Realistically, you are not going to watch With Love, Meghan. You are busy, life is short, and you don’t want your final thought on earth to be one of regret that you once spent several hours watching Meghan Markle make a daisy chain. Luckily for you, I have no such qualms about dying miserable, so I watched With Love, Meghan in its entirety, purely so I can tell you everything that happens on it. You’re welcome.
Episode 1
Meghan Markle is getting ready for her friend Daniel to visit her house. Except she states up front that the place they’re filming in isn’t her house and, at least from her description, Daniel sounds like her employee. She makes him a jar of homemade bath salts and prepares him a tray of crudités. Daniel arrives and is blown away by the food. “Every time I come to your house I always gain 10 pounds,” he says, delicately nibbling a single pea from a pod, in a house that’s not her house.
There is a segment about harvesting honey, even though Meghan Markle doesn’t like honey. She shows us how to bake a cake, even though she doesn’t like baking. She keeps talking about joy, even though everything in her life seems needlessly whiny and stressful, and she doesn’t really smile in an authentic way, or laugh. There is a discussion about jam.
Episode 2
Meghan Markle wants to throw a kids’ party, so she invites her adult friend Mindy Kaling—and no children—over. She describes Mindy as an “e-mail friend,” which seems to be code for “She was a guest on the podcast I did once.” She makes Kaling a frittata, then covers it with flowers. She shows us how to make a balloon arch, even though she doesn’t like blowing up balloons.
Kaling calls Meghan Markle “Meghan Markle,” to which Meghan replies, “It’s so funny that you keep saying Markle. I’m Sussex now.” (E-mail friends don’t have to know what each other’s surname is.) Meghan Markle makes gift bags for the children who aren’t coming to her party. The bags contain some seeds and a manuka-honey stick. At no point does Meghan acknowledge that there would be a literal riot if any parents tried to do this in real life. There is a discussion about jam.
Markle and Kaling make some crostini shaped like ladybugs and eat them together, alone, at their children’s party that doesn’t have any children.
Episode 3
Meghan Markle invites a chef named Roy Choi to her house. They are not friends and have never met, but Meghan wants to know how to make Korean chicken wings. Meghan repeatedly asserts her credentials as a local, telling Choi that “we’re just two kids from L.A.,” despite the fact that the end credits list her name as “Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.”
Meghan makes one of those tortuous puns she mistakes for humor, looking at a plate of chicken wings and saying, “I’m going to wing it.” Roy Choi makes the error of suggesting that crudités are boring. Meghan reacts by making him some crudités out of spite.
Episode 4
Meghan Markle invites Delfi, her husband’s friend’s wife, to visit. Meghan knows Delfi from polo, which was the subject of a documentary she and her husband made that nobody watched. However, Delfi doesn’t know how to make focaccia and, despite having learned only recently herself, Meghan wants to rectify this.
Before Delfi arrives, Meghan makes some sun tea (the title of a 30 Rock episode about people pissing in jars) and maté, a drink that she says tastes like rope. There is then a segment about how to correctly decorate a Mason jar of homemade dog biscuits. There is a discussion about jam.
Meghan and Delfi make their focaccia, go on a hike, and dance, even though there doesn’t seem to be any music, and then Delfi describes some steam as “romantic.”
Episode 5
Meghan Markle invites her friends Abbie and Kelly (one or both might have been on Suits) to visit. There is a flower-arranging segment, and it turns out that Meghan Markle is actually really good at flower arranging and can communicate its basic tenets extremely well.
The three of them salt-bake some fish and then sit around complimenting each other. It’s a bit like the Carrie Coon plot of the new season of The White Lotus. There is a discussion about jam.
Episode 6
Meghan Markle invites Victoria, Tracey, and Jennifer to visit. These are the friends with whom Meghan plays mah-jongg. She says the word “meaningful” several times while describing them.
Meghan wants to have a taco bar for her friends, so she invites a local chef over. He is nervous and bewildered. Then there is a segment where Meghan teaches us how to dehydrate citrus. Turns out the secret to this is buying a specialized citrus dehydrator. There is a discussion about jam.
Episode 7
Meghan Markle invites Vicky—“One of the most grounded people I’ve ever met”—to visit. She makes Vicky some breakfast. It is a basket with four croissants in it. Meghan adds three strawberries and calls it “a strawberry story.” Sadly, I fully tuned out for the duration of this episode, except for the moment where Meghan says, “Plot twist—tamarind powder!” There is a discussion about jam.
Episode 8
Meghan wants to throw a celebration brunch for the new chapter of her life, which it turns out is the hard launch of her new lifestyle business, which will almost certainly involve selling jam online. But first she invites Alice Waters—one of her all-time heroes—to visit so they can make a salad together.
Meghan handwrites some menus, and then the party begins. Her husband briefly turns up. She toasts her new business and thanks everyone “for loving me so much.” The end.
Stuart Heritage is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. He is the author of Bald: How I Slowly Learned to Not Hate Having No Hair (And You Can Too)
