From Meghan, ‘With Love’

The arrival of With Love, Meghan on Netflix last week, two months after the Los Angeles fires delayed its original debut, offered viewers an opportunity to get answers on two critical questions about about Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (as she now apparently goes by): who is Meghan really and, perhaps more importantly, how can someone can their hands and tastebuds on her famous raspberry jam?

Unfortunately, five plus hours of lifestyle content over eight mostly dull episodes featuring Meghan cooking and crafting with friends and celebrity California chefs provides unsatisfactory answers to both queries. Instead, Meghan Sussex (Not Markle, people!) continues to be a bit of a mystery despite being one of the most famous women in the world.  We also learn that while jam is her jam, we can’t actually call it jam because of its sugar content, or something. Instead, we must call it a preserve. And when commoners can actually taste the fruity spreadable goodness remains just as muddled.

Perhaps we have to wait for Season two of With Love, Meghan to get more clarity on these critical questions. Yes, somewhat surprisingly, Netflix greenlit this series for a second season last Friday, despite it being full of stilted and mundane conversations about one-pot pastas, cakes and lots of tea along with DIY crafting and gardening in an albeit stunning California setting. That despite lukewarm-to-miserable reviews equating the series with a hostage video, a lobotomy, an “ego trip.” and a “mental institution for wealthy women.”  What did Netflix see in this show that others didn’t? Again, another mostly unanswered question.

But let’s start with what we do know. Almost a year ago, homemade jars of Meghan’s fruit jam (as she called it at the time) appeared out of the blue in the hands of some of Los Angeles’s top influencers and friends of Meghan. Lady Sussex adorned it with the brand “American Riviera Orchard,” a name that conjures the beauty and upscale culture of monied Santa Barbara, the beautiful coastal region North of Los Angeles that the Duchess and her husband, Harry, now call home. Yet the brand never took off.  In February, we found out why. Meghan announced that she changed her lifestyle brand’s name to “As Ever,” in part because of disputes with the U.S. Patent Office. And lo and behold, Netflix is now a partner on the lifestyle brand, the streamer announced last week. Go figure.

The launch of “As Ever” and the new Netflix series are a back to the future moment for the Duchess. Ten years ago, as she started to get serious with Harry, she shut down her lifestyle blog (remember those?) called The Tig. It seems Meghan really missed that part of her life and she mentions several times during With Love, that her Netflix special is about starting a new chapter in her life. After her podcast, Archetypes, didn’t find an audience and with other projects with and without Harry stalled, in some respects who could blame her for pivoting back to her former passion project when she was a star on the drama Suits? But did it have to be this meandering and boring, particularly right out of the gate?

The new Netflix series kicks off with an odd episode featuring Meghan cooking with Daniel Marin, her former makeup artist from Suits. who is in town from New York City. The two make candles and a gift basket among other things, including small talk, but the show has no real introduction. We just have Meghan annoyingly narrating everything she is doing in her kitchen. It’s not clear if the show intends for us to follow along, be inspired to try it ourselves, or just marvel at Meghan’s obvious creativity and great sense of style. It’s a pattern that repeats itself for the next seven episodes. And Daniel, who no doubt did a great job making Meghan’s skin look great on Suits, has a personality and presence that is better, um, off camera.

Additional episodes get slightly better as the Duchess improves her self narration and interacts with her funny friend, actress Mindy Kaling, as well as a group of women she plays the increasingly trendy mahjong with as part of a homemade drink-lubricated game night. Other old and new female friends, including a skincare entrepreneur and the Argentinian wife of one of Harry’s polo friends stop by to make things with Meghan and talk about making things.

One of the knocks on Meghan over the past several years is that, after having fallouts with numerous people close to her, that she is an untrustworthy friend or only has friends of convenience. Several episodes of With Love obviously push back on some of this criticism. But they aren’t very entertaining. The conversations are surface level and reveal very little of note about who Meghan really is besides her new positioning as a lifestyle entrepreneur.

Three of the episodes in With Love have Meghan interacting with select California chefs she has never met but obviously respects: L.A. food truck pioneer, Roy Choi, Santa Barbara’s Ramon Velazquez, and the legendary Alice Waters, whose Berkeley,CA-based Chez Panisse restaurant helped launch the farm-to-table movement. All three help Meghan cook one thing or another and add some food authenticity to the happenings, but the fact that she never met any of them in person previously shines through in their stilted conversations. Even Choi notes after talking about their love of cooking and their shared L.A. roots (they title the episode Two Kids from L.A), “we should have met a long time ago.” But they clearly haven’t and the Duchess just smiles in response.

But it is another remark of Choi’s in the same episode that perhaps best highlights what’s missing in the series, particularly with how little Meghan says about herself. While helping prepare some of Choi’s famous Korean fried chicken, the Duchess asks Roy if he listens to music while he cooks. Choi responds, “yeah…some lyrical hip hop, jazz, some speed metal, dark metal.” Meghan seems particularly perplexed by Choi’s interest in the morbid and aggressive form of heavy metal that is often heard in kitchens. “That doesn’t sound like The Choi of Cooking,” Meghan says in reference to Roy’s popular cookbook.

In response, the Korean-American chef notes, “(w)e all have different sides to who we are.”  It’s a potentially pithy and leading comment that could have been a jumping off point for a timely and revelatory conversation between these two powerhouses raised in multiracial Los Angeles.  Instead, the Duchess looks away and down, and says without much emotion, “That’s true. Multifaceted folks, That’s what we are.” And, then, she goes back to piling vegetables on a plate as the scene cuts out.

This conversation with Choi is symbolic of the missed opportunity for the Duchess with this series.  Instead of just presenting bland DIY lifestyle content that you can similarly find these days on thousands and thousands of Tik Toks and Facebook Reels, Meghan could have done these same things while also engaging in more interesting conversations about herself after years of being in a harsh and often unfair public eye.

Instead, the most interesting people in the series seem to be the random production team members and series director that appear randomly across the “fourth wall” of television during several episodes, or even the beekeeper who teaches the Duchess how to make honey in the opening episode. They seem more real than anything Meghan does or says.  Even her beloved dog, Guy, a cute but obviously aging beagle who appears in most of the episodes seems annoyed that she’s putting him through this (we learn that Guy sadly passed away earlier this year).

Alas, there is another season of With Love to come in the Fall. The fact that they’v shot most, if not all of it has already doesn’t give a lot of confidence that it will be any different than the first season.  But one thing will likely change when it returns: we should be able to eat some of Meghan’s famous fruit preserve while watching. At some point, we will be able to order some from her “As Ever” site, won’t we?