The Spectator
With Love, Meghan 2 is just as ghastly as season one
Alexander Larman
27 August 2025, 6:00am
Like death and taxes, the second instalment of
With Love, Meghan has come around again, sloughing into view to the usual chorus of disapproval and confusion. The
newsrecently broke that Netflix has deigned to allow Harry ‘n’ Meghan another five years of deciding not to make their future projects. In light of that, this second series of the hitherto unloved show – filmed at the same time as the first – has been presented to a previously indifferent global public in the hope that it will distract from many of the
unflattering and
embarrassing stories about the Duke of Sussex that have proliferated this year.
Harry is entirely absent from this series of
With Love, Meghan, although he and the couple’s children are often referred to. Instead, this is Meghan: the solo show, and as she trills Californian-inflected pieties to her sycophantic assortment of not-so-special guests, there is the occasional gleam of desperation just about visible underneath her equally gleaming smile. It is fair to say that the many attempts to launch her as a solo star – via television, podcasts and, of course, her ‘As Ever’ product range – have not been as successful as she (and those with a vested interest in her earning power) might have wished. Unless she is prepared to write yet another tell-all memoir, she risks dwindling into obscurity.
With this in mind, what’s
With Love, Meghan II like? The surprising answer is that the second run-around is actually slightly more bearable than the first. Don’t get me wrong –
it’s still ghastly, tedious dreck, seemingly produced for an audience that has no critical faculties whatsoever and is content to regard whatever is taking place on their televisions without any necessary judgement – but it throws up a few minor points of interest, which is more than the earlier series did. The presence of the Michelin-starred British chef Clare Smyth – who did the catering for Harry and Meghan’s wedding – in the sixth episode lifts proceedings considerably. Smyth is a proper person, unlike most of the non-entities featured here, and in her brief appearance manages to imbue the show with a professionalism and dry wit that are entirely absent from the platitudinous nonsense elsewhere.
As for the rest of it, your tolerance and enjoyment for therapy-speak and carefully ladled-out nuggets of minor gossip will be tested. Meghan offers fleeting, inconsequential details that are expressed with virtually the same amount of gravity, whether it’s her reminiscing about her love for the ‘grandma radio’ show Magic FM, describing her three-week separation from her children in the aftermath of the Queen’s death as something that left her ‘not well’, or the revelation that she made her husband a personalised baseball cap for his 40th birthday party, emblazoned with the logo PH40. There is also the surreal reminder that Meghan and her friend Chrissy Teigen briefly appeared as briefcase-wielding models on the American version of the quiz show
Deal or No Deal, although sadly Meghan never appeared alongside Noel Edmonds, which would have made for a cosmic shock of toxic proportions.
I cannot imagine that those who shunned the first series of
With Love, Meghan will be lured back in for this go-around, and I’m already dreading the Christmas special.
The food cooked is largely unappetising, and British audiences are likely to be mystified by both the identity of the ‘special guests’ and why, say,
putting a roast chicken in the oven is treated with the kind of reverence usually reserved for the opening of the Ark of the Covenant, but this is not the point.
This is brand reinforcement, pure and simple. And should – heaven forbid! – Harry and Meghan ever go their separate ways, this is a reminder that the distaff half of the brand is more than capable of putting herself out into the public eye as a solo prospect. That revelatory memoir has, you feel, just come a tiny bit closer.
