With Love, Meghan review — smug, syrupy and endlessly spoofable

Desk report: If you thought With Love, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex’s new lifestyle show, would be a smug, syrupy endurance watch, and that you would rather fry your eyeballs than sit through it, I have news for you. It is so much worse than that.

Here is a duchess presenting her extreme wealth and mind-bogglingly exclusive lifestyle as if it is available to anyone who cares enough to pop a twee personal label on a homemade beeswax candle or lay a sprig of fresh lavender on a towel.

That lavender will of course be harvested in a rustic wicker basket along with fruits and herbs from the vast garden of your Montecito mansion. “Love is in the detail!” Meghan squawks, explaining how she likes to feel like a “present parent” by, for instance, arranging her children’s fruit in a perfect rainbow each morning, advice that I sincerely hope every single knackered parent catching the bus to work at 6am in the rain will heed.

In one episode, after she has put about 50 quid’s worth of berries on a plate and decked out a summer house like there’s been an explosion in a Cath Kidston warehouse, she tells her guest Mindy Kaling that it’s possible to create this kind of magic “on a budget”. Here, I’m afraid, I laughed out loud. Tone-deaf klaxon required! That a millionaire paid a reported $100 million by Netflix to tit around in a farmhouse kitchen wearing perfect pastel trousers could utter the word “budget” with a straight face and seems to suggest she’s just another “working mom” may make you wish to retch into your (rosemary-scented) sick bag.

Yes, I know that what Netflix is peddling, alongside cooking tips, is lifestyle envy. This is why Meghan, who seems to be auditioning to be the new Martha Stewart, wears a pricey beige cashmere sweater draped over her shoulders while cooking like no one ever does and a beautiful white blouse with lantern sleeves that nearly droop into her crudité platter. People love to press their noses against rich celebrity windows, though the farmhouse here isn’t hers. She wanted to keep her own home private — and I suspect it is far, far bigger than this.

But it is all the relentless smiling, the desperate upbeatness of this high-spec, lavish production, that jars. At least I suspect it will with a more cynical British audience. Americans may feel differently. Meghan must have had face-ache with all that grinning. It is a world where people use superlatives about a cherry tomato and in Californian accents say, “That’s so funny!” but then don’t actually laugh from their bellies. There is no authentic humour.

Meghan says we aren’t “in pursuit of perfection … we are in the pursuit of joy” — and yet we all know she told Oprah Winfrey that Kate made her cry over a difference of opinion about flower girl dresses. This is a series that entreats you to fill every moment of life “with wonder” so do please try to remember that when you are next applying haemorrhoid cream or emptying the cat’s litter tray.

In fairness here’s what did surprise me. Meghan is rather talented at all this creative presentation lark. She has the knack, as we saw when she wrapped gifts perfectly, decorated cakes and demonstrated beautiful handwriting. I like that she let her late dog Guy (to whom the series is dedicated) lick peanut butter off the spoon like a real dog owner would, that she has rescued chickens and that she is clearly not one of those Californians who don’t drink alcohol. It also isn’t a self-pity party like that other Netflix series, Harry & Meghan.

But her skills get lost amid all the syrup and rehearsed hugging. This is performative joy. There is a point when an oblique reference is made to hers and Harry’s sex life and at that exact second she pops a cork on a bottle of champagne while winking to camera. I bet that “spontaneous” moment took many retakes.

Harry barely features in this series, incidentally, popping up briefly to drink a mimosa at a garden party brunch and toast his wife who speaks of “healing” and her “new chapter”. He looks like a spare part.

This series should do very well. There will, I bet, be a second one, even though to some it will not be about “taking the ordinary and elevating it” but taking the ordinary and making it insufferable. Couldn’t they have dialled down the self-congratulation just a notch? They must know how spoofable it all is. I imagine South Park is penning a script right now.