On the Live Aid charity single, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’, Bono sings the (somewhat incongruous) line ‘Well tonight, thank God it’s them instead of you’. Although he is referring to starving children dying in poverty rather than well-heeled Americans appearing on television, much the same sentiment applies to the unfortunate ‘special guests’ who have been corralled into the latest (and, presumably, last, unless the ratings pick up dramatically) episode of With Love, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex’s Netflix-funded wallow in self-regard and vanity.
This instalment is festive-themed, and comes with all the joyful élan of a drunken department store Santa placing a lump of coal in a child’s stocking. The episode, grandiosely entitled ‘With Love, Meghan: Holiday Celebration’, follows the usual pattern of previous endurance tests. Meghan pretends to cook; ‘special guests’ applaud her efforts as if she has found a cure for cancer; some would-be homely wisdom is dispensed, as if from on high; and a thousand royal commentators strain to discern some veiled attack on the institution that she and her husband so showily abandoned. And this time around, the whole affair – as filmed this time a year ago, when Netflix had rather higher hopes for the show – has a light dusting of Christmas schmaltz all over it, as superficial and insubstantial as sleet.
Call her Meghan Poppins, practically perfect in every way
British viewers are unlikely to be familiar with the latest round of celebrities featured here – restaurateur Will Guidar, chef Tom Colicchio and Meghan’s ‘close personal friends’ Kelly Zaifen and Lindsay Roth – but such recognition does not matter. As with the earlier series of With Love, Meghan, the interchangeable roster of B-listers are mainly on hand to tell the Duchess how astonishing, kind, wonderful, etc., she is, and for Meghan to simper knowingly. That the guests occasionally have an expression of panicked surprise on their faces that makes them look like reluctant diners at Hyacinth Bucket’s candlelit suppers was not, presumably, part of the grand plan.
The whole thing feels ersatz, partly because it’s not actually filmed in Meghan’s home but in a convenient nearby Montecito home, and partly because it says precisely nothing about Christmas traditions. We learn that Meghan became quite partial to pulling crackers – not a euphemism, alas – when she lived in Britain, and that she beats herself up for her high standards. At one point, she declares that ‘I get so fussed about everything being perfect that you lose the magic that even happens in the mistakes.’ If we were to list the mistakes that she has made over the past few years, we would be here all day, but instead we learn that such things are merely a byproduct of her search for excellence. Call her Meghan Poppins, practically perfect in every way.
Thank goodness, then, for Prince Harry; not necessarily words that I imagined that I would write. He makes his most substantial on-screen appearance in the show to date and brings a welcome degree of irreverence in the couple of minutes he’s on screen. He suggests that Meghan’s gumbo – lovingly taken from her mother – is ‘puncturing through the top of my head right now’ and mocks Colicchio’s worthier-than-thou assembly of beetroot, black olives, anchovies and other horrors as ‘the anti-salad’. There is a warm rapport between him and Meghan that seems a good deal more genuine than the stiff, angry dynamic displayed between the two on their eponymous Netflix show a few years ago. He briefly gives this otherwise unendurable experience a jolt of humanity.
Harry aside, With Love, Meghan is thin gruel indeed. Given the utter failure of the last season, which practically nobody watched, and the subsequently scaled-back Netflix first look deal that the Sussexes have been offered, it is unlikely that there will be any more offerings of this nature. On this meagre evidence, viewers may channel their inner Tiny Tim and cry out ‘God bless us, every one!’
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