Like a politician blitzing a key riding hours before polls close or a quarterback throwing that hail Mary pass with seconds left on the clock, Meghan Markle is seemingly pulling every lever within her reach during the pre-release promotional countdown to tomorrow’s drop of her Netflix lifestyle show.
With just hours to go before the midnight release of With Love, Meghan, for example, People magazine announced that the Duchess of Sussex had spoken with them for her first proper profile-y interview in years, complete with pictures shot at her Montecito home by her old friend, Canadian photographer and co-founder of The Coveteur Jake Rosenberg.
The day before that, Meghan had taken to Instagram Stories to show “Auntie Serena” Williams playing a customized version of Candyland with Lilibet, the Sussexes’ rarely glimpsed daughter. That itself came not long after she shared a video of her gardening with her son, Archie, who responds, “Only if you want me” when she asks him for help watering.
These posts are just part of the activity on her newly launched Instagram account, which she’s been updating regularly — a bulletin board filled with inspirational quotes, a Valentine’s Day tribute to her “love,” the video announcement that her rebranded product line is launching soon — in the lead-up to the show’s release on March 4.
A flurry of publicity before a new show isn’t exactly unusual, of course. (Although the cynics among us might note that there’s often an inverse correlation between the quality of the project and the amount of effort needed to drum up excitement.) What is notable is that we didn’t see any of this in the days leading up to the show’s original launch date, which was meant to be January 15 but was postponed just three days before because of the wildfires in Los Angeles.
There are certain clues — like the fact that her People magazine interview seems to have been done just after the Invictus Games in mid-February and doesn’t seem to have just been held from before the original launch date — that we’re witnessing some kind of strategic PR pivot at play here.
The perception of why this is happening, however, depends on which corners of the internet you’re hanging out in. If you’re scrolling through the more than 88,000 comments underneath the YouTube trailer for the show — as a taster, one that says “everyone is invited, no one is coming” has more than 2,800 likes — you might make the case that it’s a desperate effort to salvage a project panned before it’s even released, purely on the basis of its star.
Or, if you’re someone who’s seen the critiques that it bears a strong resemblance to a similar show made by Pamela Anderson (or just every cooking show ever), you might read her constant callbacks to The Tig, and her long history in the lifestyle space, as an attempt to establish her bona fides in the genre.
It’s certainly something she brings up in her conversation with People — a softball interview very different in tone from her tangle with the cynical, often critical The Cut in 2022 — when they ask her how it felt giving up her career, which included her successful blog, to marry Prince Harry.
Injecting joy, or at least seeming to present an unbothered face to everyone who seems to be desperate for this to be a flop, might also be a driving force in this second chance publicity blitz. You could argue that she is de-fanging some of the pre-emptive critiques — she’s pretending to be this domestic guru that she’s not, she protested about wanting privacy but look at her desperate for our attention — by appearing to be utterly relaxed about it all, to the point where she’s happily sharing snippets of her life, including her carefully shielded children, without retreating as she may have at previous points of intense scrutiny in her life.
And here’s a thought: Is it possible that this new round of pre-show publicity is actually a vote of confidence for this new show? The decision to launch the show with very little notice, and remarkably little fanfare, the first time round may have indicated that there was uncertainty that Meghan getting behind the show would benefit it.
Perhaps, having seen the positive reaction since — for example, she now has 2 million followers on an Instagram account less than eight weeks old — allowing its star freer, more open reign with its promotion is a signal that there’s been a far more excited, or at least openly curious, response than the louder voices of negativity would have you believe.
Or maybe, as the plethora of detail we learn about her life — she and Harry just watched Black Doves, Harry and Archie like fried eggs, she’s still making that same roast chicken she made on the night her husband proposed — in the People article might lead you to believe, Meghan is in her “let’s throw everything at it and just see” era.
