Cr. Jenna Peffley/Netflix © 2025
With Love, Meghan, the new lifestyle show hosted by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, was always going to be a controversial launch for Netflix, and it’s lived up to that expectation and then some. It will be a week before we get concrete numbers about the show’s opening week (if it features at all). Still, early top-10 numbers suggest it’s gotten off to a relatively good start despite being faced with an absolute panning by critics and audiences alike.
Initially scheduled for release in January but delayed because of the LA wildfires, With Love, Meghan is the new lifestyle show where the Duchess of Sussex invites over friends to her lavish home (which apparently isn’t her home) for lessons in cooking and gardening. We’ve known the show was going to be contentious, as with anything revolving around the Duchess and Prince Harry. That was made clear on YouTube when the official trailer first dropped, which, to this day, has a staggering 193,000 dislikes to only 21,000 likes.
Yesterday, the show finally launched, and that’s when the embargoes lifted for it (as well as for other Netflix shows that weren’t out yesterday—well planned, I think!). Professional critics were less than kind. On Rotten Tomatoes, the score for the show is currently sitting at 33%.
What are they saying? The Guardian’s 1-star review called it “toe-curlingly unlovable TV,” adding that it’s a “tone-deaf lifestyle show [that] vibrates with vacuous joylessness – and is packed with useless information that will take a long, long time to remove from your head.” Variety referred to the show as an ego trip in its review.
Anita Singh for the Daily Telegraph described the format of the show in their review: “The format is this: Meghan invites people to her pretend house—the show is filmed in an $8 million farmhouse down the road from her $14 million home—and they tell her how amazing she is. This happens for eight episodes.”
On the fairer side was Decider, who ultimately gave it a SKIP IT rating, saying it was a “disappointment for those of us hoping for something more authentic.”
On IMDb, the show is currently at 2.4/10, which, for context, ranks lower than The Goop Lab and 365 Days: This Day, which both sit at 2.7/10. It’s not the lowest-rated show in Netflix’s history, though. Those accolades currently belong to Queen Cleopatra (1.2), Hype House (1.9), and Ridley Jones (2.0). 65% of votes are for one star, and 20% are for 10 stars, suggesting that there’s undoubtedly some brigading going on. As it currently stands, that’s Netflix’s lowest-rated title on IMDb.
How well is With Love, Meghan performing so far?
According to FlixPatrol, the show entered the daily top 10s in 47 countries on day 1, with top-performing countries including Canada, Croatia, Ireland, Kenya, and South Africa. It picked up 201 points in total, making it 10th in the global charts behind The Potato Lab, Tuiskoms, Running Point, Zero Day, Halo, Cassandra, and Toxic Town.
- Canada – 4th place
- Croatia – 4th place
- Ireland – 4th place
- Kenya – 4th place
- South Africa – 4th place
- Bahamas – 5th place
- Cyprus – 5th place
- Estonia – 5th place
- Latvia – 5th place
- Lithuania – 5th place
- Malta – 5th place
- Romania – 5th place
- Slovenia – 5th place
- Sri Lanka – 5th place
- Trinidad and Tobago – 5th place
- Denmark – 6th place
- Jamaica – 6th place
- Luxembourg – 6th place
- Serbia – 6th place
- Slovakia – 6th place
- United Arab Emirates – 6th place
- United Kingdom – 6th place
- United States – 6th place
- Bahrain – 7th place
- Hungary – 7th place
- Iceland – 7th place
- Israel – 7th place
- Norway – 7th place
- Switzerland – 7th place
- Austria – 8th place
- Bulgaria – 8th place
- Costa Rica – 8th place
- Czech Republic – 8th place
- Honduras – 8th place
- Mauritius – 8th place
- Netherlands – 8th place
- Portugal – 8th place
- Qatar – 8th place
- Sweden – 8th place
- Belgium – 9th place
- Ecuador – 9th place
- Lebanon – 9th place
- Maldives – 9th place
- Finland – 10th place
- Germany – 10th place
- Guadeloupe – 10th place
- Poland – 10th place
Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024
The series will be hoping for a big boom on the Netflix charts next week, as all but their first major project has spectacularly bombed on Netflix. Polo, their most recent docu-series released on December 10th, was the 2,946th most-watched series of the second half of 2024 (see the complete Engagement Reports here). That’s not a typo. It failed to enter the top 10s in any country and only picked up 2.4M hours watched, which equates to 600K views globally. Live to Lead and Heart of Invictus failed to feature in the second half report, suggesting they got less than 100,000 views each.
Beyond With Love, Meghan, Archewell has no currently greenlit projects, although two projects have been reported to be in development: Bad Manners and Meet Me At The Lake.
As you may know, this show is also launching a new product line collaboration between Netflix and The Duchess—something Netflix TUDUM began promoting yesterday.
First-week viewing numbers will be released on Tuesday, March 11th, at 8 PM GMT / 3 PM ET.
With Love, Meghan is now streaming on Netflix globally.
