Even if millions tune into Meghan’s new show, there is a deeper problem she can’t fix

Off camera, a man’s voice says, “Let’s make a show!” Meghan smiles broadly, her face framed by her perfectly unstyled dark hair. She sizzles something in a pan, pats an aged beagle, wanders along the rows of a grand potager, basket in hand, and arranges flowers as she tells us: “I see what colour I gravitate to, and everything comes from there.” The unspoken part: as long as that colour is white, taupe, oatmeal, bone, string, putty... the whole beige rainbow. This is the trailer for the Duchess of Sussex’s new show, With Love, Meghan, which comes to Netflix on 15 January.

The vibe is “everyday princess, just like you”: “I’ve always loved taking something pretty ordinary and elevating it, surprising people with moments that let them know I was really thinking of them.”

To be fair to Meghan, she’s always been interested in the domestic arts. Before marrying Harry, she had a blog called The Tig (named after her favourite red wine, Tignanello), where she documented favourite restaurants, cocktails, backyard barbecues.

On the night Harry proposed, she was apparently making roast chicken, and the lore quickly developed that it was Ina Garten’s “engagement chicken”, a recipe that is apparently so delicious, you’re guaranteed an ethically sourced diamond before you’ve even simmered those bones into stock.

But at first glance of the show’s trailer, it isn’t fun-time recipe pusher and cocktail queen Ina Garten who comes to mind, but the uber domestic goddess Martha Stewart, she who parlayed a rich-lady Connecticut catering company into a billion-dollar empire of magazines, books, television shows and Kmart towels. It’s hardly surprising that, in Martha’s own recent Netflix documentary, she described her five-month prison stint as “a rest”.

What a difference a few decades make. When Martha created her empire, it was about so much more than teaching nice ladies how to cook, garden and keep house. She was the Andy Warhol of domesticity. She elevated it. To an extent, she created it, promising that – with no small amount of hard work and commitment – this perfect life of well-bred perfection was accessible to all. What we now think of as a late-20th-century, high “Wasp” aesthetic was largely her invention.

It was a long way from where she was raised, in Nutley, New Jersey. She was one of six children of Polish Catholic parents; her father, an angry alcoholic, was such a bigot that he slapped his daughter in the face when, at 19, she announced she was marrying Andrew Stewart (who is Jewish). Respectability was important, and perfection was part of that. Martha learnt gardening under her father’s gaze, and cooking and housekeeping from her mother. She gained their approval – and avoided his anger – by doing everything well.

Moving forward a few decades, Meghan tells us in her trailer: “We’re not in the pursuit of perfection, we’re in the pursuit of joy. Love is in the details!”

Martha would never.

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There is much to be said for the have-a-go philosophy of our times: what’s the worst that can happen? Where this approach can fall down is when complex skills are presented as being incredibly simple. Do you have a spare afternoon? Why not replaster your house.

The most prolific offenders in this category are the high priestesses of the #TradWife movement, Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman, who just this week, in a supreme example of what happens when two insane worlds collide, both made rice crispies from scratch for their millions of Instagram followers.

Obviously, do what you like with your own time, though neither of these women look like they’re enjoying themselves. But it becomes problematic when recipes (or tasks) are presented as simple, easy, quick, only five ingredients, only 15 minutes, two seconds from farm to table, grow your own honey bees, grind your own wheat in a window box.

In 1981, Alexei Sayle parodied the London neighbourhood of Stoke Newington as a terribly alternative place where everybody was growing their own denim and knitting their own yoghurt. Now there are whole generations who wouldn’t even get the joke and would be searching “how to grow denim” on TikTok.

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In the early Noughties, magazines such as Real Simple and Donna Hay (DH is the Australian Martha) led the way with a clean aesthetic, beautiful photographs, and as little text as possible cluttering up the place.

As a food writer during this time, I was constantly being asked by editors: “Can you do this in three steps? Can you write it in 80 words? Can you put it together in 10 minutes?” The answer was probably yes, I can do that. It’ll make sense. It’ll look easy. There will be more room for the lovely photographs. But how helpful will it really be? A recipe like that makes all kinds of assumptions – that the reader knows just how slowly to add the eggs to the cake batter so it won’t curdle, precisely how long to sear the meat, what to look for when checking if the fish is done.

But then when it all goes horribly wrong, and the sauce splits, and the steak is like leather, the reader will think it’s their fault, that they’ve done something wrong; that they’ve wasted their time and their money and their ingredients. The truth is, simple isn’t simple at all. Making things simple often requires years of experience, of repeating the same old processes a thousand times until your brain, your hands and your nose learn them. I can’t make the perfect meringue in my sleep, but almost...

So while shows like With Love, Meghan may set out casually “to create magic in every moment”, at least with Martha you understand that magic is graft, knowledge and experience. While they may create magic by hammering a nail into a perfect white wall to hang a picture, with Martha, you’d know which wall finish requires what hardware, whether you’d need a hammer, which drill bit might be suitable, and what cord, hooks and other fixings would best suit the kind of art you’re hanging.

Once you got to the end of that 1,000-word piece, you’d really feel like you knew what you were doing, and could rest in the knowledge that little Caleb’s painting you framed with the birch you felled yourself was never going to fall onto his darling tousled head and fell him right back.

It's true that Modern Martha has calmed down a bit. This might or might not have something to do with her own line of CBD wellness gummies. It’s entirely possible that being in her eighties is the most fun Martha’s ever had – appearing on the front of Sports Illustrated in a golden bathing suit, hanging out with best pal Snoop Dogg at the Paris Olympics in full dressage gear, picking out heirloom chard seeds for her garden. Who knows?

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Just as with every other aspect of her life, Martha is doing old age better than anyone. While we associate her with the domestic arts, she would no doubt have excelled at whatever she chose to turn her hand to.

From a difficult upbringing, she won a scholarship to the prestigious Barnard College, landed her rich Yale law school husband, and became one of the first female brokers on Wall Street in the late Sixties. It’s hardly surprising that she did moving to the suburbs better than anyone had before, turning her home – a farmhouse named Turkey Hill, in Westport, Connecticut – into the cornerstone of a business empire that at its height would be worth a billion dollars. Simple.

Though perhaps Martha and Meghan have more in common than we might think: Martha, the relentless high achiever, taking no nonsense, accepting no shortcuts, and Meghan, embracing joy and off-white linen at every opportunity.

They both have challenging backgrounds and went on to reinvent themselves, romanticising their backstories – Martha’s columns about growing up in Nutley went heavy on making bonnets for Easter, and placed less emphasis on her father’s rage if she didn’t plant the vegetables in straight lines. With Meghan, the press release is more hard-scrabble, up-by-the-boot-straps than privately educated daughter of an Emmy-winning lighting director.

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Both have transformed themselves into lifestyle brands, creating meaning and purpose through slow-simmered casseroles, organic cauliflowers, and artfully artless flower arrangements. Whether they make it look difficult or easy, in some ways they are cut from the same (table)cloth.

But there is one way in which Martha exemplifies a key difference between the generations. Whatever she does, whether it is wax-polishing a table or signing a multimillion-dollar deal, she does it with all her might. Skill, finesse and scholarship are badges she wears proudly. She is frank about how long things take to do properly, and is the living embodiment of “do things properly or not at all”.

This is not the approach of the generations who have come after her, for whom “have a go, try, fail, move on, do something else” has become a life mantra. In typical millennial fashion, throughout Meghan’s butterfly career as an actor, campaigner, lifestyle influencer and princess, she has always appeared restless. Who knows how long it will be before she is back striving for the next big thing, barely allowing the ink to dry on the non-disclosure agreement as she branches into another new venture.

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