“With Love, Meghan,” the new Netflix lifestyle series premiering next week, is a culmination of sorts for its creator and star, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. The show casts the princess as a perfectly groomed domestic goddess, cooking and entertaining for friends at home in coastal California, a role to which she has seemingly aspired for more than a decade.
Meghan’s ambitions to be the “millennial Martha Stewart of Montecito,” as a recent New York Times guest essay put it, were delayed first by her courtship and marriage to Prince Harry, in 2018, and then by the couple’s public feud with the British royal family.
In 2020, Harry and Meghan announced they would step back from royal duties, causing a flurry of palace gossip and recriminations. The couple spent the next few years cannily telling (and monetizing) their side of the story in a series of media ventures — a sit-down interview with Oprah Winfrey; a six-episode Netflix docuseries, “Harry & Meghan”; and a best-selling memoir by Prince Harry, “Spare.”
But all along, Meghan displayed flashes of her Ina Garten side. Remember when she showed Oprah her chicken coop? Or when a London bakery posted a photo of the handwritten thank-you note on personalized stationery she had sent to its staff?
In a 15-second video on Instagram last year, Meghan finally announced her new kitchen and lifestyle brand, American Riviera Orchard. Details were scant, but a trademark application sought approval for a retail store, cookbooks and tableware, as well as jellies, jams, marmalades, fruit preserves and nut butters.
The brand’s awkward name wasn’t long-lived: This month, in another Instagram video, Meghan renamed her brand As Ever. (The existence of a New York clothing label using that name does not appear to have dissuaded her.) The announcement seemed timed to the premiere of “With Love, Meghan,” since Netflix is her partner not only in the show but also in her business venture.
Meghan is a polarizing public figure, and to her critics, her forays into lifestyle content are an inauthentic personal-branding effort from a pampered princess. Does she really do her own cooking and gardening?
But Meghan has displayed a genuine and longtime interest in the domestic arts. As she said in the video announcing her new business name: “You know I’ve always loved cooking and crafting and gardening. This is what I do.”
Didn’t Meghan have a lifestyle site long before she met Harry?
Yes, in 2014 she started a website called The Tig, named after the Italian wine Tignanello, which Meghan said awakened her to the joy of wine. The site featured content about food and travel, as well as interviews with notable people, or “Tig talks.” Its tone was aspirational and inspirational, and it offered a “filtered” window into Meghan, who at the time was an actress on the USA Network series “Suits.”
Meghan shut down The Tig in 2017, after she began dating Prince Harry and became globally famous. “Keep finding those Tig moments of discovery, keep laughing and taking risks, and keep being ‘the change you wish to see in the world,’” Meghan wrote to her readers in a farewell note.
Did Meghan ever work as a chef or gardener?
Apparently not, but she did moonlight as a calligrapher. Meghan has said in interviews that while she was auditioning for acting roles in the mid-2000s, she made extra money writing in fancy script. She did the invitations for Robin Thicke and Paula Patton’s wedding and wrote the notes Dolce & Gabbana sent celebrities during the holidays. “I would sit there with a little white tube sock on my hand so no hand oils got on the card,” Meghan told Esquire in 2013. Her good penmanship came courtesy of her Catholic school upbringing, she said.
How will “With Love, Meghan” be different from other lifestyle shows?
That remains to be seen. The trailer shows Meghan in an apron preparing delectable-looking desserts for her girlfriends, including the actress Mindy Kaling, and sharing “tips and tricks,” like her go-for-it approach to creating colorful floral arrangements. But some footage, like Meghan in full beekeeper garb tending her home beehive, is derivative of other lifestyle entrepreneurs’ work. In her 1982 book “Entertaining,” Martha Stewart is pictured in full regalia tending her own hives. When Meghan says that she’s “always loved taking something pretty ordinary and elevating it,” she echoes how Ms. Stewart has described her approach almost verbatim.
OK, so how do you watch the new show?
All eight episodes drop on March 4. They will be a surprise to just about everyone because Netflix has not released screeners to critics and bloggers. There’s no word as to whether Meghan will be sending viewers thank-you cards, with love.
