From flower arranging and beekeeping to crafting, baking cookies and spending time with her children, Meghan Markle has made pains through her Netflix show to reveal herself as the epitome of domestic bliss.
But in the wake of stinging reviews and weak ratings, the Duchess of Sussex might have sought to make lemonade out of lemons – or jam out of a sticky situation.
For despite getting hands on in the kitchen and wanting to rebrand herself as the next Martha Stewart, Meghan’s official line on the matter is that she was initially shy to reveal her homemaking ways.
During an appearance at the Time100 Summit with Time CEO Jessica Sibley on Thursday, Meghan told the audience that she had ‘always’ loved to ‘make things in my kitchen, do small flower arrangements, make a lot of jam’, she added with a laugh.
When she began sending those items as gifts, Bela Bajaria, chief content officer of Netflix suggested ‘there’s a show here’, claims the 43-year-old actress-turned-entrepreneur.
Meghan then revealed: ‘I hadn’t at the onset thought that was something I wanted to share in that way.’
With a final thrust of enthusiasm for her latest project, she added: ‘Creatively we worked as partners to really find a way for it to land and for me to be able to share it and just have fun, which I think is really the goal in this chapter.’
The Duchess’ suggestion that she was initially bashful about the project will raise eyebrows in the face of the fact the show was several months in the making.
It was also inexorably tied to the launch of her lifestyle brand, As Ever – which she has also confessed to spending ‘so many years working on’ – and a line of merchandise ‘inspired’ by the show.
With Love, Meghan finally aired on Netflix in March after it was initially postponed due to the wildfires in Los Angeles.
But for all the hype and build-up to the show’s release, it was slated by reviewers as ‘gormless lifestyle filler’ with a ‘tangible desperation’.
Others said it shows the Duchess is ‘attempting to cling to fame by any means possible’, while another described how she was ‘joylessly filling kids’ party bags with seeds’.
Marina Hyde in The Guardian described the show as ‘sensationally absurd and trite’, adding: ‘The mildest way to describe this show is as a ghastly artefact of a particular cultural era that recently met its apocalypse.’
Meanwhile The Telegraph gave the show just two stars. In a review, they said the series was an ‘exercise in narcissism, filled with extravagant brunches, celebrity pals and business plugs’.
Criticism was also levelled at the show for being about Meghan’s ‘intimate glimpse’ of life at home – yet it was revealed that it was not filmed in the Montecito-based mansion she shares with her husband Prince Harry and their two children, Archie, five, and Lilibet, three.
Instead, Meghan filmed the eight-episode series in a nearby £5 million estate nestled within a gated community and owned by Montecito’s influential Cipolla family.
She explained that specific point at New York’s Time100 Summit that the decision to film elsewhere was made to protect her children’s childhood, according to Variety.
‘When people say, ‘Why didn’t you [film in] your house?’ Well, I have kids coming home from their nap, and 80 people in the kitchen isn’t really the childhood memory I’d want for them to have,’ she said.
Questions were additionally raised after Meghan’s lifestyle products – inspired by the meals and decorations she prepared in the series – rapidly sold out within half an hour, but her famous pals still all managed to snap up stock.
Jennifer Walsh – who appeared in episode six of Meghan’s Netflix show – gushed on her Instagram story: ‘I’m in love with everything – especially the flower sprinkles that I don’t know how I ever lived without!’
Tracy Robbins, who was in episodes six and eight, posted a screenshot of her order, containing shortbread mix and raspberry spread.
And Meghan’s close friend Jamie Kern Lima cheerfully said ‘I barely got an order placed in time’ – while Kris Jenner seems to have been gifted a freebie.
Among the products included in the limited-edition drop were wildflower honey with honeycomb priced at $28 (£21.60) and flower sprinkles at $15 (£11.60), while a jar of raspberry jam set punters back $14 (£10.80).
Other goods in the Duchess’s lifestyle range included shortbread and crepe mixes – both being sold for $14 – and various herbal tea mixes for $12 (£9.30) each.
The Telegraph quoted what they called a well-placed source as saying the items had been made available in small quantities and quickly marked as sold out to generate interest, which is ‘a common marketing ploy’.
Despite the show coming under fire, the series has been renewed for a second season, with Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix publicly backing it and insisting the Duchess had been ‘underestimated.’
TV viewing figures however were barely a quarter of the viewers hooked in by the documentary series Harry & Meghan in 2022.
A source at Netflix told , ‘it’s not a runaway success’, adding that the numbers show viewers prefer to see Meghan appear alongside her husband, Prince Harry, rather than solo.
The Duchess of Sussex’s eight-part series was watched by 526,000 households in the first five days it was available on Netflix, according to data gathered by Samba TV.
But by comparison Harry & Meghan drew in 2.1 million households in approximately the same number of days – making it four times more successful.
The lackluster viewing figures preceded figures out this week which show her new podcast Confessions of a Female Founder are also disappointing after it failed to chart.
Meghan’s new Lemonada podcast – a follow-up to Archetypes, which failed to land and led to Spotify not renewing her and Prince Harry’s £25millon contract in 2023 – has plummeted out of the Spotify 100 list, both in the US and UK.
A show called Sleep Cove, helping listeners with guided sleep, meditation, as well as sleep hypnosis, proved to be more popular among British listeners, placing 79th on Spotify’s UK chart.
The latest episode of the female empowerment podcast also failed to crack Apple’s Top 200 chart.
It comes as exclusively revealed the Suits’ actress had tried to get A-listers such as Beyonce and Taylor Swift on Confessions of a Female Founder, which was said to already be in crisis talks after only three episodes.
‘No one’s picking up the phone’, one source close to the production has claimed, adding: ‘The show is not landing’.
‘There’s no Taylor Swift. No Beyoncé. Not even a Hailey Bieber. And when you’re pitching female empowerment, that’s a problem. It speaks volumes for her pulling power. She’s not happy about her lack of appeal’, they added.
With her TV and podcast projects not securing the ratings and positive reviews she would have liked, Meghan can at least plunge her efforts into her lifestyle brand, As Ever – but even this project has not been without its bumps in the road.
Meghan had originally introduced her business venture – with which she has partnered with Netflix – as American Riviera Orchard last March.
But she faced trademarking setbacks and switched the name to As Ever in a shambolic about-face just weeks before the launch.
The Duchess has since admitted on her podcast that the original name was a ‘word salad’.
She said: ‘I had secured As Ever as a name in 2022, and then as everything started to evolve last year, and bringing in a partner the size that it was, and it was just so interesting.
‘Because you remember, I said, ‘I like American Riviera as an umbrella,’ and then be able to have verticals beneath it. And maybe have the ‘Orchard’ really small. But when that’s not feasible… suddenly it became this word salad. I didn’t love that so much.
‘I was like, ‘OK, well let’s go back to the thing that I’ve always loved. Let’s use the name that I protected for a reason that had been sort of under wraps’.
‘And then we were able to focus in the quiet and put our heads down and build on something that no one was sniffing around to even see about.
‘It was just really, really helpful to have that quiet period which you would know after spending so many years working on something, building it and the pivots that you had to take with it.’
But even after securing her company’s new name, she faced backlash from followers of a clothing business in New York and New Jersey which is identically named.
The business owners of As Ever were forced to put out a statement clarifying that it was ‘not affiliated’ to the Duchess of Sussex’s project and thanked everyone for their concern about their ‘namesake brand’.
She then faced further trouble when civic bosses in the sleepy Mallorca village of Porreres considered taking legal action against the Duchess of Sussex for copying its traditional coat of arms for As Ever’s logo.
Both images bear a striking similarity to one another: each features a palm tree with two birds hovering on either side of it.
While the town’s coat of arms is splashed with colours – orange and green for the tree and sand, black for the birds, on a white background – Meghan’s logo uses just dark grey and white.
Mayor Francisca Mora told local newspaper Ara Balears that the likeness was ‘surreal’.
She later told The Sun: ‘We don’t want our coat of arms to be perverted because it belongs exclusively to Porreres.
‘The only difference with their logo and our coat of arms is that theirs shows two hummingbirds and in ours are either swallows or pigeons — historians cannot agree.’
has reached out to the Duchess of Sussex for comment.