In defence of With Love, Meghan

One of the hazards of modern marriage is passive consumption of your spouse’s media diet.

The digital equivalent of second-hand smoke, I often eavesdrop on my wife’s YouTube feed – a scattered smorgasbord of boomers reviewing food, influencers dissecting pop culture drama, and makeup artists investigating true crime while applying blusher.

Admittedly, most of it is entertaining – ambient background noise accompanying our daily chores. But some of it is enraging – shamelessly designed to tweak the primal nodes in the prefrontal cortex.

Especially the Meghan Markle content.

That stuff is unhinged.

I have subconsciously overheard, then actively gawped at, various screeds eviscerating Markle. In fairness, my wife does not endorse those polemics. She lost track of her subscriptions long ago, and her algorithm is a dumpster fire. Regardless, the Meghan rage-bait surfaces inexorably, rather like Japanese knotweed, her every movement and utterance decrypted by body language specialists and handwriting experts, socialite sleuths and pop psychologists.

These agitators churn out dopamine-drenched nuggets dissecting Meghan’s actions, decoding her words, lambasting her products and reverse-engineering her outfits. Her comments are taken out of context, her interactions mined for apparently incriminating evidence. It is the TikTok equivalent of dumpster diving, and I find it incredibly toxic.

Most of the current vitriol stems from Markle’s latest Netflix series: With Love, Meghan, a fly-on-the-wall lifestyle concept fusing cooking, crafting and conversation. The show premiered in March 2025 and has run for two seasons. A Christmas special was released this week, reigniting the culture war that routinely engulfs Meghan and Harry, her princely husband.

Contrary to most incendiary takedowns, my wife and I actually quite enjoyed the series and its yuletide companion. We watched it over a few weekday evenings, and it offered innocuous respite from the exhausting grind of acerbic contemporary life. Markle’s wholesome content brightened the cynical gloom, and I considered it a fairly victimless piece of art.

“With Love, Meghan is perfect laundry-folding TV,” Alanna Bennett explained in her review. “It is not meant to be watched with rapt attention; you are supposed to put it on in the background of your regular-degular life and let Markle and her rotating cast of buddies convince you that you, too, can salt-bake a fish. This is a show about sanding down life's edges. It's about making your world more beautiful; it's not about all the regular or even ugly moments in between. The series has made no room for anger, sadness, or even the messy moments of Markle's history we already know about.” (1)

Of course, that subtext – Meghan’s marriage to Harry and the severing of their royal ties – cannot be disentangled from the Sussexes’ ongoing projects. However, the polarising history is tangential to my fundamental point: that With Love, Meghan is harmless comfort telly, and the sheer hatred it spawns is unedifying and unfair. It is vicious, even. Bigoted, in parts. And prejudiced, even if subconsciously.

“It’s an easy watch that gives viewers a peek into an unusual figure’s life,” wrote Lucy Dolan-Zlaznick for Vogue. “Sounds harmless, right? Well, if you were to believe the internet, you’d think the devil had reared its ugly head as a woman named Meghan. Among the pieces of supposed ‘evidence’ in the sham trial against the duchess? When she packages store-bought pretzels into a relabelled smaller bag, it flies in the face of her environmentalism. She and pal Mindy Kaling are out-of-touch rich ladies who laugh at people wearing Zara. Meghan is lying to us about her upbringing, and by the way she barely knows how to cook. And all that cut fruit arranged into rainbows? An indulgent waste of time. It was as if those podcasters and TikTokers had been watching a totally different show.” (2)

Evidently, there are various buckets of With Love, Meghan vitriol. Some accuse its protagonist of a shameless cash grab, while others call it a vanity project or a vessel for egotistical clout-chasing. Markle must earn money somehow, though, and if she did so while remaining in the royal family, feeding off an allowance, people would criticise that, too. Yes, Meghan and Harry have used his royal heritage for a leg up, but at least they have gone their own way and tried to fund a self-sustained life. Others, including Harry’s disgraced uncle Andrew, could learn a thing or two from that.

Ah, but they are hypocrites, comes the inevitable repost. They criticised the media then embraced Hollywood for cash. They request privacy yet allow cameras to film a lifestyle series. She is a feminist who rails against homemaking stereotypes but created a tradwife-coded series beautifying them. And don’t even mention her green credentials, which are apparently invalidated by the ‘wasteful packaging’ of her trademarked jam. (3)

Sure, there are logical inconsistencies at play, especially when extreme examples are cherrypicked amid confirmation bias. But contrary to most retellings, Meghan Markle is human, and so is her husband. They, like you, are fallible and fluid and prone to change. Besides, With Love, Meghan never intended to be that deep. It is charcuterie boards and candle-making. Nobody expected a UN symposium.

Further, it is ironic that seemingly every lifestyle YouTuber makes clickbait-heavy videos about Meghan whenever she is in the news. Why? Because negativity moves the algorithm, which generates views and, ultimately, revenue. It is pure rage-bait, and there is as much disingenuousness in such content as in Meghan sprinkling flower petals on scrambled eggs.

Another popular critique says With Love, Meghan is unrelatable, and that her effortless opulence is grotesquely unattainable. Markle is elitist, we are told. She makes viewers feel inadequate by comparison. She preaches imperfection but everything looks perfect. Nobody has the spare time to paint abstract patterns on artisan aprons, and the entire concept smacks of rare privilege.

Those are valid observations – kernels of truth that the production team would do well to iron out. There is a mismatch of messages and aims, with Meghan swapping personas – sometimes, The Normal Girl from LA; other times, The All-American Princess – as expedient. The target audience is jumbled, confusing the overall objective, but is that not a fitting microcosm of monarchy itself? Royals are expected to be of the aristocracy but for the common man. That paradox defines Harry and Meghan, but it is more a product of his genuine birthright than a feature of her supposed vindictiveness.

To that end, there is a prevailing narrative that Markle is cunning, calculated and conceited; that she is disingenuous, performative and robotic. The show is not filmed in her own home, the masses howl. Her utensils are too clean, her crafting equipment barely out of the wrapper. The whole thing is a strategic public relations charade, and the brainstormed virtue signals are barely concealed.

Remember, though, that this is a woman whose family has been harassed by the press and paparazzi at every turn. Jeremy Clarkson literally wrote a column saying he dreamed of Markle being paraded naked through the streets of Britain while being pelted with poop. That she does not want to use her own home for the show is not only understandable; in this age of nonchalant doxxing, it is pivotal. And those mistaking With Love, Meghan for a reality show are wilfully misguided.

Sure, the show is heavily curated, but aren’t all efforts in the genre? Besides, Meghan needs to do something with her life, to earn a living, and if she is not hurting or offending anyone, why should she be torn asunder? In a world of endless importance, where everything feels existential, there must be room for innocent escapism. Markle offers something warm in a cold, cynically world, and the zeitgeist’s rejection of that says more about it than her.

Still, anyone who defends Harry and Meghan – heck, anyone who fails to vilify them with the requisite zeal – is branded a bootlicking sycophant. They deserve the hate, per the general sentiment. They ask for it. Alas, I beg to differ. They are people, ultimately, and they deserve a break from the relentless negativity.

Harry endured great grief as a child and has been open about battles with mental ill health. Meghan, too, has spoken of brushes with suicidal ideation. That even those struggles were dismissed, trivialised and accused of fabrication speaks to the covert agenda of her nemeses. And that agenda is, in my opinion, quite clearly tethered to a vindictive web of subliminal racism and misogyny; its talking points littered with ambiguous dog whistles.

Admittedly, some of the With Love, Meghan interactions are stiff; some of the activities lack authenticity; some of the guests are awkwardly curated; and some of Meghan’s schmaltzy schtick seems insincere. But, once again, she is unashamedly creating something here – a friendly show that offers escapism. Markle welcomes a diverse range of interesting guests to spend time with her, and those attempting to decipher cryptic messages in her arrangement miss the point entirely.

Among the more humane criticisms of With Love, Meghan is the dismissal of it as ‘cringe.’ As a fellow millennial, I can tell Meghan, assuredly, that she is cringeworthy. We all are. We say sickening stuff like ‘teamwork makes the dream work,’ and I’m freshly aware of how lame we are. I can laugh at that, though, as most millennials can. I can also laugh innocently at the television while compartmentalising it from the vicious culture war. That is just what I do with anodyne shows like With Love, Meghan. They are timeouts amid the wreckage, rather than the wreckage itself.

Sources

1. Bennett, Alanna. Refinery29. [Online] March 17, 2025. https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/2025/03/11867812/with-love-meghan-series-review-meghan-markle-backlash.

2. Dolan-Zalaznick, Lucy. Vogue. [Online] March 12, 2025. https://www.vogue.com/article/with-love-meghan-meme-culture-has-become-too-powerful.

3. Conard, Kristin. The List. [Online] March 31, 2025. https://www.thelist.com/1823569/meghan-markle-jam-packaging-hypocrisy-not-environmentally-friendly/.