Duchess goes trad wife with a side serving of berries, baking and bees

We have had Meghan Markle the actress, Meghan the people’s princess and Meghan the Oprah-confiding ex-royal. Now the former Suits star has a new guise: Meghan the trad wife.

We have had Meghan the actress, Meghan the people’s princess and Meghan the wound-licking, Oprah-confiding ex-royal. Now the artist formerly known as Ms Markle has a new guise: Meghan the trad wife.

This evening Netflix released the honey-hued trailer for the Duchess of Sussex’s latest programme for the streaming giant, With Love, Meghan.

“I’ve always loved taking something pretty ordinary and elevating it,” intones our heroine while pouring olive oil over hummus. And so it comes to pass: the humble cookery show has been sprinkled with Montecito charm and elevated to Netflix juggernaut.

For make no mistake, that is what it’s likely to become. The last time we were given such access to the Sussexes’ home was in Harry & Meghan in 2022. The six-part documentary was oddly unrevealing (though we did learn that Meghan was “a hugger” and the couple call each other “H” and “M"). It still went on to become Netflix’s biggest documentary debut, watched in more than 28.7 million households in the first four days.

The Duchess has used her sudden arrival back on social media to plug her new cooking show and says it’s about “connecting with new friends”.

In the trailer for With Love, Meghan, we see the duchess picking berries, decorating a sponge cake, arranging flowers and labelling homemade candles. If you think that all sounds a little Stepfordy for a self-identified and vocal feminist, you wouldn’t be wrong.

But such is the fickle nature of the internet trend cycle: ostentatious displays of domesticity are now de rigueur.

It’s not just the popularity of housewife influencers such as Nara Smith (almost 16 million followers on TikTok and Instagram) and Hannah Neeleman (nearly 20 million) - achieving the right kind of Instagrammable dinner party table (think long, colourful candles, cocktails served with rosemary garnishes and homemade place settings) is a status symbol among younger millennial women too.

In this way, With Love, Meghan is bang on the money - unlike her husband’s recent five-part series, Polo, which failed to make the streaming giant’s top ten in Britain or the US; or 2022’s worthy but not terribly scintillating Live to Lead, which “showcased global justice activists”.

The Duchess of Sussex shared the official trailer of the eight-part Netflix series.

It’s notable that With Love, Meghan features a smattering of her A-list friends: her former Suits co-star Abigail Spencer and the actress Mindy Kaling, alongside some credible foodies such as the Korean-American chef Roy Choi, whose teenage years were marked by addictions, including to crack and gambling, and Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, the Californian restaurant.

All in all it’s set to be a big year for Montecito-related news. Netflix’s announcement comes a day after the duchess shared her first post-palace Instagram update under her own handle @meghan. The artfully shot clip, reportedly filmed by Harry, showed her jogging on a surprisingly overcast beach, before writing “2025” in practised, curling script in the sand.

What next? It isn’t hard to see how With Love, Meghan could be spun off into a kind of royal-adjacent Goop: less Gwyneth Paltrow-style vagina eggs, more freshly laid Sussex chicken ones, whipped into an easy-to-replicate-at-home omelette. The duchess already has one lifestyle brand, American Riviera Orchard, which seems to revolve around sending pots of jam to her famous friends (she has run into trademark difficulties and no goods are yet available to buy). Perhaps With Love, Meghan will be the one that sticks.

THE TIMES