To start with an unpopular opinion: I loved With Love, Meghan, Netflix’s goofy new lifestyle series, in which Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, smiles winningly in a Montecito kitchen that is not her own, making the hokey jokes you typically find stitched on Etsy home goods (“bready or not, here I crumb”), underbaking cakes, and strewing edible flowers on everything that crosses her path. I loved how Meghan’s core kitchen skills appear to be arranging vegetables on a $326 cutting board and emphasizing every single consonant in the word preserves. I loved when she praised carnations as a humble, budget-friendly flower, then “elevated” them by sticking one (1) into the middle of maybe a thousand dollars worth of peonies. I even loved when she made avocado toast for a quick solo breakfast—who among us?—though I screamed out loud when she promptly sprinkled edible flowers on top.
By now, you may have seen the memes—TikTok jokers radiating cheer and offering tutorials on how to “prepare” glasses of water. They skewer one of the show’s key contradictions, which is that Meghan, though lovable, is maybe in truth not very good at domestic goddessery. In the first episode, tending to “her” bees, she relies on a beekeeper, a man who could easily be Fred Armisen doing a Portlandia bit. “We’ve been doing this for over a year now, but I still need you,” she tells him, smiling. Later, she confesses, “I’ve never liked honey.” When Meghan and Mindy Kaling prepare food for a children’s tea party to which no children actually show up, the finger sandwiches look less like high-tea offerings and more like the scraps in the duchess’s chicken coop. Making tacos with a chef, she has to be told to use two forks to shred chicken breasts or she’ll burn her fingers. She is, however, extremely skilled at opening champagne—no one has popped this many bottles in the lifestyle realm since Martha got out of prison or Ina went through pandemic lockdown.
Watching the show, I found myself stuck on one question: Who is this for? Is there an underserved niche of Santa Barbara moms with their own pristine vegetable gardens who’ve previously been too intimidated to attempt baking focaccia? And yet, as With Love, Meghan went on, it started to hit a few of the classic pleasure points. A beautiful woman with a wardrobe of stealth-wealth beige separates and floral dresses? Check. A fixation, both nutritional and aesthetic, on how best to feed one’s family, down to fruit platters arranged like rainbows and jars of chia seeds and hemp hearts to sneak into pancakes? Check. A strange aside where she details what it meant for her to take her husband’s name? Ding ding ding: We’re in tradwife territory now. This is absurd, of course. Meghan isn’t a tradwife; if anything, she’s a girlboss, a savvy, mediagenic entrepreneur with a new podcast dedicated to businesswomen and a nascent retail brand. So why does she seem to be trying so hard to rebrand as one, offering up this wistful performance of femininity and old-fashioned domestic arts that feels staged—and pretty familiar?
In a world in which 99.999 percent of women’s labor at home goes unseen and unappreciated, tradwives demand visibility—cut loose from the demands of a 9-to-5 job, they promise, we women can free ourselves to make the things we already do more beautiful, and to find meaning in everyday routines by turning chores into homemaking. The most notorious tradwives on social media turn domestic labor into intoxicating content; think Hannah Neeleman churning butter (with a KitchenAid) or Nara Smith whispering over videos of herself carving up pork butt while wearing a scarlet couture gown. With Love, Meghan does exactly the same thing, affirming the home as Meghan’s sanctuary after a bruising, very public introduction to married life, and the acts she performs for friends and family as labors of real love.
But there’s also a playacting component to the show that it can’t quite shake off. Most of us, I’d safely bet, have made pasta, possibly even while another person watches. But we don’t imbue the process with so much meaning. Meghan doesn’t just entertain, she explains on the show; she makes elaborate rituals out of the act of hosting, baking dog biscuits from scratch for one dear friend (who arrives regrettably sans dog) and creating a welcome basket for a beloved former makeup artist, right down to handmixed bath salts and snacks in beribboned bags. Partly, this seems practical—Meghan might not be a trained chef entirely set up for her own cooking show, but her calligraphy skills and decorative abilities are second to none. The word beautiful is peppered throughout every scene, emphasizing Meghan’s key aspiration of prettifying domestic life. Her friends appreciate these efforts—of course they do! But they’re also stiff and slightly awkward on camera, which is perhaps what all the wine is for.
The overall vibe is one of delightful leisure. “We might have a busy floral day today,” Meghan says, visiting a flower market and walking out with armfuls of bouquets, like she’s in a horticultural episode of Supermarket Sweep. By contrast, I’ve spent the past few months watching Neeleman, the superstar influencer also known as Ballerina Farm, attend cooking school in Ireland, a 12-week sojourn—her husband and eight children have accompanied her—in which, for once, she seems unafraid to show how hard she’s working. She posts about the duck entrées that go wrong, the prep work for kitchen shifts, the late nights. And I’ve appreciated the transparency of someone really showing the arduousness of her efforts, not just cosplaying scenes of kitchen congress for Instagram. Most of the content creators whom we’ve come to identify as tradwives are more apt to hide both their home labor and the fact that they do indeed have jobs (as influencers).
If the goal is inducing aspiration, With Love, Meghan is indeed “beautiful.” Walking into the room while I was watching, my husband asked if this was “one of those movies with the kitchens,” by which he meant the oeuvre of Nancy Meyers—possibly the biggest compliment any Southern California lifestyle influencer could hope for. If Meghan’s fake garden is this colorful and bounteous, her fake pantry this blissfully stocked, can you imagine the real thing? I don’t begrudge her any of her hard-won happiness making crepes to mop up all her preserves, or getting Roy Choi to help her make fried chicken. (If you watch any one episode, make it that one, because Choi really can cook, and his chemistry with Meghan is the kind people watch morning television for.) But her series, ultimately, is best appreciated as anthropological study—what impossibly wealthy women do for love and fulfillment—rather than a model for how the rest of us should enact our labors: half as care and half as performance.
