Words by Jane Jervis-Read // photograph by Allen Rad
Critics have taken savage delight in Meghan Sussex’s new lifestyle series, decrying With Love, Meghan as “narcissistic”, “out of touch” and “boring”. The show is, on one level, quite boring. How-to sequences are drawn out and chemistry with guests is low. Yet public interest in the show, and the Duchess, have been high. Netflix promised that the show would “reimagine the genre of lifestyle programming” and it does this in unexpected, possibly unintended ways. Through the fairly bland, aspirational material of the show emerges a unique character pertinent to our times — Meghan as the alienated hostess.
Meghan’s decision to host the series in another person’s home, understandably made to protect her family’s privacy, lends the show a strange echoey isolation. The immaculate house and re-oriented hostess exist in a sort of vacuum. There’s no hustle and bustle. No children running through the kitchen. There aren’t even children at the children’s party around which episode two revolves. No neighbours pop around with lemons. No one experiences dinner party bonhomie, that festive feeling of familiarity. The friends brought in to learn domestic arts from Meghan seem more like long-time acquaintances. Shots of the crew aid a sense of life but it is no substitute for community and family, which seem to be the whole point of homemaking. Meghan seems very much alone.
Most episodes feature one guest, with whom Meghan prepares recipes and creates inviting spaces and celebrations (balloon arches, layer cake, lavender towels). But the celebrations never occur. The episodes tilt uncannily towards a party that doesn’t eventuate, like a kind of domestic dystopia where the hostess must eternally prepare but never welcome the loved ones. There is a fairly stiff get-together in the final episode when Harry finally makes his brief cameo. Otherwise, Meagan sits down with a singular friend at the episode climax and dishes out very small servings of the delicious, party-worthy food.
True to criticism, Meghan is a guarded hostess. Comparisons drawn with her predecessors, Nigella Lawson and Martha Stewart, loom unfavourably. Where Nigella draws in the viewer (and evidentially, the cameraman, if the percentage of close-ups so extreme they veer out of focus is anything to go by), Meghan keeps a cool, awkward distance. The show is not candid or warm but firmly aspirational.
With Love, Meghan nails the aesthetic. Beautifully shot, the luxurious Californian farmhouse is serene and inspiring. The kitchen garden strikes a desirable balance between abundant life and controlled beauty, and Meghan herself, impeccably dressed in what you could call royal-casual, never has a hair out of place.
But faults in the veneer reveal a more interesting Meghan. On-screen, certain glances reveal uncertainty and her small, benign jokes seem told for herself or a child who is not present. Much of her dialogue is one-sided, tinged with desperation to drive home a point or make a segment “work” or brand herself as wholesome and admirable. Meghan seems vulnerable in her perfection. Frail in her confidence and ultimately, more likeable because of it.
Meghan, homemaking alone in a rented house, is relatable and not because of her enormous diamond pendant, the A$12 million rental home or her silk blouse sleeves which billow fearlessly over frying tomatoes. With Love, Meghan abounds with post-pandemic loneliness. After years of lockdowns, in a social-media-saturated milieu, isolation is a common experience. Meghan is not the only one obsessing over aesthetics but failing to gain traction in the real, peopled world. The village is sorely lacking and many are wondering when their party will arrive.
This particular version of domestic alienation may be familiar to stay-at-home parents and homemakers, whose roles sit uncomfortably between modern categories in a paradigm that neither approves of nor supports them. Like Meghan, they might spend a lot of time at the kitchen bench, chopping vegetables, without the company of other adults. They may wonder at the relevance of their work and their links to the outside world may fray or become tenuous.
Meghan is talking to herself. They’re filming her but she’s alone in the kitchen. At times, one can imagine she’s staving off madness. She’s putting painstaking attention to detail in preparation for her friend’s visit. In reality, perhaps her friends don’t visit very often. No one could blame her for struggling to maintain close connections: her stage of life, not to mention her career, surely make it challenging. Her children are still really young. She knows how to decorate the hell out of a sponge cake but flounders when trying to create a relaxed connection with her friends. If not for the crew, her voice would echo in the empty mansion. “This is fun, I had fun,” she says, popping a corncob in the microwave. But did she?
Meghan seems to want desperately to connect. “My friend, mi amigo,” she keeps reminding her fellow polo wife, Delfina Blaquier. Or, as she nervously prepares for chef Roy Choi: “We’re not friends yet but we’re going to be. He might not know it yet but it’s true.” Or, when Mindy Kaling asks Meghan if she had friends in Canada when Suits required her to relocate, “I always tried to invite the cast over or people you’d meet at the dog park… I love making friends.” Something about the way she says it, mirthless and yet so polished, in control but not allowing vulnerability, chopping perfectly sized pieces of banana for an unnecessarily symmetrical fruit rainbow that no child will see, seems so… sad.
Who is there for Meghan? Not Harry, who rings in only once for the final soiree. Not her friends, with whom she doesn’t seem to share a genuinely intimate connection. Not the critics, waiting on the sidelines of each venture to “hate-watch” and ridicule. Perhaps not even Netflix, who in signing a mind-bogglingly lucrative deal with the Sussexes (rumoured to be between US$75 — $100 million for five years) may not have shared Meagan’s aim to create a positive new public identity for her.
The jarringly jaunty soundtrack lends With Love, Meghan a farcical edge and nineties-style swoosh transitions do nothing to give Meghan and her series gravity. Whilst it seems likely that Meghan exists in something of a cultural echo-chamber — making it hard to get a sense of reality, causing her to appear “tone deaf” or “out of touch” — it seems unlikely that Netflix has a similar problem. According to their website, Netflix’s Consumer Insights team has a “…deep understanding of consumers and users, their needs, preferences, the markets in which they live, and the overall opportunities to grow our business”. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine Meghan offered up for mockery or documentary-style curiosity (where she, not so much her recipes, is the subject). Bad press still generates views and ultimately grows business or, at least, recoups costs.
The hope in the series lies in episode three, “Two Kids from LA”, in which Meghan and Roy Choi bond over a shared appreciation of Korean food and reminisce about their respective childhoods in LA. Despite having just met, Meghan’s relief seems palpable as conversation flows and warm humour emerges between the two. “You’re always picking up what I’m putting down. I love that about you,” says Choi. “We connect.” Meghan glows. She is relaxed and dressed down, eager to learn from Choi in the kitchen. “This is a good day,” she says with childlike joy. It’s easy to recognise that sense of relief which comes with finding someone on the same wavelength. Meghan is at her best, most likeable and most watchable. She feels accepted and open to experience. At last, we can ungrit our teeth.
Meghan exists in a cultural system in which women are pressured to be perfect but eviscerated for appearing to be so, especially if they lack wit (Gwyneth Paltrow’s occasional glimmers of meta-humour go a long way in redeeming her aspirational lifestyle brand). The raging criticism that Meghan lacks warmth and isn’t sufficiently inviting, raises predictable questions about our expectations of women. Feed and please us. Make it look easy. Be charming and unflappable. But we can’t all be Nigella. In addition to the crudités, must we always serve up ourselves?
In a world where women are inevitably expected to host Christmas but ridiculed for taking too much pleasure in doing so, nothing is more relatable than Meghan preparing for her brunch in the season’s finale. “My Mum’s coming today. My lovely husband’s popping by. Great friends that are just such a huge part of my life. So, it should be fun and also definitely no pressure.” With palpable anxiety, Meghan fusses over the minute details of the extremely impressive spread: hand-calligraphed menus, slivers of cucumber frozen in each ice block, freshly sugar dusted crepes. It’s not the details so much as the internalised pressure that is familiar. The director asks Meghan if she is afraid that guests will arrive early, to which she breathlessly replies, “It shouldn’t be nerve-wracking. If I felt like I was pressed for time, whoever shows up first is going to help me”.
But no one is helping. Only watching. Claiming superiority as they make feminist stabs towards “trad-wife”, whilst continuing to critique Meghan against a tried-and-true-expectations-of- women checklist. Denouncing Meghan for being unrelatable whilst dismissing the very things that make her the most relatable.
With Love, Meghan scored a mere 33% average rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But it’s worth noting that, although the majority of people scored one of five stars, the second highest rating was five. A new season on Netflix has been confirmed. Perhaps, beneath the very public wave of condemnation and ridicule, a lot of people privately enjoyed or *gasp* even related to this show. Maybe some people even found the hostess with her imperfect social skills, sense of isolation and anxiety more relatable than other domestic goddesses? Perhaps this is a homemaking show for the twenty-first century and, despite its discomforts, represents us and the absurdity of our times. Perhaps, like Meghan, we all long to eat well and live beautifully and, above all, to feel connected.
