The Reviews of Meghan Markle's Netflix Series Claim it's So Bad it's Not Even Worth a Hate-Watch

When this trailer dropped in the first few weeks of the year, it almost seemed too good to be true for fans of vapid, superficial celebrities such as myself. The comments under the video set a standard of bland, ego-driven pretentiousness that no reality show could possibly live up to:

I paused this video at 7 seconds, and read the comments for two hours. That's entertainment. Thank you, America. 

I’ve been a chef for 30+ years and I can tell by how she holds her knife and her under proofed and under cooked focaccia that she has no idea what she is doing 

She added some olive oil to hummus, spun the salad dip plate and now the dish is not ordinary anymore, she elevated it to next level. How much did they pay Mindy to say that being served cake is the most glamourous moments of her life, show seems so fake.

“Surprising people with moments that let them know, I was really thinking of them.”  As she grasps a huge knife to cut through a cake.  Interesting script there.

H & M are like the boyfriend you broke up with who just can’t accept that it’s over. Go away. How many times do we have to say it?

Netflix please feel free to postpone this ridiculous and unnecessary garbage forever. No amount of editing or reshooting will change how utterly repulsed the public is by Meghan Markle. 

Netflix…is Meghan blackmailing you to keep her show and contract because the the ratio of likes to dislikes says it all. Have you noticed that when she does these fake hugs and rather overacted expressions of sympathy/compassion (all very Hallmark), she always positions herself so that it's her face that can be fully seen, along with her compassionate hand on the back. It's all so manipulative and cringe worthy. And for these two to even think about inserting themselves into the LA disaster with a film crew is beyond abhorrent. 

I think we can all agree that she’s truly a unifying force—after all, 95% of people seem to be united in their total revulsion to her show. 

Those are just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. As we speak, the trailer is approaching 90,000 comments, all of them in a fierce competition to see who can trash this dreck more savagely. And with 2.1 million views and 2,100 likes, the math works out perfectly to one person hitting the thumb-up button for every 1,000 who clicked "play." 

Well now the cloyingly titled With Love, Meghan has been launched. And the reviews are everything we could've dreamed they'd be:

Source - Meghan Markle probably only ever expected her new show, With Love, Meghan, to get terrible reviews in the U.K. press. …

However, she can hardly have predicted the scorching nature of the potentially career-ending reviews she is receiving in America, led by Hollywood industry bible Variety, which compared watching her show to a “forced march.”

In a brutal takedown of the new show, Variety paints the duchess as a narcissist for whom “no amount of praise seems enough” and questions why a show purportedly about Meghan’s life would be shot at a stand-in home up the road.

It mocks the struggle “to fill eight long episodes with only a certain number of new ideas” and notes that “Meghan’s quirks come to seem like affectations, from the multiple times she remarks on the beauty of an egg yolk to her dedication to placing ‘edible flowers’ on just about any comestible.”

The review then says, “The show plays out like a forced march, one in which Meghan’s guests must, as the price of getting to share an afternoon in a made-for-TV kitchen with her, praise her first.” …

Another savage review from an outlet with no axe to grind on behalf of the British royal family appeared in Tuesday’s Irish Times which declares, “a black hole of beige throughout.”

It adds: “The big conceit is that we, the impoverished viewers, can hang with Meghan for a few precious hours. And yet the velvet rope is always in sight. Filming takes place not in Meghan’s actual house but in some sort of guest mansion adjoining her property, and if there are passing references to her husband and children, we never see them on screen. With Love, Meghan is trying to sell us on Meghan’s lifestyle without actually showing us any of it…the ‘banter’ between host and guests has all the spark of a dead battery on a frosty morning.”

It concludes: “Lustreless and bland, it doesn’t even rise to the status of a hate-watch.”

Although Daily Mail suggests getting eyeballs on the screen to hate-watch this self-aggrandizing slop might be Netflix' whole business model:

'Even if social media explodes with criticism of the show, it could be a win-win - it is so awful it is almost compelling and sources within Netflix hope it will prove irresistible to a 'hate-watch' audience of those who don't like Meghan.' …

Guardian TV writer Stuart Heritage … wrote: 'Nobody wants to see Meghan making decorative ladybird crostini with Mindy Kaling.' With Love, Meghan is … gormless lifestyle filler. …

Anita Singh, the Telegraph's arts and entertainment editor, gave the show a two-star review and said it was an 'exercise in narcissim, filled with extravagant brunches, celebrity pals and business plugs'

She wrote: 'The format is this: Meghan invites people to her pretend house – the show is filmed in an $8million farmhouse down the road from her $14million home – and they tell her how amazing she is. This happens for eight episodes.

While I make a mental note to steal the phrase "gormless lifestyle filler" once I'm done looking up what it means, let me jump in here to say I have zero interest in watching Meghan make decorative ladybird crostini with anyone. But I am interested in a fake princess fake inviting her fake friend Mindy Kaling over to her fake house in the name of making a reality show, only to verbally slap that fake friend across the Botoxed face for getting her last name wrong:

It's incredible. Absolutely fascinating. The most mawkish brand of insincere rubbish imaginable. Posing as a look into the every day life of this warm, kind, giving woman whose greatest joy is sharing her creativity and the simple beauty of whatever the fuck she's rambling on about through her pretend happy tears. Everything is inauthentic. Everything is her own projection of some fantasy world where everything she touches is amazing and fabulous. It's the wealthy Southern California version of every ostentatious, social-climbing, nouveau riche suburban housewife's vision quest. 

If I did a show exactly on this level, I'd be a suave, sophisticated international spy with a license to kill who also happens to own a Boston sports franchise, dates supermodels, and lives in a gated mansion with an English butler. It's delusion. Cosplay. And sounds so narcissistic and terrible I don't know if I can keep myself from watching the disaster unfold. So I'll just keep reminding myself that if I do, it'll just encourage more garbage like this. Maybe if we all just give it a good leaving alone, maybe Netflix will cut off Harry and Meghan's allowance and they can finally fade into obscurity. I just don't like my chances of staying away.