We’ve 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 tradwife.
On January 2, Netflix released the honey-hued trailer for the Duchess of Sussex’s latest program, With Love, Meghan.
“I’ve always loved taking something pretty ordinary and elevating it,” our heroine intones 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 Sussex home was in the documentary Harry & Meghan in 2022. The six-part series was oddly unrevelatory (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.
In the With Love, Meghan trailer we see the duchess picking berries, decorating a sponge cake, arranging flowers and labeling homemade candles. If you think that all sounds a little Stepfordy for a self-identified and vocal feminist, then you wouldn’t be wrong.
But such is the fickle nature of the Internet trend cycle; ostentatious displays of domesticity are 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) — among younger millennial women, achieving the right kind of Instagrammable dinner party table (think long, colorful candles, cocktails served with rosemary garnishes and homemade place settings) is a status symbol.
The humble cookery show has been sprinkled with Montecito charm and elevated to Netflix juggernaut.
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 America, or 2022’s worthy but not terribly scintillating Live to Lead, which “showcased global justice activists.”
It’s notable that With Love also features a smattering of the duchess’s 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 teen years were marked by addictions, including to crack and gambling, and the legendary Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, the Californian restaurant credited with spawning the farm-to-table movement.
All in all it’s set to be a big year for Montecito-related news. Netflix’s announcement came a day after the duchess shared her first post-Palace Instagram update under her own handle @meghan. The artfully shot clip showed her jogging on a surprisingly overcast beach, before writing “2025” in practiced, curling script in the sand.
What next? It isn’t hard to see how With Love could be spun off into a kind of royal-adjacent Goop: less Gwyneth Paltrow-style vagina eggs, more freshly laid eggs from the Sussexes’ chickens whipped into an easy-to-replicate-at-home omelette.
The duchess already has one lifestyle brand, American Riviera Orchard, which mainly 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 will be the one that sticks.
With Love, Meghan premieres on January 15 on Netflix
Alice-Azania Jarvis is the deputy editor at Times2
