Seven baffling moments in Meghan’s Netflix trailer
“I’ve always loved taking something pretty ordinary and elevating it,” the Duchess of Sussex declares, early in the trailer for her new Netflix lifestyle series, With Love, Meghan. Anybody hoping she’s referring to marrying Prince Harry, and that this might be the series in which she finally lets off the handbrake, is soon left deflated. She just means putting olive oil on hummus, and stuff.
We have little choice but to respect the many endeavours of Meghan and Harry since they decided to exile themselves to Montecito, California, almost five years ago. Any other approach, especially genuine anger at what is essentially a celebrity couple behaving like a celebrity couple, leaves you prone to going insane – or at least looking insane on the internet.
They have tried their hands at various pursuits in that time, from taking Silicon Valley roles that are nonsense even by the standards of Silicon Valley roles, to hosting podcasts that are inane even by the standards of podcasts, but the only big hits have come when they’ve done what they undeniably do best: wind up the critics, troll comment sections, draw out hate clicks, and turn up the annoying to 11.
Taken in this spirit, With Love, Meghan looks like an absolute triumph. We’re all in the content mines, and Meghan’s struck gold with what might just be the most gloriously pointless-looking few hours of television of 2025. It’s all there in the trailer, so let’s break down the magnificence.
The basic conceit
Like Brian Eno or Édouard Manet, the Duchess of Sussex has little regard for the strictures of genre and convention. Netflix even said so. With Love, Meghan would, the streaming behemoth announced, “reimagine the genre of lifestyle programming, blending practical how-tos and candid conversation with friends new and old.” Though mostly it looks like her putting petals on doughnuts and challenging her friends to say “Wooow”.
So it’s a cookery and lifestyle show in which people are breezily interviewed while getting stuck in. A mind-expanding first of its kind, if you ignore Chef’s Table, Saturday Kitchen, Netflix’s own Salt Fat Acid Heat, The Martha Stewart Show, even the (golden) Ainsley Harriott years on Ready, Steady, Cook and, in fact, almost every cookery/talk/travel programme ever commissioned. Still, only a true maverick would deny the existence of an entire strand of television.
(While we’re at it, you’d also be a little put out if you were the owner-operator of the lifestyle and interiors blog With Love, Abigail, which has a curiously similar name and logo…)
OK, so who is Joy?
Of all the many questions thrown up by this trailer, one stands out: when Meghan says, “We’re not in the pursuit of perfection – we’re in the pursuit of joy”, is that an abstract noun, or is “Joy” one of her rich friends?
Thinking about it, a Hunted-style adventure show featuring glamorous Montecito housewives armed with expensive Japanese knives could be sensational. And in lieu of previews, we can’t yet say this isn’t that. Meghan does, after all, say in the trailer that she loves “surprising people with moments that let them know I was really thinking of them” – a worthy credo for any assassin.
And that’s what a good trailer does: it invites you to find out what’s really going on. Joy, Meghan’s coming for you. Hopefully.
The house… is not her house
Superb, just superb. If we were in any doubt that this is a project precision-engineered to enrage all the right people, here’s the tell. An at-home show predicated on offering a softer, domestic side to the Duchess, far away from the inauthenticity of showbusiness… turns out to have been filmed in a rented estate two miles down the road from where she really lives. That is not her kitchen. She has only just learnt which side the fridge door opens on. For all that dog knows, she’s run away to start a new life.
We can well understand why Meghan has done this – her own house is too full of children, chickens and Prince Harry to reasonably fit a camera crew and three famous friend-guests in – but more than anything else, this is a naked lure for the hate-clickers. Oh, she’s good. She’s very good.
Bees and Beatles
After the success of Beckham, it is now written into all Netflix contracts that every new documentary series commissioned must contain a scene in which the protagonist goes beekeeping. It’s visually striking, acts as a metaphor to conjure a sense of both entrapment and industriousness, and, let’s face it, everybody loves bees.
Yet Meghan will not be outdone by her former wedding guest, so for reasons known only to her, she’s brought along a special assistant for her own moment at the hives: California’s leading John Lennon-circa-1968 lookalike, who wordlessly supervises our star harvesting honey. Or is it Lennon’s ghost? Don’t rule it out. This show does reimagine the genre, after all.
An earth-shattering floristry hack
It has been 13 long years since Pippa Middleton released Celebrate: A Year of British Festivities for Family and Friends, which to many observers remains the greatest egg-sucking manual for grandmothers in modern history. (Lest we forget her guide to Easter egg hunts: “An adult hides a selection of eggs. They should be low down within easy reach of children.”)
Well, here comes Meghan with a piece of taste-making advice to rival even that of her brother-in-law’s sister-in-law. “I’m gonna share some little tips and tricks,” she says, rifling through a florist shop. “I see what colour I gravitate to, and everything goes from there.” Is this not… how everybody chooses flowers? More as we get it.
A Harried cameo, never in doubt
You can’t even spell “Meghan” without a lost “H” appearing in the middle, and true to form, there he is, 85 seconds into the trailer – late by some expectations, but his arrival never in doubt.
The fifth in-line to the British throne shows up, mimosa in hand, probably wondering what the hell he’s filming now, whose house this is, whether the owners even know they’re here, why the dog’s been missing all summer, and just hoping, desperately hoping, that this marks a return to form for Team Sussex on Netflix after the disappointment of Polo, his recent tribute to the deeply relatable hobby he shares with around 23 people worldwide.
Wait, is that Gregg Wallace making candles with her at 47 seconds in?
A brief teaser within a teaser. An Easter egg, as it is known. An Easter Gregg, perhaps. But no, no it is not. Investigations reveal it is, in fact, Daniel Martin, Meghan’s long-time make-up artist and a close friend, which in hindsight was always more likely. But for a while there I was also fooled into thinking the disgraced former greengrocer and veteran menace of MasterChef had appeared.
How bold, I thought, for Meghan to honour one of her forebears in the chatting-to-people-at-a-kitchen-island game, and to refuse to cut the scene despite the latest allegations. In a way that would have been the most interesting creative decision in the whole project. Alas. Probably for the best.
