You know that urge when you’ve got friends coming for the weekend and you just have to spend the previous week putting together all the essentials for a successful stay: personalised bags of truffle-flavoured popcorn and pretzel nibbles for their bedside; hand-blended, sensually curated bath salts; layer cake flavoured with honey from your private hives; etc?
Well, if you’ve never had that urge, I’ve got some disappointing news: With Love, Meghan may not be the programme for you. Wait, no, actually, it might yet. But not for pleasurable reasons. Only for car crash-TV reasons. It’s like the lifestyle-TV equivalent of one of those rare public appearances by Mark Zuckerberg where he pretends he is not a robot. The harder Meghan tries to persuade us that she is warm, approachable, likeable, normal, homely, the more you’re inclined to suspect the opposite.
In the first episode, the very good friend Meghan has coming to stay at her fake house is no such thing. He’s essentially a cherished pet-cum-minion – the personal make-up artist she has known since even before Suits – whose sole purpose is to go ‘Wow!’, ‘Amazing!’, ‘This is, like, the most incredible home-made jam ever’, while Meghan goes through the motions of pretending to be a domestic goddess.
You almost feel sorry for her. At least you would if you weren’t thinking about all the hapless production team members whose lives were no doubt made a living hell during the making of Operation Make Meghan Seem Nice. It’s as if a rich, connected, bird-eating spider had commissioned itself an eight-part series in which it was to be portrayed throughout as a gambolling, newborn lamb: the challenge was always going to be tricky.
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