Netflix ‘With Love, Meghan’ Season 2 Review - A Lifestyle Show that Mistakes Gloss for Substance

From the opening frame, the season makes it clear that imperfection is not on the menu. The camera pans across pristine countertops, pastel flower arrangements, and Meghan herself styled as if she stepped out of a lifestyle catalog. It’s undeniably pretty, but after ten minutes, the gloss becomes suffocating. This isn’t a home, it’s a showroom. And the longer you sit with it, the harder it is to shake the feeling that you’re watching a sales pitch disguised as comfort viewing.

The content itself leans heavily toward the ornamental. Cooking segments are the worst offenders, food preparation reduced to slow-motion shots of edible flowers sprinkled on toast, or calligraphy-like drizzles of sauce. Actual technique? Forget it. The show flirts with teaching but refuses to deliver, because that would mean getting messy, and mess doesn’t match the mood board. You can’t help but wonder: who is this for? Home cooks won’t learn a thing, and casual viewers will feel trapped in an extended ad for a lifestyle that’s unattainable, unless you happen to have a private chef just off-camera.

It doesn’t help that the narration is delivered with a tone of faux-wisdom, as though braiding twine or steaming vegetables is a transformative revelation. Every anecdote feels like it’s been test-screened for relatability, then sanded down until nothing remotely human remains. What should feel intimate instead feels airless, like being locked in a meditation app voiced by a duchess.

Guests do bring flashes of relief, mostly by injecting authenticity that Meghan can’t seem to manage on her own. Chrissy Teigen accidentally forgetting her kids’ birthdates tattooed on her arm, José Andrés forcing her to confront a lobster before cooking it, Tan France calling her flower sprinkling “the gayest sh*t I’ve seen in a long time”—these moments feel unscripted, and therefore alive. But the problem is obvious: the show only works when Meghan is knocked off balance. The rest of the time, she’s too busy holding the pose.

The absence of Harry is another glaring issue. His name drops in anecdotes, but his physical absence turns into an elephant in the room. This is presented as “life in Montecito,” yet the family dimension feels hollow. Either he’s deliberately absent to avoid overshadowing her, or the producers thought it was smarter to keep him out. Whatever the reason, the effect is bizarre, like hosting a dinner party while your spouse hides in the pantry.

The rare glimpses of honesty, the roast chicken disaster the night of the proposal, the fried chicken after-party, the awkward first “I love you”—do land with some charm. These details hint at a version of the show that could’ve been: candid, funny, lightly self-mocking. But those moments are scattered like crumbs across a banquet table. The dominant flavor is still airbrushed earnestness, and after a while, it starts to taste like cardboard.

Even the cinematography works against it. Everything is shot with a precision that borders on sterile. You get the sense someone spent more time arranging props than planning content. A lifestyle show can be aspirational, sure, but when it’s this staged, it stops being aspirational and becomes alienating. Most people tune in to escape, not to be reminded they’ll never have a kitchen that looks like a magazine spread.

What’s most frustrating is that there’s potential here. Meghan can be warm, and she clearly enjoys storytelling. But instead of leaning into humor, mess, or personality, the series doubles down on being polite, polished, and pretty. The result is a program that looks expensive but feels cheap, a piece of TV that’s visually rich but spiritually empty.

And yet, against my better judgment, I couldn’t completely look away. There’s a certain hypnotic quality to how contrived it all is, a fascination in watching a project so carefully controlled that it becomes its own spectacle. It’s like scrolling through an influencer’s feed long after you’ve stopped enjoying it; you know it’s curated to death, but you keep going because the sheer effort of the curation is its own bizarre entertainment.

At its best, With Love, Meghan offers the occasional laugh and a fleeting anecdote that feels human. At its worst, it’s an extended Pinterest board with a Netflix budget, a season so sanitized it borders on parody. The imbalance between polish and personality makes it a difficult watch, one that spends far too much time convincing us of a lifestyle we can’t, and maybe shouldn’t, want.

The end result is a glossy, pastel, self-serious series that confuses perfection with connection. You’ll get a few laughs thanks to the guests, and maybe a moment of warmth when the facade slips, but most of the journey is like sipping flower-infused water: elegant on the outside, bland on the inside, and not nearly as refreshing as promised.

Final Score- [3/10]
Reviewed by - Anjali Sharma
Follow @AnjaliS54769166 on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times