Meghan Markle’s new Netflix series seeks to rebrand a Duchess Difficult into a Culinary Queen

She ditched royalty for privacy, but now the ‘humanitarian’ Meghan Markle is in the kitchen broadcasting essential cooking tips – like making ice cubes.

Meghan Markle has a new Netflix series.

We are not in the pursuit of perfection, we are in the pursuit of joy. So says Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, who reminds us “love is in the details: the small, personal moments that bring delight to those we cherish”.

So we can ignore her gently waving hair spiralling into the bowl, the jewellery-bedecked fingers deep into focaccia dough in the trailer of her latest Netflix foray, and instead focus on Meghan’s too good to be true beatific smile, her stain-free white clothes and her amazing friends. For truly, the world of “With Love: Meghan” is an ultimate syrupy, unachievable, carefully airbrushed fantasy.

Her guests are invited to coo at how wonderful the Duchess, please believe me, really is. Those nasty trolls pointing out her real relationships are fraught or non-existent – including with her own father, with her royal in-laws, with her school friends – have been set aside. For Meghan’s new Instagram page – where she heralded the new year with some swirly 2025 written into sand – doesn’t allow any comments.

The cooking and lifestyle series which comes just in time to round out the five-year $US100m Netflix deal, will drop mid-January, and all of the Duchess’s fans will be able to feast on eight episodes at once.

Meghan’s tips and tricks are priceless. Generations of women have had no idea before her.

When selecting flowers her point of difference from every other flower buyer is to “see what colour I gravitate to and go from there”. Her carefully curated bowls of vegetables are peeled and perfect, her apron freshly ironed, her makeup thick, her pantry suspiciously half-empty.

Netflix says the series was filmed in Montecito, but don’t be fooled into thinking this is a glimpse into Meghan’s home and garden. Like the contentious unloading of royal complaints to Oprah Winfrey in 2021 which caused hurt to an increasingly frail Queen Elizabeth in the last weeks of Prince Philip’s life, the cameras weren’t at their home.

This latest filming was done in two nearby locations to the Sussexes’ California residence: the main one being the kitchen of philanthropists Tom and Sherrie Cipolla, three kilometres down the road.

With expensive countertops covered with designer bowls, neutral-coloured cabinets with a spectacular gas Thermador hob and oven upon which a handful of wooden spoons and copper pots and pans reside, the kitchen is an ideal set for filming Meghan’s perfect life that you too can aspire to.

No longer the whiny I-couldn’t-cope-with-royal-life-opening-village-halls Meghan, nor the award-winning philanthropic humanitarian Meghan, this is a glossy high-maintenance Meghan who wants you too to freeze delicate petals in ice cubes to impress guests. And husband Harry, who is usually attached to her arm, is only shown briefly, clicking congratulatory champagne glasses filled with some orangey-looking drink. No doubt she will show us how it’s done with a recipe reveal in good time.

In her halo of goodness as Meghan swirls olive oil into hummus she tells us of her desire of taking “something pretty ordinary and elevating it”.

Surely a coincidence then, that the producers of this series may be thinking the same thing.