Is "With Love, Meghan" State-sponsored Propaganda?

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In the first scene of the “With Love, Meghan” pilot, our hostess and executive producer is somewhere on her sprawling Montecito property with Beekeeper Branden, harvesting honey.

“They are good vibes,” Meghan muses of the bees from behind her veiled wide-brim hat. There are about eight of them buzzing just outside the hive.

“We’re about to immerse ourselves in like 70,000 good vibes,” Branden says as he lifts the hood off the wooden beehive.

“What’s the lifespan of a bee?” Meghan asks.

“Four weeks. Maybe six. And they have different roles… and different jobs…”

“Mmmm…” Meghan says, nodding, looking down at the hive like their Queen Bee overlord.

Whether that’s accidental or dramatic irony, you can’t help recall how she and husband Prince Harry walked away from their royal duties in 2020 and fled stateside due to vicious bullying by the British press and lack of protection from the royal family. In doing so, Meghan was instantly cast a beautiful rebel like her late mother-in-law— the throne and its responsibilities were so stylishly cast aside on good principle. But the status associated with the throne seems harder for Meghan to let go of.

There is something fantastically colonial about With Love, Meghan. The title card in which her first name is penned in en elegant calligraphy, for one; and her first guest not being a peer, but an old employee—make-up artist Daniel Martin. Daniel’s in town for the weekend from New York, Meghan explains, and she wants to make his stay special. She introduces Daniel as “one of her closest friends,” which you want to believe, but can’t. Meghan doesn’t know whether or not Daniel is allergic to peanuts, and can’t remember what their first job together was (it was Suits). Later, Daniel insinuates that while he did accompany her to her wedding cake testing, he was not actually invited to the royal wedding. Daniel could be any Netflix watcher slobbering on their couch; skeptical, feeling a little condescended to, but pleased to be the receiver of a warm welcome, a freshly baked cake, and the clout that comes associated with the First American Princess.

After presenting Daniel with bath salts, the viral peanut butter pretzels, and a perfectly imperfect crudité platter, Meghan asks Daniel if he can help her chop tomatoes for a dish she made up, called

Single Skillet Spaghetti. (Martha Stewart has a nearly identical recipe called One-Pan Pasta.)

Bouncing off one another, Meghan and Daniel say those beautifully branded words a couple times— Single Skillet Spaghetti— just so we don’t forget it. Within seconds, Daniel cuts himself with a knife.

Camouflaged red, white, and blue…

“Your only ratchet friend,” Daniel says deprecatingly to himself while Meghan jumps into boo-boo doctor mode. She yells to the crew, “but he’s an ARTIST! We need to protect these hands!”, a strange insinuation here that being ratchet is okay if you’re an artist— a very ruling class take.

She is not just the Queen Bee, but the Busybee too. Meghan is nonstop industrious throughout the 41-minute runtime— there is craft after snack after meal to make. She adds truffle oil and truffle salt to her home made popcorn— “truffle truffle truffle!” she titters, signaling that you, too, can “luxurify” any snack. She bakes a simple cake with lots of lemon zest. They pour candles. After she and Daniel decorate the cake, she makes him a tea from the honey she harvested earlier.

Watching With Love, Meghan feels like swallowing an Ativan: like mind numbing YouTube fodder. I was surprised that it recalled for me the Chinese influencer Li Ziqi’s mesmerizing YouTube channel.

Li Ziqi’s content has been called CPC propaganda because her videos portray a romantic version of rural Chinese life, a far cry from the impoverished reality and lack of infrastructure that rural Chinese citizens face. CCTV ran an interview with her when she returned to YouTube this fall, which they rarely do with influencers, fueling the rumors that she is, if not paid for by communist China, at least welcomed by it.

Nowhere near the impressive technical level of Liziqi, who we see turn trees into paper or leaves into baskets she uses to harvest cucumbers, Meghan too is foraging, cooking, crafting with what she has. She, too is walking barefoot around her kitchen. With Love, Meghan has caught flack for its similarity to Pamela Anderson’s show Cooking with Love, in which Pam invites chefs to cook plant-based food with her from her home on Vancouver Island. But that’s all happening up in Canada! As an aspiring responsible consumer, I can’t separate who Meghan is and what she stands for from the format of this lifestyle show, and the times we are living through.

Obviously it’s giving trad wife, it’s giving cottage core. But the real reason With Love, Meghan feels like state sponsored propaganda to me is because the Trump administration surely would find nothing to fault about this show. Nor would anyone in power. This is actually the perfect show for keeping the masses tranquilized: it elevates and celebrates budget-friendly crafts and four-ingredient recipes. It keeps the average audience member feeling like they still have dignity, while fascism revokes rights around us left and right. None of Meghan’s meals or crafts are all that impressive, and that’s the point. What the audience is supposed to find impressive? Her beautiful homestead, her crisp linen outfits, and her generosity in inviting us to peek inside. What is more MAGA—or end stage capitalist— than that?

At the end of the episode, Daniel prepares to return back to his New York apartment (where, he admits, he does not have much counter space for crafting). Before he leaves, Meghan reminds him:

“You can do all of this at home, you know.”

Sure, you can pause Netflix, bake that cake, and resume your precarious standing as a member of the vanishing middle class. Or you could watch seven more episodes of With Love, Meghan, and never leave the homestead— or your couch. Lucky for us, Netflix has already renewed it for season two.

(BTW, it’s not even her actual house.)