True, and equestrian boots w/o a zipper are very difficult to take off.
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I helped my wife tie her running shoe in the airport last weekend. I guess she’s an entitled royal that can’t fend for herself…
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Part of the problem could be that she wants viewers to buy into her lifestyle brand, but viewers don’t know much about her, outside of what they read on social media. She never lets us see anything. We can’t even see her actual kitchen (so odd to see them flip to an occasional shot of something in her actual kitchen). We never see her kids - except for random blurry pics. She talks about dogs, but we don’t see them.
I think if someone is going to launch this type of brand and do this type of show, it would help to let the viewers in more. Move to your own kitchen, we don’t care if it’s perfect. Have your kids/dogs running in and interrupting a shot (she can have them filmed from the back if she wants). I actually forget that she has kids until I hear her randomly mention doing something for them.
I get her privacy issues but their house is gated and secure. Filming shots from their property doesn’t compromise anything. I’m sure it’s not hard to find out where in Montecito their home is, if one wanted to know.
I also think the average person doesn’t identify with her uber upscale and fussy way of doing everything. Hardly anyone is getting up early to make their kids a rainbow fruit display with flower sprinkles or hand-labeling custom tags on bagged snacks. Even the inside of her rented refrigerator is perfectly staged with perfect fruit and vegetables.
All that said, it is at like #5 on Netflix - so people are watching it, for better or worse (I skipped around and watched 3 episodes).
What is rather infuriating, though, is that there is no actual conceit to the show. All that production money and brainpower and we couldn’t even come up with some sort of narrative conceit?
It is literally just a showcase for Meghan. Period.
In one episode, she has two friends come over for “girls lunch”. They are all dressed to the nines with full glam. Meghan instructs them on how to make salt baked fish, tsk tsking when they don’t make their salt mounds perfectly aesthetic. She lightly mocks one friend for not being a good cook. The friend eats it up with a smile. They eat a lunch with not a single gram of carbohydrates. Neither friend is given any sort of platform to promote themselves or their causes or projects. Then they leave, presumably back to LA, and the doyenne of Montecito packs up her rental mansion and returns to her real mansion, where she immediately creates a crudité tableau of the Birth of Venus using nothing but colorful vegetables grown in her own (rented? Non rented?) yard….
Ok that last part never happened, but the rest did…
She just comes across as that one condescending friend we all have who married super rich and now acts like she was to the manor born. There was even a clip in a montage where one of her camera people is attempting to spell “crudité”. I think Meghan thinks she invented crudité??
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The second season that nobody asked for.
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So they completed filming of the second season before the first season’s release. They filmed it all at once and split it into two seasons of 8 eps each, presumably.
I guess it would have had to be a spectacular failure for them to pull season 2 after already paying for the production.
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Thanks for the explanation. After reading reviews, I couldn’t figure out why Netflix would renew it.
Evidently, season two is going to include the controversial footage of her & Harry at the aftermath of the LA fires. It’s almost like she purposely sabotages herself. Even if she doesn’t read social media comments, someone in her squad had to have mentioned the bad press from their visit. Also remember that she delayed releasing season one “out of sensitivity to the LA fire victims”. Now the second part is set to include their visit? Hmmm…
I’ve seen two recent sound bites from chefs who turned down offers to appear in the special. Also, many comments about her claim to be Meghan “Sussex” in the cringey exchange with Mindy Kaling. All concur that “Sussex” is the title, not her last name. How could she not know this? Embarrassing.
In the UK, titles are commonly used as surnames; Harry/Meghan/kids can absolutely use Sussex as a surname. William and Kate’s kids were registered at school as Cambridge before the Queen died, now they are Wales
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I think I would give it another chance if she had celebrity chefs - or people who knew what they were doing in terms of dog training or whatever - and she asked questions and let them demonstrate their skills. They would have the credibility and she could be the viewer in terms of trying some of these things to varying degrees of success.
It sounds like just another talk show, and maybe it is and maybe we’ve had enough of those.
She can use whichever last name she wants, but she was definitely snarky and condescending about it when Kaling called her Markle (the horror!!).
Worse, she used the Sussex tangent to deflect Kaling’s joke about Jack in the Box! Which I personally found much funnier than Meghan’s little speech about the importance of her sharing a last name with her family.
The editing choice to leave that tidbit in 100% came from Meghan and I would bet two jars of jam that she had to override her production team on that one.
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Oh boy. I think delulu is the word that comes to mind? Does the world need another podcast from rich LA people who have found their joy and passion?
This is puzzling since her first one didn’t go anywhere.
We might need a world-wide ban on celebrity podcasts of any kind. Just because they can do it, doesn’t mean they should.
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Or if they live within their means. Some (Julia Roberts, Katherine Heigl) don’t live in Hollywood. They wanted privacy for their children so they created a life that is private. They don’t flip back and forth but do attend some red carpet events - without their kids or bring their kids on their terms.
There are a lot of others too. Ron Howard lives in Connecticut. Paul Newman was pretty famous but kept his kids out of Hollywood life,spent money on what he wanted to,
I don’t believe H & M need to earn buckets full of money, but they may have to spend less.
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I think it’s the security detail that requires millions every year. They had serious death threats before.
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Julia Roberts is a good example, though in fact her “main family home” is reportedly in Malibu. The point is that her means are clearly much greater than H&M and so she can afford to own much more property than they do.
But she can earn a lot from each movie to pay for it. If Meghan was able to earn a similar amount from doing a movie (rather than a lifestyle show that is supposedly based on her lifestyle rather than her acting in a role), then there wouldn’t be an issue. Reportedly Julia Roberts “easily earns $20-$40 million per year.”
I agree that the staff costs are likely the biggest issue for H&M. I have no idea how many staff Julia Roberts has, but she may benefit more from studio provided help when she’s working on a movie, compared to H&M who are trying to run their own production and lifestyle brand (I imagine this is like comparing the costs incurred by an employee vs a business owner). But Julia Roberts may well employ private security.
It is locally known that Julia Roberts’s’ kids went to high school in SF.
No security, regular soccer mom. No special anything other than a very very nice but not ostentatiously grand home in Pacific Heights (public info per the Hello! article). She is known to be very private and low key.
I suppose their security concerns would be different, but a private life can be achieved even for megastars (see also Angelina Jolie).
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At the end of the day, if your earning capacity and wealth are based on generational talent, in acting, sports or business, then you have much more opportunity to seek privacy when you are not performing those activities, than if your earning capacity is tied to being a celebrity.
People can achieve wealth in other ways than earning it: marrying into it or inheriting it, or just winning the lottery (either playing Powerball or being a mid level executive at a tech company at the right time). If you don’t have the earning capacity to match your wealth, you need to be more careful with your spending.
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That’s very true.
But I remember reading police describing death threats against them and thinking they had no choice but to have protection. I do wonder how constant those threats remain over years. Who knows. I would be terrified though knowing people are out to kill me.
Sadly, death threats are becoming common for regular, non-wealthy people these days (local news people, school administrators, etc.)
I bet if they moved to a non Hollywood-y state and quietly lived their lives (which is what they both claim they want to do), everyone would forget about them (in a good way) and all of the bad press and death threats would ease up. We’d maybe hear about Harry once a year when he does the Invictus Games, and maybe a tabloid pic or two a year of Meghan at a famous friend’s bday party.
Meghan seems to have exhausted all attempts to continue her life as a celebrity - so try something else for a while. Harry did inherit money from Diana’s estate, right? And the numbers that they got from Netflix are pretty impressive. Whenever I hear the amounts, I find myself in disbelief that a family of four cannot live on that. California is expensive, Montecito is expensive. Move to a less-expensive state, buy a lot of land, gate it, get a few trained German Shepherds to guard it and have one bodyguard on retainer in case they need them.
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