12 honest thoughts on Meghan Markle's Netflix show.

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Do you know what the world needs? Yet another hot take on a TV show based almost entirely on the sprinkling of flowers on food. All types of food. Am I up to the task? I am.

With Love, Meghan dropped on Netflix on Tuesday and I watched the first two episodes immediately so we could discuss it on Wednesday's show, which you can listen to here:

Pretty much globally, the muscle-memory default is to trash any project with which Meghan is associated, which is exactly what happened. This show was always going to carry a lot of baggage; suitcases stuffed full of however you feel about Meghan. About lifestyle shows. About the royal family. About rich people living leisurely lives in Montecito. About forcing your friends to make candles. About having your own bee-keeper.

I'm not here to tell you to like the show or not to like the show. You do you!

Watch: Meghan Markle and Prince Harry on Sunday Morning. Post continues below.

Video via: Sunday Morning.

I started by not liking it and feeling defensive because I am a terrible hostess who hates having anyone stay at my house, let alone making 'moments' for them beside their bed (what bed? I don't have a spare room).

I turned off halfway through the third ep not with disgust, but with the sense that I needed more plot. Or more outfit changes. Or more…. chinks in the perfectly tonged armour.

Image credit: Netflix/'With Love, Meghan.'

But then a funny thing happened. I got sick for a couple of days and couldn't really concentrate on much, so I put the show back on and got sort of washed away by the inoffensive blandness of it. In a nice way. It was kind of soothing. Nothing happened in any of the episodes and I liked that because this year is about cramming entire news cycles into minutes.

So here are some of my thoughts, in no particular order and with no particular agenda.

1.Meghan has beautiful skin and I like her freckles a lot.

2. She seems vulnerable and unsure of herself and her place in the world. Most of the people who come over to be in an episode (Mindy Kaling! A Korean chef! A Mexican chef! The founder of the Tatcha skincare empire! The wife of her husband's polo friend!) don't seem to know Meghan well or at all. She tries very hard to make them feel 'cared for' as she puts it, by making special drinks or food that they like, but this comes across more like wanting them to like and admire her. In many ways, the whole show seems like fishing for compliments more than doing something she actually loves which feels oddly poignant. She comes across as a person in great need of approval and validation but from a place of uncertainty more than ego. You can tell she's been rather knocked about by this whole royal thing.

3. Her pop-cultural temperature seems to have been frozen back in 2015 when she met Harry. "Time for a parfait par-tay!" "Busy bees!" "My bacon brings all the boys to the yard" "Wine time". It's like she's a dad joke.

4. I totally get why it's not her kitchen. The critics losing it about her TV show not being filmed at her actual house have clearly never been to a shoot. Filming 8 episodes of TV (we now know they filmed more like 16 because season 2 was filmed at the same time and was announced a few days after season 1 dropped) would have taken a couple of months of filming with a large crew and I can't think of any cooking shows like this that take place in the host's actual home. Stand down.

5. She's not a clothes person. Whenever I say this about someone, it seems like a diss but it's not. It doesn't mean someone doesn't look good. It means they don't get a kick out of expressing themselves through what they wear. Clothes are more about function for them than form. She genuinely seems to be a jeans and a shirt kind of woman, and she wears them well. The styling is a bit all over the place in the series, designed to be inoffensive but lacking a cohesive sense of who she is. The sweater draped over her shoulders in a way you might do if you were in a Ralph Lauren campaign shot on a yacht was a low point for me and the way it was combined with a formal up-do and oddly matronly earrings was odd. I liked it when she had bare feet.

Image credit: Netflix/'With Love, Meghan.'

6. There was an undercurrent of diet culture running through the show from both Meghan and her guests. Off-hand references to "earning a treat" and eating "healthy" or "light"… it's all coded to a very familiar skinny beauty standard. A show about cooking and eating where every woman is a size zero and looks utterly perfect? Tonged hair. False lashes. Artful makeup. Immaculate styling of outfits, hair and faces. It felt a little… exhausting and joyless in its hermetically sealed perfection, no matter how many times Meghan insisted it wasn't about perfection.

Image credit: Netflix/'With Love, Meghan.'

7. Meghan really wants to work. She's ambitious, and I don't mean that in a pass-ag way. I'm ambitious too. I love working. When she was an actor, her lifestyle blog, The Tig was her side hustle. Lots of people had them around 2013. Gwyneth's GOOP inspired a generation of women to turn their love of shopping and home-making into something you could monetise. It was at the same time that 'mummy-blogging' was becoming a thing. Women finding purpose and meaning, connection and even money from what they were doing already, un-noticed, for free. Working inside the home can be lonely, repetitive and boring. Turning dinner into a 'moment' and hostessing into a verb can be a way to stay sane and stimulated and to earn praise for thankless tasks. I get it. The irony, of course, is that women like Meghan are earning money from creating content about the life of someone who doesn't seem to need to work (see: making your own candles/bath salts/growing vegetables).

8. There is such a thing as being too famous to work outside your own home. Too famous to be seen to be working for money — even if you need it to pay for your lifestyle. Meghan is that level of famous. What's she going to do? Go back to acting? That only leaves charity work which…doesn't pay your bills. Monetising home-making is not a new thing. Martha Stewart, Nigella Lawson, Nara Smith, Gwyneth Paltrow and now Meghan. The reason why it can make people cranky and defensive is because it makes us feel insecure. No, I don't have a local beekeeper. No, I don't put thoughtful mini gardening tools in my kids' party bags or make balloon arches by hand. No, I don't make bath salts or harvest baskets for my guests to take home because I'm too tired and too busy, and also I don't want to. And because it takes a crew of 80 people (that's how many were involved in With Love, Meghan) working full time behind the scenes so the person in front of the camera can make it seem so easy to 'elevate' everyday basic things like pasta or turning 3 store-bought croissants into a 'strawberry story'.

9. You can make a balloon arch at home. You just have to buy the balloons, the arch and a machine to blow them up and then set aside a long time to make it.

10. The reason why people do shows like this is to be understood. There is a pained eagerness in Meghan throughout the series to show us who she is. Her guests — and the editors — are encouraged to highlight every instance of someone saying "you've always been the hostess with the mostest" "you just love feeding people" "You've always been so caring and thoughtful" and it's probably true. Before this show, Meghan's story has been written mostly by others and by the agonised, over-wrought documentary Netflix paid for (as part of the rumoured US $100M deal that included this new show) about leaving the royal family. It's nice to see her in a low (no?) stakes scenario where there are no villains or injustices more dire than the possibility of milk scalding on the stove when it's left for too long or being stung by a bee.

11. I'm not sure why she seems incapable of calling Harry by his name. Throughout the episode she calls him "my husband" or "H" and it's odd.

12. She would have made a bloody excellent royal. Every box is ticked: she looks perfect, she's innately aware of any possible landmine that could spark controversy and contorts herself painfully to avoid them. She knows how to talk a lot without saying anything. She dresses in a way that's classic, chic, feminine and expensive without being flashy or fashion-y. If only she — and they — had been able to adapt to one another's expectations. She's studiously inoffensive, aesthetically perfect, enjoys being famous, appreciates a luxurious life that's very different to the one she grew up in and appears comfortable being the centre of attention in a harmless, bland context. Not to say there's no depth under the surface, but she is excellent at masking it. And with the level of scrutiny she's been under this past decade, it's no wonder.

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