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Unless it becomes a ratings smash (and that isn’t impossible), With Love, Meghan doesn’t just represent the hard launch of Duchess of Sussex’s new career as a Martha Stewart-style lifestyle inspo guru; it might also be the final thing she makes for Netflix.
The terms of the deal Harry and Meghan signed with the streamer in 2021 were, by all accounts, wildly favourable. Their five-year deal was worth $100m, in the expectation that they would be so brimming with ideas that they would become Obama-style prestige-content producers. Reader, as you already know, this did not happen.
Instead With Love, Meghan is the fourth project to be released under Prince Harry and Meghan’s Archewell banner – and the third consecutive disappointment. Last year’s documentary series Polo – an F1: Drive to Survive rip-off that asked the question “Are polo players as dull as they seem?” then immediately fell asleep – all but died on impact. This was due to a combination of factors, primarily the on-screen absence of Harry and the pointlessness of polo.
Prior to that, there was 2023’s documentary Heart of Invictus, which also had limited appeal. Outside the Netflix deal, there was Meghan’s bizarre podcast cul-de-sac, Archetypes, which ran for 12 episodes in 2022 and was the sum total of the couple’s $20m Spotify deal.
In truth, With Love, Meghan probably won’t turn things around either, unless the broader public suddenly develops a hankering for long-form television programmes about a woman filling children’s party bags with seeds and manuka honey. This means that the only successful content produced by Harry and Meghan so far has been, well, Harry & Meghan.
This one you will definitely remember, because it was the reality show that came amid 2022’s post-Megxit Burn It All Down tour, where it felt as if every one of their waking moments was dedicated to lashing out at their families in full view of the public. There was the Oprah interview in which Meghan said that one (and only one) member of the royal family was racist. There was Spare, the book in which Harry detailed all his fights with his brother, plus the time he took so many drugs at Courteney Cox’s house that he ended up having a conversation with a bin.
But Harry & Meghan now feels like the pinnacle of all that because, unlike everything else, it understood what audiences expected of them. Yes, it had ambition – parts of the series did a really good job of contextualising the royal family’s history of colonialism – that elevated their complaints from whining. But, more importantly, there was also a lot of whining.
A lot of whining. It was basically all they did for the entire series. And, honestly, they were great at it. Harry & Meghan would have made an amazing 00s VH1 reality show, full of bitchy asides to camera and gratuitous sound effects. There was an unignorable trashiness at its core, an opportunistic desperation for attention that couldn’t be quenched. Had they been smarter about drip-releasing their grievances, rather than unleashing them all at once, Harry & Meghan may well have run for years.
The thirsty part of Meghan still exists. It’s evident in the Vanity Fair story about her going to a publisher to pitch a book about divorce, despite not actually being divorced yet. And it’s evident in her decision to rebrand herself in With Love, Meghan. The problem is that nobody wants to see Meghan making decorative ladybird crostini with Mindy Kaling. With Love, Meghan is the sort of gormless lifestyle filler that, had it been made by the BBC, would be used to bulk out episodes of Saturday Kitchen.
There is a version of Meghan that people want to see on screen. But it isn’t the joylessly joy-filled rictus version of With Love, Meghan. No, they want to see the furious, righteous Meghan from Harry & Meghan. In other words, what they want is a proper Meghan reality show.
There are rumours that Netflix may not cut its losses with the Sussexes completely, instead preferring to keep them on at a vastly reduced rate. This is good news for the content developed but not yet delivered, such as the adaptation of the novel Meet Me at the Lake, and possibly even their aborted animation show, Pearl. But mainly it’s good news for us. If this really is the last roll of the dice, then it may be time for Harry and Meghan to face the inevitable and become the new Osbournes.
