Was this ‘sick burn’ the moment Meghan admitted defeat?,
We’re not even in hate-watch territory anymore. In a true feat of failure, Meghan Markle has leveled us all into indifference.
Even she seems somewhat resigned to her fate.
On Tuesday, hours after new episodes of ‘With Love, Meghan’ dropped — she calls it Season 2, but I call it Season 1, Part B — Taylor Swift announced her engagement, broke the Internet and dominated headlines.
In what felt like a sign of defeat, Meghan liked Taylor’s engagement post on Instagram.
It’s worth remembering that Taylor Swift, queen of Easter eggs, hidden messages and numeric symbolism, does nothing without military precision.
Recall too that Meghan reportedly sent Taylor – now friendly with William and Kate – a ‘personal letter’, asking the pop star to be a guest on her old podcast, Archetypes.
Swift didn’t reply in kind. Instead, she reportedly declined through a representative.
That, as Taylor might sing, was a ‘sick burn’.
It was also a smart move, as Spotify refused to renew their reported $20 million deal with Meghan and Harry’s Archewell Audio.
Executive Bill Simmons later called the couple ‘f***ing grifters’, and insiders told the Wall Street Journal that there was great internal ‘frustration’ over their ‘lack of productivity’.
So is it any surprise that Part B of ‘With Love, Meghan’ — filmed at the same time as Season 1, Part A — has landed with a thud?
As of this writing, the latest episodes have yet to crack Netflix’s Top 10.
Brutal.
The streamer did little promotion. Other than releasing a trailer two weeks ago, there’s been nothing.
Most daytime network talk shows are on summer hiatus, but Meghan hasn’t been booked on any late-night shows or big podcasts.
Nor is she gracing the covers, as she once did, of The Hollywood Reporter, Variety or The Cut.
The only interview she appears to have given is to Bloomberg News, and it is vastly more interesting than anything in her latest episodes for one reason: She still doesn’t get it.
In a 46-minute video that racked up a mere 53,000 views in 13 hours, Meghan fielded softball after softball from reporter Emily Chang and just couldn’t drop the facade of perfection.
Not one loose moment from Meghan, not one admission of frailty or vulnerability.
She is incapable of making a joke at her own expense. The only thing authentic about her is her inauthenticity, which at this point seems pathological.
She repeats lines and phrases from interviews past. When Chang name-drops Melinda French Gates and mentions that she believes people are still agitating, just quietly (cough-Trump-cough), Meghan says: ‘The quiet part of the song is still part of the song.’
Here she was to The Cut’s Allison P. Davis in 2022: ‘I have a lot to say until I don’t… Sometimes, as they say, the silent part is still part of the song’.
Lest you think I’m exaggerating, we also get, for the one thousandth time, a retelling of Meghan’s dish soap commercial origin story.
We get a relatively new spin though, Meghan linking watching that ad while the Los Angeles race riots burned through the city — subtle, our Duchess is not — and feeling compelled to act as a very young feminist firebrand.
‘It was a very turbulent time in our city [with] a lot of uncertainty,’ Meghan says. ‘But the one thing I was certain on [sic], you know, in all of this was: That’s wrong. Let’s do something about it.’
The same slipperiness mixed with banalities permeates Part B. She opens one episode metaphorically walking a razor’s edge: Will Meghan pour the perfect amount of water into flour?
Spoiler alert: Yes, she does.
We then watch her sourdough sit for 6 days. Why not add the proverbial pot we could all watch boil?
And again, as in Part A, Meghan bakes with her long, loose hair hanging right over the food. She also resumes her terrible, terrible puns, at one point writing, on a chalkboard: ‘It’s way past our bread time.’
The same episode features Chrissy Teigen, who Meghan introduces as ‘the quintessential multi-hyphenate model: Entrepreneur, mom, cookbook author, and all-around foodie.’
She forgot erstwhile online troll and bully, a woman who once told a younger starlet to take a ‘dirt nap’.
But hey — what’s a bit of bullying between fake friends?
She then goes on to tell us how ‘excited’ she is ‘to see Chrissy again! I haven’t seen her in almost 20 years.’
Note to Meghan: That’s not a friendship.
But here comes Chrissy, all smiles, with husband John Legend in tow, which of course prompts Meghan to say: ‘I would have told H to come.’
Insufferable.
These two women, who both look like they haven’t ingested a carb since the turn of the millennium, go on about what devoted mothers and homemakers they are — until Chrissy has to yell at John, off-camera, to remind her of the birthday of one of her four children.
Truly, you could not make this up.
Tan France from ‘Queer Eye’ appears in another episode — a ‘new friend’, Meghan tells us — and we watch them cut up food to use as ‘stamps’ to dip in acrylic paint and make art.
Food as art supplies! In this economy?
Tan — surely with pre-approval — asks Meghan whether she or Harry said ‘I love you’ first.
We have never seen Meghan come more alive than this moment, smugly saying, ‘He told me’, before flipping her hair and adding, ‘Still got it.’
Indeed, she does: Basicness, tedium, humorlessness, lack of self-awareness, feigned interest in anyone other than herself and a delusional insistence that people want to watch her measure water while air-kissing Hollywood ‘friends’.
She’s got it all, alright.
