Tina Brown, the founding editor of The Daily Beast, has delivered a withering verdict on Meghan Markle’s much-derided new Netflix show, arguing that With Love, Meghan represents a colossal failure on the part of the Sussexes to successfully transition into non-royal life.
Following a Substack chat with Janice Min, the founder of the Hollywood gossip newsletter The Ankler, last week, Brown has devoted a significant chunk of her newsletter Fresh Hell to the show this week.
Brown writes that Meghan’s “unerring instinct for getting it wrong” means “Meghan has come out with a show about fake perfection just when the zeitgeist has turned raucously against it. Trump’s America is a foulmouthed and disheveled cultural place where podcasters in sweaty T-shirts, crotch-rot jeans, and headphones achieve world domination on YouTube.”
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She says that Meghan “has never figured out a convincing persona,” is “behind the curve,” and should have made a show about “what a flaming flop the last five years have been.”
Meghan is “too damn impatient,” Brown writes, adding: “Who announces a new lifestyle brand, American Riviera Orchard, and hounds celebrity friends to talk up her strawberry jam on social media, without doing due diligence on the availability of the trademark?”
She adds that instead of leaving the royal family, “All Meghan had to do was shut up and wait. Go quiet for a couple of years, start a family, keep her eyes trained on the splendid royal real estate that would soon come up for grabs… The moment William ascended to his role as Prince of Wales, there would have been new global gigs and red carpet roll-outs raining down on the Sussexes’ heads. But no. Offered the Commonwealth or Netflix, the Sussexes, with naïve avarice, chose Netflix.”
She concludes: “What Harry and Meghan forgot was that the great thing about being royal is you can be as boring as f--- for as long as you live and still be treated as the most important person in the room. The only reason any of these deals were signed was for low-down dish on the royals, and Meghan, in another fit of vainglorious yearning—this time for a sit-down with TV’s ultimate deity—gave that away to Oprah for free, infuriating Netflix, whose multi-million dollar deal got them sloppy seconds.“
