The Failed Celebrity Cooking Show That Honestly Never Stood A Chance

A cooking show hosted by a celebrity — that is, somebody famous for doing something other than cooking — is a solid proposition, at least in theory. Cooking shows have been a television staple since Julia Child made an omelet on the first episode of "The French Chef": they're inexpensive to produce, pleasing to watch, and inherently personality-driven. When said personality is someone with a pre-existing following, surely only good things can happen, right? That's the gamble Netflix took in 2025 with Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle's lifestyle and cooking show, "With Love, Meghan" — but alas, it didn't work out so well. The first season ranked #383 in Netflix's semi-annual report for January to June 2025, and after two seasons and a holiday special, it was unceremoniously cancelled after Netflix stepped away from its deal with Harry and Meghan.

A lifestyle show starring Meghan doesn't seem like a bad idea on paper. What could be more glamorous and aspirational, after all, than a lifestyle show starring a member of the Royal Family? If she's palling around with celebrity chefs like Roy Choi, the ever-influential Alice Waters, and noted microwave apologist David Chang, so much the better. 

But Meghan was no Martha Stewart or Ina Garten: she offered obvious advice and clearly strained to come across as personable and charismatic. Writing for Variety, Daniel D'Addario said that Meghan's "on-camera attitude...resembles [her] on-camera wardrobe: Well-tailored and beige." What's more, the series felt neither accessible nor aspirational. You couldn't really imitate a lot of her projects (including a foray into beekeeping), and you never felt like you were invited into the domicile of a domestic goddess — especially since, as she admitted herself, the house we see on the show isn't her actual home.

So the show wasn't good — so what? Plenty of bad Netflix series have prospered in the past. (Hello, "Too Hot To Handle.") Why did this boring-but-inoffensive show fail? It may be the case that a lot of people were negatively polarized against Meghan already: She had spent years as a favorite punching bag of the United Kingdom's famously vicious tabloids, exacerbated by her status as a biracial woman seen as insufficiently reverent towards a pillar of British national identity. Time and again, famous women find themselves caught in a storm of bad press and toxicity — sometimes organic, sometimes driven by bots, oftentimes a mix of both. In any case, it's hard to shake off.

But of course, not everyone was acting in bad faith: there were perfectly normal reasons to be tired of the royal couple. Although Prince Harry and Meghan announced that they would step back as working members of the Royal Family in 2020, that didn't mean they stepped back from the public eye. After moving to Los Angeles, Harry and Meghan sat for a high-profile interview with Oprah Winfrey, launched several podcasts, and shot a Netflix documentary series. ("South Park" dubbed it "The Worldwide Privacy Tour.") By the time "With Love, Meghan" premiered in 2025, the ongoing saga had reached its fifth year, and perhaps diminishing returns started to set in. Undaunted, the couple is once again working with Netflix, this time to develop a scripted series about polo.