda? That Meghan and Harry shouldn’t continue to talk about what was done to them at the hands of the Windsors and the British press and that people will get bored or tired of their “royal tell-alls.” That’s a narrative which came straight from the Windsors and the British press, and as we’ve seen multiple times over the past five years, nothing could be further from the truth. Harry and Meghan’s most successful interviews, ventures and projects have been those centered on what happened to them and what is still happening to them. If Meghan wrote her memoir, it would be a huge success because people know that she still hasn’t talked about all of the sh-t those people did to her. Still, even if I think it would be fine if Harry and Meghan continued to tell their stories, I’m also glad that Meghan is projecting an air of “I moved on a while ago, this cooking/entertaining show is who I really am.”
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images, Netflix.
