The problem the Sussexes have run into is that eventually, retelling your story starts to bore — and annoy — your audience. Even those who had sympathy for them and believed they had been badly mistreated began to tire of the couple monetizing their victimhood.
The biggest strength of “With Love, Meghan” is that it appears to be something completely different. The series is produced by Archewell Productions, the couple’s production company, so what we’ll see is likely to be tightly controlled. But the show allows Meghan to break out of the cycle of re-litigating the royal feud on different mediums, which put the couple at risk of irrelevance. With frequent references to love, friendship and joy, the message of the show seems to be relentless positivity.
The show also allows Meghan to step out on her own. In the nearly two-minute trailer, there’s only one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance from Prince Harry, which feels like a pointed choice. As her longtime fans know, a show about homemaking is far from a random pivot; she ran The Tig from 2014 to 2017. It was deactivated alongside her personal social media accounts as she prepared to marry into the royal family. But on Jan. 1 Meghan returned to Instagram, signaling a new era where she will be speaking for herself.
Since the Sussexes settled in California, the British press’s main beef has been that they gave up their royal status to become “celebrities,” a class of citizen considered uncouth by comparison. What’s often overlooked in the case of the British press versus Meghan is an underlying snobbery and distrust over the fact that she’s American. In recent years, Prince Harry has drawn parallels between the treatment of his wife and his mother, Princess Diana, whose tragic death was a result of being hounded by the tabloids. The British press, however, have more closely aligned Meghan with another woman who married into the family: Wallis Simpson, the American socialite who married Edward, the Duke of Windsor, after he abdicated the throne to be with her, causing a crisis that jeopardized the monarchy itself.
Like Simpson, Meghan has been portrayed as a grifter who is both disrespectful to the royal institution and determined to profit from her association with it. The dream of finding sanctuary in domesticity isn’t a new product, but it’s one she’s well positioned to sell. Halfway through Meghan’s trailer, there was one line that stood out to me: “We’re not in pursuit of perfection,” she proclaims. “We’re in the pursuit of joy.” It’s a marketing statement that seems like it was workshopped by a team of writers — yet even if it sounds inauthentic, it also underlines her intent to become a serious player in the lifestyle space. As the founder of a new brand, American Riviera Orchard, and as a TV personality, she is reintroducing herself to the world, “With Love,” as Meghan. It’s a blueprint that proved profitable previously for Martha Stewart and Nigella Lawson, two women who also overcame their share of public crises and whose recipes are woven into the lives of fans who connect with them on a first-name basis.
