This cloying reality show is enough to induce toothache

‘With Love, Meghan’ is back with another batch of celebrity guests and dishes made from scratch. It’s a shame her brand of hostessing makes us all feel inadequate, says Helen Coffey

- Helen Coffey

“There are easy ways to show up lovingly,” Meghan Sussex, nee Markle, says during the second season of her Netflix lifestyle show, With Love, Meghan. In fact, the word “easy” seems to be the watchword for the entire eight-episode run – and boy, is it doing some heavy lifting. Making homemade graham-cracker s’mores with vanilla-bean turmeric marshmallows and here’s-one-I-made-earlier tonal chocolate bark is, apparently, “easy”. Whipping up boba tea and persimmon-topped sourdough is “easy”. Crafting necklaces using pressed flowers for your children’s individual birth months and setting them in UV resin is “easy”. In the surreal and saccharine world created by the actor turned royal turned Instagram-grid-come-to-life, nothing, it seems, is complicated.

This second outing of the madly aspirational hostessing show doesn’t stray far from the format of its predecessor. Each instalment sees an impeccably if blandly presented Meghan swaddled in neutral tones as she invites guests round to a house in Montecito, California.

It’s not her house, obviously, but a rental property down the street, which makes the whole “at home with” brand feel slightly bogus. References to spouse Prince Harry and their two children, Archie and Lilibet, are generally kept sporadic and vague - “I would’ve told H to come!” she trills to an awkward John Legend, who, one assumes, is contractually obliged to duck into the kitchen when dropping off wife Chrissy Teigen.