Meghan Markle probably only ever expected her new show, With Love, Meghan, to get terrible reviews in the U.K. press, which has a longstanding animus against the duchess, who is tremendously unpopular in Britain due to her and Harry’s perceived sell-out of the royal family.
However, she can hardly have predicted the scorching nature of the potentially career-ending reviews she is receiving in America, led by Hollywood industry bible Variety, which compared watching her show to a “forced march.”
In a brutal takedown of the new show, Variety paints the duchess as a narcissist for whom “no amount of praise seems enough” and questions why a show purportedly about Meghan’s life would be shot at a stand-in home up the road.
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It mocks the struggle “to fill eight long episodes with only a certain number of new ideas” and notes that “Meghan’s quirks come to seem like affectations, from the multiple times she remarks on the beauty of an egg yolk to her dedication to placing ‘edible flowers’ on just about any comestible.”
The review then says, “The show plays out like a forced march, one in which Meghan’s guests must, as the price of getting to share an afternoon in a made-for-TV kitchen with her, praise her first.”
It concludes with another dig at Meghan’s self-absorption, saying: “With Love, Meghan is made with a great deal of love—in the sense that the greatest love of all is the one that a person has for herself.”
Another U.S. publication, Time magazine, found the show and its star wanting, saying of Meghan: “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.”
Later, the review declares itself baffled by the blandness of the whole affair, saying: “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.”
Another savage review from an outlet with no axe to grind on behalf of the British royal family appeared in Tuesday’s Irish Times which declares, “a black hole of beige throughout.”
It adds: “The big conceit is that we, the impoverished viewers, can hang with Meghan for a few precious hours. And yet the velvet rope is always in sight. Filming takes place not in Meghan’s actual house but in some sort of guest mansion adjoining her property, and if there are passing references to her husband and children, we never see them on screen. With Love, Meghan is trying to sell us on Meghan’s lifestyle without actually showing us any of it…the ‘banter’ between host and guests has all the spark of a dead battery on a frosty morning.”
It concludes: “Lustreless and bland, it doesn’t even rise to the status of a hate-watch.”
In the U.K. the Daily Mail and the Telegraph are predictably cruel, but even the famously left-wing, monarchy-hating Guardian can’t give it more than one star, declaring: “It’s the lack of humour, irony, self-awareness and apprehension of the reality of this deeply unequal and apocalyptic world that makes With Love, Meghan so unlovable in the end.”
