Meghan Markle’s new big budget Netflix show can’t hide one major issue

The first look at the Duchess of Sussex’s new TV show has dropped but the big budget can’t hide one major issue.

The first look at the Duchess of Sussex’s new TV show has dropped but the production’s big budget can’t hide one major issue.

It’s impossible to be on the internet in early January and to not be swamped by tediously self-improving ‘new year, new you’ stories. (Eat the gluten for god’s sake.)

Well, it’s a new year and looky here, we have a whole new Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.

A New Old Meghan, that is.

On Friday morning the trailer for the duchess’ Netflix series, With Love, Meghan, was released, a 90 second-odd effort that has the high buff sheen of a major haircare launch and all the substance of a Domayne advertorial.

Pre-the 42-year-old’s royal anointing and husband-acquiring, back in the dark ages of 2017, she had a nice, shiny blog (The Tig) and a nice, shiny Instagram account, all populated with nice, shiny friends doing nice, shiny things.

Meghan Markle has used her sudden arrival back on social media to plug her new cooking show and says it’s about “connecting with new friends” and she “has to get it wrong to get it right”.

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Eight years, one title, two children and five house moves later and the duchess has come full circle and has today officially returned to her influencer roots, only now with a Netflix crew of 50 and a merch line in tow. Let the cash registers ring out!

Let them watch and make and eat cake!

Or will they? From what the trailer throws up, With Love presents us with a veritable hand-curated smorgasbord of issues, not least the inherent artificiality and unreality of it all.

Here we have New, Old Meghan peddling, peddling, peddling a domestic, homey, idyll – and yet the series was not shot at her home.

Netflix hired a $8 million estate three kilometres away from her actual $20 million mansion to film all those hours of perfectly imperfect coupe glasses and insouciantly arranged peonies.

The first look at the Duchess of Sussex’s new TV show has dropped but the big budget can’t hide one major issue.

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It’s like a Truman Show of tart-making, a pastelly pastiche of her real life? Meghan’s dog Guy features in the trailer, chewing a treat and sleeping in his basket. Just think about that. Some lackey or intern had to, day after day, shift the ten-year-old rescue Beagle and relocate him to a Netflix set so he could be put to work providing B-roll and adding a sprinkling of reality.

At one point in the trailer, Meghan tells the camera, “Guy’s snoring. Peaceful day” [1:30 mark]. A peaceful day on set you mean?

It is impossible to ignore the cringeness and datedness of it all.

One Netflix poster shows the Duchess of Sussex wearing a floor length blue gown as she charmingly arranges flowers on an overstuffed, art directed table begging the question, what, you don’t spend your days strewing decorative fruit all over your place to “create wonder in every moment”? You don’t stuff lemons in jars and colour-co-ordinate your cutlery and dibble olive oil all over plates “in the pursuit of joy”?

The marketing guff verges on the parodic; it’s promise that With Love “reimagines the genre of lifestyle programming” is so over-egged it should come with an allergen warning.

Or what do we do with the fact that the show is being sold as all about love, so much love, positively massive soup spoon-sized globs of dolloped out love! Yet the Sussex name has, for years now, been synonymous with family acrimony and breakdown and feuding and turning up on TV screens to teary over fallings out.

At one point, the words “Everyone’s invited” appear on the screen. Everyone, that is, who is not her father, half sister or brother or Harry’s father, brother, stepmother, sister-in-law, cousins … Shall I go on?

Maybe, like an aggressively shaken Etch-a-Sketch, With Love will handily and immediately erase this all and overnight remake Meghan into a beacon of joy and warmth in dark times.

Even if it does though, the thought that keeps running through my head is, is this it?

Meghan went through heartache and trauma and incredible emotional and personal upheaval of the last seven years to … relaunch herself as an influencer?

Meghan went through heartache and trauma and incredible emotional and personal upheaval of the last seven years to … relaunch herself as an influencer?

She is a woman who has spoken truth to power and shaken the very foundations of a millennium-old institution and she has decided to now spend her days teaching us how to make an impossibly airy sponge cake?

There is a bigger, philosophical question here too which is how jarring will the life that Meghan is selling be given what is going on in the world that exists beyond the clear, carbon monoxide-free air of Montecito?

During a global cost-of-living crisis, when tempers are frayed, when political divisions threaten to cleave nations apart, when democracy is hanging on by a fraying thread and when even glancing at news headlines means facing escalating horrors and suffering … does the world really want to watch a very pretty well-dressed woman with untold hours of leisure time rhapsodising about the restorative balm of hand-kneading your own focaccia?

Will it be jarring or desperately needed escapism? Who knows, With Love could end up being some sort of deep psychological balm for us, sort of an ASMR video by way of homemade aioli.

So far the numbers should be showing some very Californian capped teeth smiling. Across Meghan’s newly relaunched Instagram and Netflix’s social media and YouTube accounts, the With Love trailer has been watched nearly eight million times in just six hours. Maybe New Old Meghan’s cake has officially risen nicely. So far anyway.

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.

Originally published as Meghan Markle’s new big budget Netflix show can’t hide one major issue