A joyless spectacle from the Duchess of Bland
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Picture: AP Photo/Peter Dejong
There is something uncomfortably painful about watching someone try desperately to be liked. Meghan, Duchess of Sussex's new lifestyle show on Netflix, , is an excruciating spectacle, stretched over several hours and filmed with the soft-focus glow of a premium feminine hygiene advert.
The premise is simple enough: Meghan, in an £8 million Montecito farmhouse - or perhaps a cunningly disguised television set pretending to be one - invites friends and pseudo-friends to participate in activities so profoundly banal they make watching paint dry seem like the climax of a Bond film. They bake "beautiful on the inside" cakes (because everything you see contains a metaphor), arrange vegetables into geometric patterns, and sprinkle dried flowers on literally anything that doesn't move quickly enough to escape.
The show belongs to that peculiar genre of lifestyle pornography where the presenter pretends to be "just like you" while simultaneously existing in a parallel universe of privilege so removed from ordinary experience it might as well be broadcasting from Versailles.
"We don't all have gardens like this," Meghan acknowledges, gesturing vaguely at her personal Eden. "I fully recognise that."
But fear not, viewers! Just pop down to your local farmers' market! The solution to not having a duchess's budget is, apparently, to shop where duchesses would never dream of setting foot.
What's most striking about this exercise in beige self-aggrandisement is its staggering joylessness. Every moment is so carefully curated, so exhaustively styled, so relentlessly on-brand that any authentic pleasure has been suffocated under the weight of aesthetic perfection. When Meghan claims she "never gets fussy with place settings", the camera lingers on place settings so fussy they would make Marie Antoinette mutter "It's a bit much". There is studied casualness here that takes teams of people working around the clock to achieve.
Her guests perform the rituals of friendship with all the spontaneity of hostages reading prepared statements. Mindy Kaling, a genuinely funny woman, finds herself reduced to uttering inane compliments like "What are you, Tinker Bell?" as Meghan performs her thousandth act of flower-sprinkling. The strain of pretending this is all perfectly normal human interaction is visible on her face, like watching someone holding in a fart in a crowded greenhouse.
The Duke of Sussex, Harry, appears only briefly, relegated to the status of an anecdotal husband who "salts everything" and "loves bacon". One can't help but wonder if he's hiding somewhere on the vast estate, perhaps in a small cupboard, frantically calling his old Army mates to send a rescue helicopter.
What's missing most conspicuously from is any sense of humour or self-awareness. The show vibrates with an earnestness so intense it could power a small city. Everything - absolutely everything - carries profound significance. Harvesting honey becomes "a reminder to do something that scares you a bit". Arranging crudités is a meditation on imperfection. Making a sponge cake without icing is a treatise on inner beauty. One longs for a moment when Meghan might look at the camera and say, "This is all a load of bull, isn't it?" But that moment never comes.
Behind every moment of Meghan's "effortless" domesticity lurks an army of invisible serfs, their fingerprints hastily wiped from the lens of authenticity. The extra balloons that appear mysteriously self-inflated after Megan inflates a token sample. Those baskets of implausibly uniform berries - each one an identical twin to its neighbour - are perfectly arranged in a rustic, twee, and almost beige wicker basket.
The immaculate table settings, arranged with a flawless aesthetic while our hostess pontificates about "casual entertaining" materialise like poltergeist activity - the work of ghosts we're not meant to see. The true miracle of lifestyle television isn't the lifestyle; it's the televisual sleight of hand that transforms a platoon of production assistants into invisible minions.
Most egregious is the bread sculptor's butchery – a crime that would have caused riots in less wasteful epochs. Watching two-thirds of a perfectly edible loaf sacrificed on the altar of perfection feels like witnessing a war crime against carbohydrates. The discarded crusts and misshapen slices – banished to some off-camera purgatory – speak to a profligacy that would make a wartime mother weep. It's bread genocide disguised as gentility, the casual wastefulness that only the catastrophically privileged could present as aspirational.
This is millennial aspiration in its death throes - a world where mason jars, calligraphy, and "authentic moments" have been commercialised to the point of self-parody. It's the Instagram aesthetic made flesh and broadcast to millions, a relic of a cultural moment that has already passed its expiration date. The oatmeal-tablescaping-side-hustle dream that defined a generation has crawled into Netflix's palatial hospice to die.
The tragedy is that somewhere in this pastel wasteland, there might have been an interesting show if only someone had been brave enough to excavate it from beneath the layers of carefully curated banality. Meghan's actual life story - from working actress to royal bride to exile - contains genuine drama worthy of Shakespeare with a splash of Jackie Collins: a commoner's ascent, palace intrigue, family betrayal, and a dramatic self-imposed banishment to the gilded cage of Californian privilege. Her story is meets with a dash of , for God's sake.
Instead, we get the televisual equivalent of a scented candle from an upmarket department store: expensively packaged, vaguely pleasant, and ultimately designed to mask something rather than reveal it. In its final incarnation its more with brunch and a round of soothing lobotomies. The show suffocates under the weight of its own artifice, with Meghan stiff and awkward, operating entirely in clichés. Each precisely arranged tablescape and lovingly labelled mason jar serves as another brick in the wall she's building between her audience and whatever authentic human being might be trapped inside this lifestyle brand with a pulse. The bee-keeping, the crudités, the 'Sussex' branding all seem designed to distract us from asking truly interesting questions like an overwrought magician's assistant frantically waving feathers while the real trick happens elsewhere.
is the fourth offering from the Sussexes' Archewell Productions, following (a series so dull it made actual polo seem thrilling by comparison), (worthy but limited in appeal), and (their sole success, primarily because it contained actual emotional content - namely, complaint and artfully concealed bitching).
In the final episode, Meghan cooks with Alice Waters to mark "the next chapter" of her life - the launch of her lifestyle brand, formerly 'American Riviera Orchard', now rebranded as 'As Ever' ('Whatever' might have a better ring to it ). The irony is that Meghan has produced something utterly inauthentic in trying so desperately to create a brand based on authenticity.
And that's the problem at the heart of . It's not that arranging flowers, baking cakes, or making preserves are invalid activities. They're presented with such suffocating reverence, humourless intensity, and blinding obliviousness to the real world that they become unwatchable. Nigella Lawson could make candle-making sensual and inviting; Martha Stewart infuses her perfectionism with pragmatism; even Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop madness comes with a knowing wink.
The only undeniably authentic thing in is her elderly beagle, Guy, who nestles by her side with the weary resignation of someone who's seen it all and is simply counting down the days until retirement. He alone seems real in a show constructed entirely from artifice - a furry truth-teller in a kingdom of perfectly arranged fakery.
As I watched Meghan label yet another jar of something no one will ever eat with her impeccable calligraphy, I couldn't help but think this is what happens when you take the aspiration without the inspiration, the aesthetic without the authenticity, and the brand without the substance. is a beautifully arranged nothing - precisely like those dried edible flowers she sprinkles everywhere: pretty, pointless, and ultimately tasteless.
