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.
