Season 2 of Meghan Markle’s lifestyle Netflix show flopped after being eviscerated by UK critics.
The eight-episode second installment of “With Love, Meghan,” which dropped on Aug. 26, did not make the streamer’s Top 10 list for the week of Aug. 25 to Aug. 31, Forbes reported Friday.
While Netflix does not release weekly viewing data for shows outside of its 10 most popular, Forbes noted that Markle’s show had to have been watched by 500,000 fewer viewers than the first season in its first week.
According to the outlet, 2.6 million people watched “With Love, Meghan” Season 1 when it debuted in March 2024.
The drop in popularity follows a wave of criticism of Markle’s series from across the pond.
After its premiere, The Guardian’s Lucy Mangan slammed the program as “so boring,” “so painfully contrived” and “so effortfully whimsical” that it “does become almost fascinating.”
Mangan also credited guest Chrissy Teigen with being the “high point” of the show, arguing that she and other celebrities who made cameos weren’t “paid enough.”
The Times issued a similarly scathing take on the renegade royal’s show, referring to the host as “a woman in need of some cash.”
Hilary Rose told the outlet that the “baffling” series occupied “the sweet spot where irrelevant meets intolerable” and made her “rock back and forth in a darkened room.”
Meanwhile, Anita Singh from the Telegraph labeled “With Love, Meghan” as “tone-deaf” because the “episode about cocktail-making in Malibu is dedicated to the first responders and victims of the California wildfires.”
Though Singh called the “Montecito Marie Antoinette” a “needy” host, she did highlight Markle “drop[ping] her Type-A perfection” and seeming “relatively normal” in some “self-deprecating” and “likable” moments.
The former actress, 44, responded to the hate in an interview with Emily Chang, explaining, “I knew who I was trying to meet. If you know your audience, you know your demographic, they loved the show. My partners loved the show. That’s why they have a Season 2 and why we have more fun coming.”
She cheekily added, “Are they saying negative things and then going home and secretly making single skillet spaghetti? Possibly.”
“With Love, Meghan” was part of the $100 million Netflix deal that Markle and her husband, Prince Harry, landed in 2020 after they stepped down from their royal duties and moved to California.
Page Six reported last month that the couple had recently extended their partnership with the streamer — but for an amount that is “much” less and therefore poses “no risk for Netflix” while saving them both “reputationally.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source pagesix.com ’
