Here’s what Meghan Markle’s new Netflix show is like: You know when you’re watching a recipe video, and it all starts out fairly normal, with them giving you a little shopping list of ingredients you recognize and feel comfortable with, but then at some point after that, when they’re making the thing, they suggest adding something that they haven’t put on the ingredients list because they’ve assumed you’ll have it in the house, but you absolutely don’t? And now there’s this unbridgeable chasm between you and this mystery internet chef who apparently always has a little pot of chia seeds and some asafoetida kicking around in the cupboard and assumes you do too? You know that? That’s what Meghan Markle’s new Netflix show is like.
The show consists of Markle… umm… Well, she’s, like… putting edible flowers on things? And… keeping bees? Actually, no, she's talking to a man she hires to keep her bees.
It’s quite hard to find a throughline to describe all of her activities in the show. She makes bath salts for her friend who's coming to stay. She prepares vegetable platters. She assembles hampers. It’s sort of like what you imagine the lady of a grand Victorian manor would be getting up to if she had access to Pinterest. More dried lavender!
I’m not saying anything new here. It’s bad. You know it’s bad. Everyone is saying it’s bad. But the particular way in which it’s bad—that’s actually kind of groundbreaking. It's groundbreaking because it represents a new frontier in the new most societally corrosive form of TV available to us: background TV.
Background TV has been around for a while. The Hollywood Reporter declared the beginning of its reign as far back as six years ago, and that was before everyone was on TikTok. It could be defined as anything that doesn't ask you to pay much or any attention to it. It's a response to our diminishing attention spans, our reluctance to dedicate as much as a whole hour to sitting down to watch something, and our likely devotion to the other screen in our right hand that we'll be paying much more attention to as we “watch.” It's can-miss TV.
Why Markle's show should be considered a pioneer in this department is that it's so simultaneously boring and irrelevant to any normal person's life that it may have set a new record for the least a TV show has ever threatened to capture the attention of anyone “watching”.
Here are the markers of Background TV that we spotted in Meghan Markle's show. Number one: it is staggeringly boring. In the first episode, “Hello, Honey,” Meghan tells guest Daniel Martin, her former Suits makeup artist, that she's going to make him some pasta. “You do it all in one pot—single skillet spaghetti,” she explains. Daniel enjoys the sibilance. “Si, si, si,” he says. “Single skillet spaghetti.”
“We do the whole thing in one pan,” repeats Markle.
“Oh!” exclaims Daniel, apparently having grasped the concept now. “That's perfect for me in New York. I get home from work, I need to make something.”
That made it through the edit.
On top of that, it is irrelevant to any normal person's life. Markle likes to make candles out of beeswax. From her bees. She likes to create "good morning and good night moments” for people who come to stay. She likes to collect vegetables from her garden, which she recognizes is a privilege not everyone will have access to—she didn't growing up—“but if you have a farmer's market…”
The result is a sort of accidental escapist fantasy that's too boring to bother escaping to. A picture of a life no one lives—including Markle. (The house we see her entertaining guests in was rented for the show.) But this isn't really about Markle. She's obviously good at a lot of this stuff, and an episode with pioneering Korean chef Roy Choi in which he brings some genuine culinary expertise to the party and they talk about their childhoods as non-white kids in 90s Los Angeles flirts with being genuinely interesting.
This is about the fact that a show as devoid of concept as this, as ignorable, was commissioned by Netflix at the expense of something better. It's about the opportunity cost of bankrolling blandness. Background TV begets background TV, but it also pushes better stuff out of the picture. And even if we don't end up watching it, wouldn't we rather have better stuff to choose from? Wouldn't we rather watch something that actually demands our attention?
While “watching” With Love, Meghan, I'd often get up to leave the room. (Like I said, boring.) And I kept forgetting to pause it. But this wasn't a kind, “No, don't worry, you keep going" type of gesture towards anyone I was watching with. There was no one else in the room. It just didn't occur to me to hit the pause button, to make sure I didn't miss what was happening. It played on, to no one.