Kaling, the celebrated comedienne who has spent the better part of her screentime on With Love, Meghan lauding Markle’s “glamorous” cooking and “incredible” fashion,” tries to garner some positive PR for the exiled royal in-law infamously branded “Duchess Difficult” by the international tabloids. “I don’t think anyone in the world knows that Meghan Markle has eaten Jack in the Box and loved it,” exclaims Kaling, only for the background music to come to an abrupt halt. “It’s so funny you keep saying Meghan Markle,” says Meghan Markle. “You know I’m Sussex now.” More than half a decade after Meghan and her spoiled second son of a princeling husband publicly quit their jobs, his whole family, and the entire United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Meghan and Harry remain in a royal rut of canceled Spotify contracts and failing Netflix deals for one simple reason: Meghan and Harry cannot fathom not being royal, and given their financial reliance on their association to royal house of Windsor, they quite literally cannot afford to let the world forget it. With Love, Meghan marks the couples’ fifth and likely final attempt to prove their value to Netflix before their contract expires, but perhaps more importantly, it constitutes Meghan’s first real effort at post-royal reinvention. A self-described stab at “lifestyle programming” featuring culinary and hospitality how-tos, Meghan likely sees herself as the millennial successor to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop or even Oprah’s extended universe of self-help gurus and “Favorite Things.” The reality is much more pathetic. At best, Meghan 2.0 is the same washed-up former royal who remains as bitter as ever that her husband has dropped to fifth in line for the throne. At worst, like all flailing Instagram influencers, Meghan 2.0 is no different than your bargain-barrel tradwife desperate for validation from the masses. The only difference is that unlike Markle, who calls herself an “activist” and “entrepreneur,” at least the tradwife is in on the joke that she is utterly superfluous in even as decadent a society as ours. Over eight excruciating episodes, Meghan’s celebrity friends and colleagues try to make her seem warm, relatable, and authentic, despite her best efforts to stop them. The show attempts to advertise Meghan as the consummate host, but the $8 million Montecito mansion that serves as the show’s set isn’t even hers. She and Harry actually live in a different $14.65 million mansion across town. The show wants to erase years of allegations that Meghan bullied royal staffers and in-laws by reinventing Meghan as the best of friends, but most of the show’s guests have only been befriended by Meghan in the past few years, and even then in the capacity of professional prestige. One guest, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, is the celebrity literary agent at William Morris Endeavor, the talent agency that represents the former royals, and another, Victoria Jackson, is one of Walsh’s business partners. Kaling only met Markle in 2022 for an episode of her failed Spotify podcast Archetypes, and per Markle’s own admission, Roy Choi, the prominent Korean-American chef who joins her third episode, wasn’t even a friend when she invited him on her supposedly intimate and candid Netflix vlog. When Meghan brings in a select few actual chefs to teach her how to cook, she excels like the comely and inoffensive actress she once was, following directions without question and looking good while doing it. But when she tries to run the show, she’s relegated to rebagging Trader Joe’s peanut butter crackers and decorating chopped fruit into the shape of a rainbow. Worse is when she pretends to be friends with these fellow real housewives of Montecito. Harry might be dimwitted enough to have deluded himself into believing he’s actually happy in suburban hell, but Meghan, who saw a rapid-fire ascent from nobody to B-list television success to bonafide global superstar in under a span of a decade, isn’t fooling us that she finds packing seeds in gift bags or making balloon banners fulfilling. When Princess Diana wanted to reinvent herself outside of her destiny as future consort after her divorce from then-Prince Charles, she traded tea parties with the royal rota for treks through landmine fields in Angola as a part of an ultimately successful Red Cross campaign for a global ban on landmines. In five short years since their own royal divorce, Harry and Meghan have devolved from the sort of tabloid fodder that at least nabbed a prime time on CBS with Oprah to barely making the cover of People magazine. Despite the fact that Meghan actually did score the elite education denied to Diana, Meghan doesn’t seem capable of talking at length or depth about any charitable topic that would logically extend from Diana’s past interests — be it AIDS (still relevant with the recent PEPFAR pause), the measles resurgence and MMR vaccines, or war crimes committed by the Russians or the Sudanese RSF. In fact, Meghan seems incapable of talking at length about anything other than her own celebrity. Which brings us back to the hilarity of Meghan Markle deciding to correct Mindy Kaling for calling her Meghan Markle. Legally speaking, the government of both the United States and the United Kingdom consider the last name of her children to be Mountbatten-Windsor, and while Harry has historically used the surname “Wales” in the army and on his polo jerseys, even royals as senior as William, the Prince of Wales, use the Mountbatten-Windsor moniker in legal documents such as lawsuits and marriage registries. The title of Duke of Sussex was only first created in 1801 before lapsing by 1843. It was then created for a second time for Harry upon his marriage to Meghan in 2018. By contrast, the surname Mountbatten-Windsor refers to two dynastic names with a combined 1,700-year history. Mountbatten is an anglicization of a morganatic line of a cadet branch of the House of Hesse, which was founded in the 13th century. Windsor is an anglicization of a cadet branch of the House of Wettin, which was founded a little more than 1,000 years ago. While the princely descendants of Elizabeth II will continue to solely use the name Windsor for their royal style, the late queen’s 1960 declaration was that outside of royal titles, her descendants would use the compound surname to respect the dynastic origins of both her and Prince Philip. Meghan does not want to be a common Markle, but she and Harry evidently do not want the duties of the noble Mountbatten-Windsor moniker. Hence, double down on the dukedom of Sussex, lest anyone forget that who you are, rather than what you actually do, is why you have a Netflix program in the first place. But in the end, the tradwifestyle is a trapping. Meghan spends her afternoons playing Mahjong with the other Wisteria Lane wives and admits to more than a mere amount a day drinking among the Montecito set. Beekeeping and plucking berries from bushes into some other socialite’s garden don’t exactly compare to international diplomacy and statecraft. Hell, it doesn’t even hold a candle to strutting across our TV screens on Suits in a pair of power stilettos. Still, Meghan tries to convince us otherwise. “It’s a real delight in being able to be a present parent, and it’s a luxury sometimes because we all have to work,” says a listless Meghan as she pushes some fruit around a plate. “We all have a lot of stuff to do, but when you can take a minute to just, yeah.” Just, yeah. Indeed.