A jolly red-faced man looms into view towards the end of Meghan Markle’s latest Netflix turkey, With Love, Meghan: Holiday Celebration. It’s Prince Harry, apparently ruddy with embarrassment at being dragged into his wife’s tectonically tacky lifestyle show.
Harry, kept locked away through the previous two seasons of With Love, has popped in to jollily admonish Meghan’s high-concept salad (all that beetroot and anchovy) and to sing the praises of her mother’s gumbo. His own family’s Christmas cooking is not mentioned. Still, we can surmise that the late Queen Elizabeth was not au fait with the cacio e pepe pasta or gougères (upwardly mobile cheese puffs) that Meghan has rustled up with the desperate bustle of a Victorian urchin working in a match factory.
Royals are often assumed to be lazy. But Meghan – a blue-blood through marriage – is manically eager to make an impression throughout her latest attempt at rebranding herself as Darina Allen for people who watch too much of The Crown. Clocking in at an ominous 56 minutes, Meghan’s Holiday Celebration begins with our hostess skipping among the pines at a Christmas-tree farm and busying herself with making an advent calendar stuffed with positive aphorisms for her kids.
She then welcomes her first “friend”, one of the B-listers from the American lifestyle industry prepared to trade banter with Meghan in return for an elevated profile. That guest is the restaurateur Will Guider, who is astonished to discover ye-olde-world tradition of Christmas crackers.
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“It’s such a celebration of community,” he gasps as Meghan explains that a cracker will typically include a terrible joke. (She disgracefully neglects to mention the paper crowns.) Next is the famously introverted tennis pro Naomi Osaka. She‘a visibly puzzled about what she is doing in the Meghanverse and takes some of the air out of proceedings by explaining to her hostess that, as a new mother, she doesn’t have much time for entertaining.
There is an unpleasant bauble lurking at the bottom of Holiday Celebration insofar as it marks the end of the most lucrative phase of the Sussexes’ relationship with Netflix. Having stumped up $100 million for five years of content from the exiled royals, Netflix has now decided to amend the arrangement. Going forward, it will be a first-look deal, meaning less upfront cash and the option for Netflix to say thanks but no thanks to whatever Meghan and Harry cook up next.
But before they head off into the streaming sunset, this one final horror remains. It‘s an onslaught of Christmas naffness the awfulness of which seems obvious to everyone except poor Meghan. Confronted with his wife’s purgatorial salad, for instance, Harry’s good cheer evaporates faster than his uncle Andrew’s sweat in a London nightclub.
The vitriol directed at Meghan since she and Harry became a couple has been unedifying, and she’s clearly not going through the motions here. Far from it: she wants very badly for Holiday Celebration to dazzle. But like an office party where HR mandates that everyone participate in the karaoke, the reek of forced fun is ever-present. It’s almost enough to overpower even the anchovies that are giving Harry the horrors.
