Meghan: As Ever, Polarizing
A new show and podcast, a new last name, a bucket of flower sprinkles and yet another rebrand to start of 2025. Will this one stick?
Hello Dear Readers,
This is a newsletter that’s been a long time coming. To be quite honest, we were a bit taken aback by how raked over the coals With Love, Meghan was via the press (UK and US) last month. Before the show’d aired, Meghan Sussex Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, was accused of plagiarizing the vibe of her show from aristocrat Emma Thynn, the Marchioness of Bath and actress Pamela Anderson. And professional critics didn’t hold back when describing their thoughts. Some excerpts of the kindest reviews are below:
The Cut: “Small moments of joy for the viewers are few and far between”.
The Hollywood Reporter: ‘With Love, Meghan’ lacks a key ingredient: Relatability”.
The Guardian: “Toe-curlingly unlovable TV”.
Variety: “An ego trip not worth taking”.
The Independent: “Queasy and exhausting”.
The Telegraph: “An exercise in narcissism”.
This newsletter won’t be an in-depth, episode by episode review of With Love, Meghan. Other publications and Substacks have done a much better job of this than we ever could. This’ll be more of stream of consciousness on the series and the tropes that caught our eye. Now that we’ve had some time to sit with it after the chatter has died down, we have thoughts.
Our overarching view wasn’t dissimilar to that of The New Yorker’s: Intellegencer, which was what exactly was With Love, Meghan and As ever selling? And more importantly, who was it selling it to?
Popcorn and Techniques
To be quite honest, the writing and problems were on the wall from the first few minutes of opening episode. Meghan kicked everything off by showing viewers how she popped some homemade popcorn right from the cob in a brown paper bag. Upon closer inspection, eagle-eyed viewers were able to see what looked eerily similar to a Whole Foods-branded organic microwave popcorn bag. Dear Readers, it seems as though Amazon’s Jeff Bezos deserves the accolades for the pristine popcorn seen inside the bag Meghan opened, not the dehydrated ear of corn shown in the shot. Perhaps this is what the Duchess meant by “elevating the ordinary”?
What we’d like to know is
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