With Love, Meghan is a nightmare ending to a fairytale

“Has anyone in the world ever been so tickled by the sight of lettuces?” Meghan titters to chef Alice Waters, on the final episode of her new “lifestyle television series,” With Love, Meghan. Meghan’s latest venture is an exercise in how many inspirational quotes you can simper out in five hours. She’s less duchess, more Instagram influencer. She doesn’t have the pissed-off husband half-arsedly holding the camera while she explains, in excruciating detail, how to make a balloon arch. Instead, she has a plentiful Netflix crew and reported $100 million budget. 

I’m trying my hardest to find something nice to say and, well, the guests aren’t too awful and the food looks alright. In the first episode we meet Meg’s longtime friend and makeup artist Daniel Martin, who is clearly not very interested in cooking — he cuts his finger within thirty seconds of filming — or making candles and seems, honestly, weirded out by his friend’s whole demeanor and Joker-esque smile. 

In the second episode, Mindy Kaling tries to bring some light to the whole thing. Yet her attempts at banter are lost on Meghan. When Kaling quips about “Meghan Markle eating Jack in the Box,” trying to make her friend the duchess seem relatable, we see Meghan’s one genuine reaction in the whole show: “It’s so funny you keep saying ‘Meghan Markle’, you know I’m ‘Sussex,’ now,” she says before droning on at the importance her royal name has to her. “Well, now I know,” Kaling says, scolded. I asked Piers Morgan, the British YouTube host, for his thoughts on the scene. He replied: “As someone who grew up in Sussex and still has a house there, I can say with some certainty that you could interview 100,000 random people from every town and village in the county and not find anyone who has ever seen her there. And we’d like to keep it that way.”

In a recent interview with People magazine, Meghan described herself as an “entrepreneur and a female founder,” rather than an influencer. And there, once again, is where the duchess loses us. She believes that selling fruit preserve (not jam, as “jam” describes something half-fruit and half -sugar and Meghan would never do that), homemade candles and balloon arches is liberating. In reality, she is a bored housewife sipping Taittinger at midday. When Kaling comments on how early they are drinking, Meghan replies, “Welcome to Montecito!” I’ve spent time in Santa Barbara and she’s right — Meghan fits in well, fussing about table settings, helping her chefs cook elaborate lunches and having the fakest, rich-person job of all: event planning. But let’s not let Megs delude herself that her throwing an apron on and frying chicken for her husband is helping anyone. 

Brits are already locked in on what they think of Meghan, but how are Americans holding up? Well, my husband, who knows nothing about Meghan Markle apart from her royal exile to Montecito, walked out the room halfway through the second episode asking, half-joking, “Why couldn’t this house have burned down?” I think he meant the Duke and Duchess’s, not ours.

Celebrity blogger Perez Hilton says it doesn’t really matter what any of us think about Meghan’s latest show. “There isn’t much buzz around it in the industry but people on social media are talking about it because she’s such a polarizing personality,” he tells me. “Meghan has already succeeded. Not only have Netflix given her her very own show, they’ve also partnered with her on her new business. That’s a great co-sign and it’s very little risk for her. If it flops, she very probably didn’t have to put her own money into it anyway. Netflix is most likely fronting the brunt the whole cost. It’s very smart on her end — but more questionable for Netflix.”

As for Meghan’s guests, it looks and sounds as though their agents called them and asked, “Hey, could you pretend to be friends with this woman, compliment her clothes and tell her that her cooking looks ‘absolutely amazing,’ over and over again for forty minutes?” 

With Love, Meghan was commissioned to address the question, “How does one fill their days in royal exile?” Apparently the answer is by cutting fruit, re-bagging store-bought pretzels and being bored enough to make ladybird-shaped sandwiches in a bland, millennial gray house down the road from your own. But it doesn’t matter what I think, because as Hilton says, “they’re not trying to do any reputation-correcting; they are trying to make money. They live a very expensive lifestyle and have to fund it, this is a very important piece of that.” Maybe so. But the real lesson of this show is that marrying a prince doesn’t make your life a fairytale. It can turn it into a drab, domesticated nightmare — and Meghan Sussex, as she demands to be called, is proof of that.