The critics go 'With Love, Meghan ' wrong

Written by Max Balzer, 04/08/2025

After Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, split from the Royal Family in early 2020, it wasn’t initially clear how they would continue their opulent lifestyle without the financial support of the Family they had enjoyed previously. The Duchy of Cornwall, a private estate to provide income to the Royal Family, funds the activities of the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall, titles currently held by William and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Wales, and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

When they stepped back as senior members of the Family, the funding went away too, and they were left to establish new “financial independence, something they [looked] forward to,” according to their website. This started with a $100 million deal with Netflix that they signed in 2020, which set them up to produce and feature in multiple projects with their production company, Archewell Productions. Later that year, they signed a multi-year deal with Spotify to produce shows as well, which yielded Archetypes and Archewell Audio, limited podcast series featuring the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. 

The most recent development by Archewell Productions is With Love, Meghan, a lifestyle series on Netflix with the Duchess of Sussex. The show features a new guest every episode, with Meghan preparing food, decor, and gifts for her guests. The show provides ‘tips’ for things you can make at home, like lavender towels, Epsom salts, and a birthday party balloon arch. The show had a troubled release with Netflix planning to release it during the height of this year’s Los Angeles wildfires and pushing the release to early March instead.

The show got poor reviews from critics and audiences alike, coasting with a Rotten Tomatoes critic rating of 40%. Critics' consensus describes the show as “insistently pleasant but ultimately sterile,” with one critic review from The Spectator asking “Why on earth did she feel compelled to put herself -- and us -- through this horror?” Not great. Audience reviews read, “I thought this was really poor,” and “Ms Markle is tiresome and pretentious.” The Guardian titled its review “Kiss the Netflix deal goodbye! With Love, Meghan is so pointless it might be the Sussexes’ last TV show.”

So, yes, the world has seen enough of the Sussexes, and Meghan and Harry’s reputation has been challenged, to say the least. Only through a conversation with my friend about Meghan did I realize just how much the public has been trained to dislike Meghan. I don’t have a great perception of her, either, and a lot of that comes from the coverage by the media and tabloids, which were so influential in the Sussexes’ split from the Family. Some of that, unfortunately, stemmed from her race — she has a White father and a Black mother — a fact that was a huge point of contention from 2018 through to today. She stated in her bombshell interview with Oprah in 2021 that there was even discussion within the senior tiers of the Family prior to the birth of their first child about how dark his skin would be.

With this discourse, and with the controversial release of the couple’s last series Harry & Meghan, the next release was bound to be troubled. However, it wouldn’t be an issue of the Stand without a slightly controversial article, which is why I’m here. I’m here to say that With Love, Meghan isn’t really as bad as the critics think it is.

The whole premise of With Love, Meghan is that the Duchess of Sussex infuses joy and love in the everyday. That sounds cheesy, and it might be, but once you get past the remote an slightly tone-deaf nature of a lot of what she says, there is some joy and community within it. Meghan, though she sometimes feels disingenuous, has authentic friendships that are put on display in the show. There’s something satisfying about the delightful gifts and decor she creates onscreen (much of which she may have spent hours working on) and it feels inspiring to escape to a farmhouse in Montecito, California with an organic garden, fresh flowers, ingredients in labelled jars, and a dose of authentic joy and love.

For the same reason people love reality shows (not including me), sometimes it’s fun to see a life that is so extraordinary and out of reach for most of the world.

I’m not arguing that With Love, Meghan isn’t out of touch and inauthentic, or that the world hasn’t had enough of the Sussexes. Despite critics’ feeling the show is out of touch with reality, I’d argue it is just the escape and joy needed in the oftentimes tough and unpromising times our society is going through.