I’m Already Bored by Meghan Markle’s New Netflix Cooking Series
The first trailer for “With Love, Meghan” dropped today
On Thursday, just as everyone rubbed the New Year’s Day sleep out of their eyes, Meghan Markle revealed the first look at her forthcoming Netflix series, With Love, Meghan. The trailer, posted to Markle’s Instagram account, showcases the Duchess of Sussex hanging out in a Montecito, California mansion with famous friends like Mindy Kaling as she harvests fresh produce, snips florals, and, and tenderly sprinkles dried flower petals onto freshly glazed doughnuts.
The eight-episode series, part of Markle and her husband Prince Harry’s deal with Netflix, will premiere on January 15, and according to Deadline, Markle hopes to “reimagine the genre of lifestyle programming.” Based on the trailer, what that looks like is a lot of celebrity cameos, glimpses of breathtaking California coastline, and “intimate” glimpses into life with Markle, her prince husband, and their adorable children. It also, unfortunately, looks incredibly dull.
This isn’t Markle’s first go at lifestyle expertise — her now-defunct blog the Tig, launched in 2014, was, according to some, “poised to become the next Goop” before she abandoned the project in preparation for life as a royal. There, she shared travel tips, playlists, and of course, recipes. But that was a decade ago, when Markle was a television actress, and the idea of her relatability was at least plausible. She could be more open and vulnerable then, before gossip rags in two countries followed her every move. Now, Markle’s image is much more tightly controlled, her movements more calculated, and those machinations feel really obvious in the context of this series. Regardless of how “relatable” Markle believes herself to be, hers is a lifestyle that very few people can actually emulate.
It’s also unclear what cooking and entertaining “tips and tricks” (as she puts it in the trailer) Markle has to offer that have not already been shared by the lifestyle gurus who precede her. What could she possibly teach us that Martha Stewart or Ina Garten haven’t already? Yet it seems Markle wants us to think of her among those ranks, a true tastemaker for the millennial generation. In this glimpse of what’s to come, though, Markle doesn’t communicate a clear point-of-view. It is lovely, yes, to watch her lovingly snip carrots and exchange enamored glances with her husband, but it is not exactly exciting television.
The show does, however, fit perfectly into the canon of shows that Markle and Harry’s company, Archewell, has produced so far. In December, the couple released Polo, a series that attempted to demonstrate that the sport isn’t just for the insanely rich. Most critics agreed that it failed to achieve any meaningful level of relatability, and noted that this was just another way that the couple was demonstrating that it was totally out of touch.
I fear that when it airs, we’ll be drawing the same conclusions about With Love, From Meghan. Her fans — Markle’s newly reactivated Instagram account already commands nearly 1 million followers — will almost assuredly love it, because it’s in keeping with her subtly glamorous brand of aspirational content. Her detractors, a portion of whom are just a bunch of racist haters who will criticize anything she does, will see it as yet another example of her privileged cluelessness. For the rest of us — those who want to see Meghan succeed but have cringed at her every misstep — here’s hoping that her forthcoming jam brand American Riviera Orchard offers something a little more compelling than a bunch of rehashed recipes and floral arranging tips.
