Photo: COURTESY OF NETFLIX
You don’t really need to watch With Love, Meghan. Meghan Markle’s (Meghan Sussex’s?) new Netflix show–slash–jam commercial is all about creating small moments of joy for your guests, and while there are some nice tips sprinkled throughout the eight episodes, small moments of joy for the viewers are few and far between.
Each episode of With Love, Meghan features a guest and some sort of theme. Sometimes the theme is “Your friends are coming over for lunch,” and sometimes it’s “Your friends are coming over to play mahjong.” The guests help Meghan prepare, and through flashbacks we see Meghan prepping for those guests, giving us instructions about flower-arranging and making your own bath salts. The show can’t seem to decide whether Meghan is an expert teaching her friends new tricks or a student learning dutifully from professional chefs, and by the third time she’s arranging vibrant crudités, you have to wonder what the point is here.
That all being said, if something is still compelling you to watch or you have a mountain of laundry to tackle and would like the background noise, you should put on the Mindy Kaling episode. The second in the series, the concept behind Kaling’s episode is that she and Meghan are preparing a “garden tea party” for their toddlers. They make finger sandwiches, Meghan prepares a rainbow fruit plate, and they assemble crostini that look like ladybugs. All of that is whatever, but the real saving grace of this episode is Kaling herself.
Kaling solves With Love’s major problem, which is that there is simply not much to latch on to here. You might have seen the clip of Meghan correcting Kaling on her last name — one of the only truly interesting moments in the whole show. Meghan reveals that she ate a lot of Jack in the Box growing up, and Kaling, dutifully playing her part as the Everywoman, responds, “I don’t think anyone in the world knows that Meghan Markle has eaten Jack in the Box and loves it.”
“It’s so funny you keep saying Meghan Markle; you know I’m Sussex now,” Meghan responds. Let’s watch the clip, because you really need to see how she visibly tenses up at this apparent misstep:
Her name is Meghan Sussex, and i love it too 💖💫#WithLoveMeghan #MindyKaling #WithLoveMeghanOnNetflix@netflix pic.twitter.com/l1mYNEWiaO
— sunrayleo – HouseOfSussex 🌴🕊 (@sunrayleo1) March 4, 2025
This is the only moment in all eight episodes when we even come close to something that feels like tension — as well as a little peek into how Meghan actually feels about … anything. “You have kids, and you go, ‘No, I share my name with my children,’” she explains to Kaling. “I didn’t know how meaningful that would be to me, but it just means so much to go, ‘This is our family name — our little-family name.’” Meanwhile, Kaling kind of looks like a child who has been reprimanded. Drama! For once!
Kaling, a very successful television writer and producer, also seems to understand that confrontation is good drama and brings a much-needed dose of it to the show, even if it’s mostly in jest. If you’ve been following Meghan’s jam journey, you’ll recall that she initially made a batch of 50 jams to send out to her celebrity friends. For some reason, she numbered the jars, and Kaling, who received No. 19, boldly brought it up. “Of course, as a very hierarchical person, I was like, Who are these other 50? Does having a lower number make me more special?,” she asks with a bluntness and a sense of humor that never come back to the show. Meghan then explains that it was not a ranking but that people did “take it very personally.” This crumb of conflict feels like water in the desert.
On top of jump-starting the best moments on the entire show, Kaling generally brings some much-appreciated energy to the production. It seems as though she could make conversation with a wall, and she occasionally uses that power to make Meghan come off as more interesting. In one exchange, Kaling explains the term lewk to Meghan while asking for outfit details, and our host, charmingly, has no idea what she’s talking about. Eventually, they get to the bottom of it, and Meghan reveals that she’s wearing Zara pants with a Loro Piana sweater. (“I like high-low,” she says.) Kaling’s casual comment gives us more of an insight into Meghan’s life than most of this show does.
On the off chance we get a second season of With Love, Meghan, we need more Kalings. I don’t know how many more times I can hear Meghan talk about how a small touch can elevate an experience into something spectacular before going to collect honey from her personal beehive. This show needs a charisma infusion stat. That being said, I would watch several seasons of With Love, Mindy.
