‘With Love Meghan’ Pioneers New Frontiers in Unrelatability – Vulture

Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission.Netflix’s new reality series With Love, Meghan is a testament to the simple but powerful reminder that two things can be true at the same time. Meghan Markle (Meghan Sussex!) is a perfectly regular human woman who stumbled into a romance with a prince and then found herself at the center of a tornado of bullshit fueled by predatory British tabloids; a centuries-old monarchal tradition shaped by imperialism and snobbery; and basic, ugly racism. All of it was cruel and surreal — no one could ever deserve the way she was treated — and Harry and Meghan’s decision to leave the royal family is courageous. All of this is one sincere and complicated reality of Meghan Markle’s public persona.The other truth is that With Love, Meghan is an utterly deranged bizarro world voyage into the center of nothing, a fantastical monument to the captivating power of watching one woman decorate a cake with her makeup artist while communicating solely through throw-pillow adages about joy and hospitality. It is painfully defensive. Meghan comes across as constantly worried about what people will think, and because of it, the show can neither flaunt her unusual life, nor can it embrace legitimate ordinariness. It is at once wildly unattainable, like when she describes the joys of sourcing beeswax from your local beekeeper, and mind-bogglingly basic, as in building a whole segment out of arranging fruit in rainbow order. And it is quite, quite sad — a document created by a woman cursed to a life in which even the safest, blandest, emptiest statements somehow boomerang back around toward cuckoo land.On its face, With Love, Meghan is an inoffensive, fairly rote entry in the general category of home-hospitality shows. She invites her friends over to her home, she cooks them food, she demonstrates how to be a good hostess, and she extols the virtues of warmth, thoughtfulness, and adding an extra touch to make things aesthetically pleasing. She pitches herself straight down the middle of a Joanna Gaines–Martha Stewart–Ina Garten model of TV personality, and the intended effect is elevated accessibility. Make the balloon arch yourself! You just need a few cheap supplies, and you can order them online. Kids love a little gift bag, and parents appreciate them, too, because they can provide distraction on the car ride home from the party. You don’t need to go to a fancy kids’ store to pull this kind of thing together, she tells the camera while tucking child-size garden rakes into paper bags filled with burlap packets of snap-pea seeds and a single manuka-honey straw.Seen from a distance, or perhaps if viewed with the sound turned off on the TV in a periodontist’s waiting room, With Love, Meghan does fit in that mold. Meghan wanders dreamily through a garden, picking rosemary and fresh tomatoes. She laughs with her friends and guests, and she does plenty of the required demonstrations of skill. She dimples focaccia dough and pipes frosting onto a cake. She explains the mechanics of one-pot pasta dishes: The water will evaporate once you remove the lid, and the starches from the pasta will make the dish creamy without adding cream. She nods, awed and appreciative, when professional chefs appear to teach her about brining or how to make a vinaigrette.From scene to scene and line to line, though, With Love, Meghan quickly dissolves into a meaningless pile of linen and gooseberries. It does not help that Meghan has the kitchen and hospitality proficiency of a competent but unremarkable amateur. Who actually developed these pasta and cake recipes she makes? Who came up with the idea of the ladybug crostini, delicately dotted with balsamic-glaze polka dots by Meghan and her close friend Mindy Kaling? Maybe it was Meghan! But she is so reluctant to offer any specific personal details or genuine access to what’s going on in her head that nothing connects to who she really is or what she truly likes. And unfortunately, her running commentary on each new project and recipe does not sound like the commentary of someone with intensive experience in the kitchen — or even a healthy dose of self-reflection. “All good stock starts with water,” she says, describing the most basic tenet of a soup stock while also preparing a recipe that is not actually stock. “When you’ve had kids, you’re used to balancing things on your hips,” she says while carrying things around the kitchen. Before making a frittata: “But first? Coffee.” “You’re not trying to make, in a harvest basket, one meal,” she says while snipping lavender to assemble a massive gift basket of fresh produce for Tatcha founder Vicky Tsai. “You’re trying to create moments they can pick from.”With Love, Meghan is constantly feinting toward intimate relatability. These are the things she really cares about and loves! Her bees, her honey, her blackberry bushes, making a special childhood for her kids, her dogs, her husband. But the feints are so half-hearted and underwhelming that they barely seem worth the effort. Her kids and her husband are not in evidence. Her bees are tended by her kooky beekeeper, who obviously does all the hive maintenance until Meghan shows up for the fun parts, such as when the honey gets scraped from the combs. Kaling calls her Meghan Markle — which is her name — and Meghan immediately corrects her: It’s Sussex. This is the name she shares with her family! They laugh about it, Kaling performs a quick and capable apology for her misstep, and then they go back to producing cucumber sandwiches for an entirely imaginary children’s tea party while drinking Bellinis made from Meghan’s personal peach trees.There are stretches when it almost works. Meghan is good at playing the happy learner when an expert shows up to guide her through something new, and when a chef like Roy Choi keeps insisting that he and Meghan are having a wonderful time together, the effect is nearly convincing. But every instance of humor is immediately undone by a sudden departure into the uncanny valley of Meghan’s elaborate “This is a normal life” fantasy. She tells Kaling she loves to combine “high-low” for her clothing, chipperly listing off her outfit: “Zara, Loro Piana, Jenni Kayne!” (The recitation comes after Kaling attempts to ask her about her “lewk,” which elicits blank confusion from Meghan.) Her friend Delfina Blaquier comes over for a picnic, calmly explaining that it’s important to feed her athlete children plenty of carbs and protein. (They are elite polo players. Polo with the horses — not water polo.) Most crucially and hilariously, the gorgeous kitchen and the endless meticulous garden of raised flower beds where Meghan happily hosts all her guests are not part of Meghan’s house. They can’t be, for the very good reason that she does not want her home’s location to be widely known or make it a set for a huge film crew. But it’s still all a ruse, like a beautiful theme park set up for a single guest to play hostess in and stocked with in-character friends and guides to help fill out her world.This is also what makes it so tragic. At every point, Meghan seems desperate to avoid criticism and to never say anything that might give the appearance of distinction or notability. The show’s title feels entirely sincere; all she wants is to be loved, and she’s making a bid for that affection by offering up her own love to a vast and impersonal Netflix viewership. But she’s so cautious, so focused on superficialities, and so unconscious of her disconnect from everyday life. She comes off, in short, like a member of the British royal family: afraid of showing vulnerability, obsessed with appearances, and seeking affirmation from a public she cannot be part of. Nothing could be weirder or more depressing.Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism.
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