Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, live on a stunning estate in Montecito, an upscale coastal enclave near Santa Barbara, Calif. Purchased for almost $15 million in 2020 and now estimated to be worth twice as much, the home where the couple is raising their two children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, has roughly 18,000 square feet of interior space; one journalist who profiled Meghan described it as “the kind of big that startles you into remembering that unimaginable wealth is actually someone’s daily reality.” The five-acre grounds feature gardens, a pool, a tennis court, a guest house, and other outbuildings. But you won’t see any of this in With Love, Meghan, the Duchess’ new Netflix lifestyle show. It was shot at a rental a few miles away with its own Nancy Meyers kitchen and lush gardens.
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Meghan isn’t exactly pretending that she’s welcoming us into her home; she has spoken about her choice to film elsewhere and, in the show, occasionally refers to the backdrop as a set. In an interview with People, she explained that she wanted to preserve the estate as a “safe haven” for her family, rather than transforming it into a bustling ad-hoc TV studio. It’s a prudent decision, especially when you consider that inviting dozens of strangers into their private space would pose a unique security risk for one of the world’s most surveilled families. Yet it captures a fundamental frustration about the expatriate-era Sussexes and their implicit promise to earn our attention—and eight-figure content deals from some of the biggest platforms in media—by showing us the reality behind a royal veneer. There have been exceptions, like Harry’s blunt memoir, Spare, and their revelatory 2021 Oprah interview. But with each glossy new program, podcast, and lifestyle brand, the promise of authenticity has given way to an impersonal performance of perfection. With Love, Meghan might be the most performative example to date.
The eight-episode series takes a form similar to many recent celebrities-in-the-kitchen shows, from Selena Gomez’s lockdown-era Max project Selena + Chef to Netflix’s own short-lived Paris Hilton vehicle, Cooking With Paris. Each 33-ish-minute installment takes place mostly in the rental property’s generically beautiful, light-flooded kitchen, where Meghan works alongside a rotating cast of friends and synergistic acquaintances to prepare for some manufactured occasion or other. While non-chef pals like Mindy Kaling and Daniel Martin, Meghan’s makeup artist since her Suits years, marvel at the Duchess’ domestic-goddess chops, celebrity chefs including Alice Waters and Roy Choi help her whip up their recipes. With Love wants to be more than just a cooking show, though, aspiring to the higher form of entertaining mastered across media by Martha Stewart. Meghan doesn’t just cater her backyard brunches and teas; she shows us how to make balloon arches and flower arrangements and gift bags, soak hand towels in lavender water and throw together homemade bath salts for the guest bathroom.
It isn’t that the persona she brings to the show is unlikable. On the contrary, as a host she radiates a sort of nonspecific playfulness and magnanimity that gives viewers who don’t come in with the determinedly anti-Meghan agenda of certain British tabloids very little to dislike. She talks about her passion for hospitality without, to her credit, constantly talking up her soon-to-be-launched fancy-food brand, As Ever. (Plenty of the items she makes and uses on With Love, including the edible flower petals of questionable utility she sprinkles on everything, are among the products that fans will eventually be able to buy from it). Her personal anecdotes revolve around vague childhood memories or the culinary preferences of her husband and kids. Guests are always telling stories that showcase her thoughtfulness, as she humbly deflects.
This is the kind of performance that would approach Stepford Wives territory if Meghan wasn’t so careful to inject relatable details. When Kaling remarks upon her tasteful beige ensemble, the Duchess proudly reveals that she’s wearing Zara (alongside quiet-luxury status brand Loro Piana). She’s not fussy with her finishes, as she often reminds us. “We’re not in the pursuit of perfection,” she says in the finale. “We’re in the pursuit of joy.” The vibe is high-end millennial influencer—a supermom in earth-tone cashmere and designer denim whose impeccable taste makes even her messiest creations aspirational—infused with the pervasive sense that Meghan is an extremely special person who would never be so gauche as to point out her specialness.
There’s a difference between this perfectly imperfect character and the perfectionism of Stewart, whose high-strung nature, robust ego, and fixation on flawless surfaces inject a compelling note of neurosis into everything she does. As demonstrated by the groundswell of goodwill that last year’s hit documentary Martha generated for Stewart—and particularly her brutal honesty—a prickly personality can be so much more fascinating than a pleasant persona that screams “focus group.” Every lifestyle guru worth watching has some uniquely irrepressible quality, from the Martha-like obsessiveness with which Gwyneth approaches wellness to Oprah’s talent for penetrating conversation. One tier down, Ina Garten is never more lovable than when she’s pouring herself a big drink. Whether you love them or hate them, the sheer derangement of their hyperfeminine aesthetics make it hard to look away from social media’s tradwife influencers.
But Harry and Meghan appear to possess no qualities in enthralling excess. The irony of their endless self-portraiture—her single-season Spotify podcast Archetypes, the couple’s surface-level interactions with the non-Oprah media, the eponymous 2022 Netflix docuseries that also felt like a commercial for their relatability, and now With Love—is that the more they say about themselves, the less real they seem. There has to be something remarkable, besides her jam-making skills, about a woman with the strength of will to extricate herself, her children, and a husband who’d spent his whole life within the institution from the notoriously controlling British royal family. (Wallis Simpson was certainly one of a kind.) And yet, now that they’ve escaped the Firm, it’s as though the Sussexes have constructed an equally rigid propaganda machine to serve their purposes rather than those of the Crown. With Love, Meghan is a dusting of flower sprinkles that can’t hide the blandness of the cookie—a polite but distant dispatch from a rented kitchen down the road in lieu of truly welcoming us into her life.
