Meghan Markle takes swipe at TV shows How I Met Your Mother and Scrubs in new podcast

The Duchess of Sussex’s latest Archetypes episode - the second to be released since the Queen’s death - came out on Tuesday night, and began with a trigger warning.

Meghan Markle slammed the TV shows How I Met Your Mother and Scrubs in her new Spotify podcast as she discussed how women can be unfairly branded “crazy”.

The Duchess of Sussex’s latest Archetypes episode - the second to be released since the Queen’s death - came out on Tuesday night, and began with a trigger warning.

The Duchess of Sussex, 41, urged anyone to “tune out” if they found the debate “too heavy”.

“Raise your hand if you’ve ever been called crazy or hysterical or what about nuts? Insane out of your mind, completely irrational, okay? You get the point,” Meghan says in the podcast.

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Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.

“Now, if we were all in the same room and could see each other, I think it would be pretty easy to see. Just how many of us have our hands up? By the way, me too.

“And it’s no wonder when you consider just how prevalent these labels are in our culture.”

Meghan - who starred in US legal drama Suits before becoming a royal - then played audio clips from popular sitcoms to prove her point.

One, from How I Met Your Mother, shows the Lothario-like character Barney saying: “If she’s this crazy, she has to be this hot.”

In another, female doctor Elliot Reid in Scrubs says:”I can’t take it, Carla! I cannot hide the crazy a minute longer! I’m just this big mountain of coocoo is about to erupt and spew molten crazy, all over him and he’s gonna die like this.”

A third clip has controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson saying: “I don’t think that men can control crazy women.”

Meghan was joined on this week’s podcast by actresses Jenny Slate, Deepika Padukone and Constance Wu.

Meghan took aim at How I Met Your Mother character Barney Stinson

She also brought up a quote by Scrubs doctor Elliot Reid

The Duchess later tells the woman about the derivation of the word “hysteria”.

“I just learned this when we were doing this episode that the word hysterical comes from hysteria, which is - wait for it - the Greek word for womb,” she says.

“Plato himself was actually amongst the Greek philosophers, who believed that the womb would travel around the body adding pressure to other organs, which would then lead to erratic and unreliable behaviour.’

She later said: “Calling someone crazy or hysterical completely dismisses their experience and minimises what they’re feeling.

“It keeps going to the point where anyone who’s been labelled it enough times can be gas-lit into thinking that they’re actually unwell or sometimes worse, to the point where real issues of all kinds get ignored. Well, that’s not happening today.

“I feel pretty strongly about this word, this label crazy the way that it’s thrown around so casually and the damage it’s rotten society and women, frankly everywhere.

“From relationships to families, being shattered, the reputations destroyed and careers ruined the stigma surrounding the word. If it also has this silencing effect, this effect will women experiencing real mental health issues, they get scared, they stay quiet, they internalise, and they repress for far too long.”

Archetypes podcast by Meghan Markle

Meghan’s podcast returned last week following a four-week break in the wake of the Queen’s death.

In the last week’s instalment, the Duchess discussed visiting a nude spa with her mother as a teenager and racist stereotypes concerning Asian women.

“It’s a very humbling experience for a girl going through puberty because you enter a room with women from ages nine to maybe 90, all walking around naked and waiting to get a body scrub on one of these tables that are all lined up in a row. All I wanted was a bathing suit.

“Once I was over that adolescent embarrassment, my mom and I, we would go upstairs we would sit in a room and we would have a steaming bowl of the most delicious noodles.”

Meghan also criticised Austin Powers and Quentin Tarantino movie Kill Bill for portraying Asian women as “over sexualised or aggressive”.

Austin Powers movie Goldmember, released 20 years ago, features raunchy Japanese twins Fook Mi and Fook Yu. Lucy Liu played murderous assassin O-Ren Ishii in the Kill Bill franchise.

“The Dragon Lady, the East Asian temptress whose mysterious foreign allure is scripted as both tantalising and deadly,” Meghan said.

“This has seeped into a lot of our entertainment. But this toxic stereotyping of women of Asian descent, it doesn’t just end once the credits roll.”

In its debut episode, the Duchess opened up to her friend Serena Williams about the horror moment she found out her four-month-old baby Archie’s nursery had caught fire during their royal tour of South Africa in 2019 – thankfully while he wasn’t in there – and had then been forced to attend a royal engagement.

Meghan also revealed how her life changed when she joined the Royal Family – claiming she had “felt the negativity” of being labelled “ambitious”.