All smiles in Meghan’s upbeat Netflix series
Blue skies, picture-perfect flowers, intricately-prepared cakes and Californian sunshine streams through the windows. Oh, and another celeb turns up in the kitchen.
Is that like your home too? Of course not. And that’s the point really. The new Netflix series, With Love, Meghan is about escapism and aspiration, it’s a glass of something sparkling on a grey day.
We see her standing in a kitchen, albeit not her own kitchen in Montecito, gathering fruit and herbs in the garden and chatting with friends as she makes food such as foccacia, doughnuts and Korean fried chicken.
What you won’t see are references to her life as a working royal, her children Archie and Lilibet aren’t on camera and there’s only a fleeting glimpse of Prince Harry.
“I love feeding people, it’s probably my love language,” says Meghan, as she shows her culinary skills.
She makes different types of pasta, crudités, focaccia, frittata, baked fish. And with advice on how to make guests feel extra special, she shows how to arrange flowers and make DIY bath salts.
There are occasional sprinkles of references to her famous connections. We don’t get to see Prince Harry until the final episode, but we hear he enjoys bacon and likes a lot of salt.
“Well I have a family, a husband, who no matter what meal is put in front of him before he tastes it puts salt on,” Meghan explains. “So I try to under salt.”
Friends drop in. There’s the movie star Mindy Kaling, who jokes about the weight of Le Creuset saucepans. Celebrity chef Roy Choi is there. There’s designer Tracy Robbins and Victoria Jackson who ran a cosmetics business.
It’s an eight-part ode to optimism, relentlessly upbeat and feelgood, where parents, rather than clinging to glasses of Friday night white, are standing proudly behind a huge fruit platter beautifully presented in a rainbow design.
It’s all presented in lush colours, with dramatic shots of the beautiful California coast and mountains.
Whether you love or hate the TV series will almost certainly depend on what you think about Meghan, 43. And there will be strong opinions on both sides.
It’s in an entirely different genre from the previous Netflix documentary from Meghan and Prince Harry, which raked over their angry departure from royal life.
Instead we’re into a zone of gleaming smiles in polished kitchens, with a soundtrack of positive music pulsing away. “Love is in the detail, gang,” she says. And “it’s time to pop a bottle” for a glass of champagne.
Meghan dominates every moment of the 33-minute episodes of this lifestyle TV series, whether it’s cooking, gardening, chatting, dancing. Or, as the series begins, beekeeping, as we see Meghan out harvesting honey, dressed in a beekeepers’ outfit.
“It’s that reminder to do something that scares you a little bit. I think that’s part of it, but I’m trying to stay in the calm of it because it’s beautiful to be this connected,” she says approaching the beehives.
We learn about Meghan’s fashion style. She likes “high low” fashion, mixing up high street fashions with expensive designers.
There’s also clarification that her name is Sussex now and not Markle, when she challenges Mindy Kaling over using her maiden name.
“I didn’t know how meaningful it would be to me, but it just means so much to go ‘this is our family name, our little family name’,” says Meghan.
And of course there’s jam. That was trailed as the first product of her lifestyle brand that has been renamed As Ever. The jam, presumably on sale soon, is spread generously through the series. “Oh my God,” says a guest tasting the raspberry preserve, and the plugs for the jam keep coming.
As Meghan is shown picking blackberries from rows of bushes she says: “This is sort of what inspired my jam and preserve making,” with picking fruit a “daily task”.
Asked what her favourite preserve is she replies: “My grandmother used to make apple butter so I like that, it’s connected to something sentimental.”
Does that mean that those busy worker bees in the Hello Honey episode are also going to see their produce heading for the supermarket shelves? And will the beeswax candles be heading to the retailers?
Mindy Kaling jokes about way the jams were first promoted, where celebrities were sent numbered jars by Meghan.
“When I received that in the mail, a box of your preserves it was probably one of the most glamorous moments of my life,” said Kaling.
“But then I looked at the label, and it said they were something like 50. And then I of course, as a very hierarchical person, was like ‘who are these other 50? Does having a lower number make me more special…”‘
Meghan reveals she saved the number one jar for her mother, Doria Ragland as “it felt like the right thing to do”.
For those watching with an understandable sense of nosiness, this isn’t actually filmed in Meghan’s own home in Montecito. “I’m gonna prep everything here as I would at home and then bring it back to my house,” she says.
There are occasional glimpses of another life below the surface. She mentions: “I was a latchkey kid, so I grew up with a lot of fast food and TV tray meals.” Even a domestic goddess had to grow up somewhere.
She’s shown wrapping a gift and says: “I used to teach a gift-wrapping class when I was an auditioning actress.”
As a viewer, you want to pause and find out more about that. But the show rushes on. There’s a toughness here.
In the final episode we see Prince Harry briefly, congratulating her on launching her As Ever business. And she raises a toast to this “new chapter” which is “part of that creativity that I’ve missed so much”.
Does this series also mark a final departure from any prospect of a return to palace life? The whole breezy, commercial charm of the show is a world away from the royals. This feels like looking forwards to a new future, without any more haggling over the past.
Everything that Meghan does gets intense attention. That’s partly because of how she polarises opinion. People who think she’s wonderful and people who can’t stand her are all interested in watching more.
This series will inevitably get attention because of Meghan’s involvement. But will there be enough for either her fans or her detractors to get their teeth into? How strongly can you feel about a cake with a few raspberries on top? Opinions will be divided. As Ever.
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The TV presenter left the show in 2021 over his controversial comments about the Duchess of Sussex.
This week also sees the release of Split Fiction, R-Patz’s new film Mickey-17 and Meghan’s delayed TV show.
Jason Knauf says the Prince of Wales was deeply affected by the Princess of Wales’s cancer diagnosis.
The Duchess of Sussex reveals “As Ever” will be the new name for her home and cooking range.
Meghan says she is “beyond proud” of Harry in an Instagram post, while William and Kate shared a poignant image.
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The Duchess really loves day drinking and crudites: five key takeaways from With Love, Meghan
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1. Meghan really, really wants us to like her
2. The elevator pitch could have been ‘Meet the influencer love child of Marie-Antoinette and Martha Stewart’
3. Being a super-chill Californian homebody does not look very relaxing
4. England, what England?
5. The garden trug is the new Birkin bag and Le Creuset is the brand name to drop
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Homemade bath salts, beekeeping and elevating your cooking: What we learned from Meghan’s new Netflix show
After her family’s well-trodden retreat from the British royals, the new Netflix show from Meghan, Duchess of Sussex marks something of a rebrand for the former “Suits” star, positioning her as a lifestyle guru and domestic goddess.
“With Love, Meghan” consists of eight glossy episodes, each centered around Meghan hosting a different friend, offering helpful tips and tricks for being the ultimate hostess, cook and homemaker.
The series, which was filmed in Montecito and celebrates living in California, premiered on Tuesday after it was delayed from its planned release on January 15 due to the wildfires that devastated the Los Angeles region.
Like most other influencer or influencer-adjacent content, it is both aspirational and relatable, with Meghan showcasing the seeming ease with which everyone else could achieve a Pinterest-perfect lifestyle.
Stepping back into this world is familiar territory for Meghan, who previously ran a successful lifestyle blog called The Tig, which she closed down prior to marrying Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex.
Here are five things we learned from the first episode of the new series.
Preparing for houseguests seems almost like a ritual for Meghan and she shares her tips for how to best welcome them into your home.
You must think about what’s at the side of the bed for them and what’s in the bathroom for them, she says, explaining how to be a thoughtful hostess.
In that vein, she prepares a tray full of gifts for Daniel Martin – her close friend and longtime makeup artist – who is the guest in the first episode of the series.
She makes her own bath salts from a mixture of Epsom salts, arnica oil, lavender, pink salt and leaves a gap at the top of the jar for a “teabag” containing rosebuds and dried lavender. That way, the dried plants won’t get stuck in the drain. “You don’t want to have to clean this out of your bathtub after you’ve taken a nice bath,” she says.
For the bedside, Meghan arranges a small bouquet of flowers and makes some truffle popcorn in case her guests want a “late night nibble.”
Accompanied by bright closeups of yellow flowers, the series begins with Meghan watching as beekeeper Branden Aroyan pries open a beehive to harvest the honey inside.
“It’s that reminder to do something that scares you a little bit,” she says tentatively. “I’m trying to stay in the calm of it because it’s beautiful to be this connected.”
Later, Meghan scrapes the honey off the hive frame, clearly in awe of the whole process, and sieves it to get rid of the honeycomb.
She never really cared for honey before keeping bees, she says, but now she “appreciates” it so much after learning the process.
The series also contains Meghan’s tips for crafting and, in the first episode, that takes the form of candle-making.
She and Martin melt the leftover beeswax from her hives and pour it into containers with scented oils to make the candles. To keep the wick still while the candle sets, she suggests sticking it to the bottom of the container with a little wax and then slotting the top through a lollipop stick with a hole in it, laid across the rim.
They have to work fast while the wax stays at the right temperature. “We would be great in “The Amazing Race,” they quip, referencing the reality show in which teams compete to race across the world.
Throughout the first episode, Meghan constantly returns to the idea of “tiny details” making a difference when cooking, crafting and decorating, and offers tips for the audience to elevate their own homes.
She prepares a crudites platter – “there’s nothing so fancy about a crudites platter except it’s called crudites,” she says – and makes it “more artistic” by adding small fresh flowers on top of the vegetables.
When cooking spaghetti, she gives tips on how best to plate it: Put a little of the sauce on the plate first, then twist the spaghetti around a fork so it becomes a distinguishable shape rather than just a lump of pasta. She then finishes the look with some tomatoes from the sauce, basil, and a sprinkling of cheese.
And when baking a cake Meghan uses a serrated bread knife to even out each layer before assembling them. Instead of using a piping bag for the buttercream, her “hack” is to use a plastic Ziploc bag with one of the bottom corners cut off.
In this way, she pipes buttercream and raspberry jam in overlaid spirals between each layer to achieve a swirled frosting effect and make a cake that’s “beautiful on the inside.”
The raspberry jam Meghan uses to decorate the cake is homemade using berries from her garden, she says.
Viewers who continue into episode two of the show will learn there are rows of berry bushes in Meghan’s garden that produce basketfuls of fruit when they are ripe.
She then goes on to reveal that her favorite preserve is apple butter because her grandmother used to make it so it is “sentimental”; she hopes that her children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, will associate her own jam-making with sweet smells wafting through the house when they come home from school.
To originally launch her lifestyle brand in April 2024, Meghan sent jars of homemade strawberry jam to influencers and friends, each one labeled with a number from one to 50.
But labeling the jam jars caused “people … to take it very personally,” Meghan tells actress and writer Mindy Kaling, who is the featured guest in episode two.
“It was not a ranking. It was just ‘let me share them,’” she says – adding, however, that she saved the jar labeled one of 50 for her mom.
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