If timing is everything, Meghan Markle has nothing.
Her little cooking/entertaining/gardening vanity project for Netflix, set to premiere on January 15, has been postponed to March.
Meghan says the decision was hers, made with respect for her fellow Californians devastated by the Los Angeles wildfires.
She issued a statement on Sunday afternoon — Day Five of this apocalypse. Gird your loins for this one.
‘I’m thankful to my partners at Netflix’ — those are your bosses, Meghan, not your peers — ‘for supporting me’ — me, me, me, me, me — ‘in delaying the launch as we focus on the needs of those impacted by the wildfires in my home state of California.’
It was vintage Meghan: Verbose, vague, meaningless, and thoroughly unnecessary.
Because, really, who cares what Meghan Markle is doing or not doing, especially now? Who cares about her ridiculous new Netflix show, already tone-deaf before the fires?
Not the vast majority of Los Angelenos, that’s for sure.
If timing is everything, Meghan Markle has nothing. Her little cooking/entertaining/gardening vanity project for Netflix, set to premiere on January 15, has been postponed to March.
Most American families are still struggling in this economy, yet here’s Meghan playing Marie Antionette in a rented mansion with her ladybug cupcakes and long hair hanging over these ostensible edibles.
Rule #1: Tie your hair back in the kitchen!
Oh, and she’s got a few famous friends standing around and gushing while Meghan, dressed all in white, prepares food.
Really: who doesn’t brave inevitable spills and stains while wearing white?
As for who made the call to postpone this turkey? Forgive me if I’m doubtful that Meghan did so unilaterally. More likely to my mind is that Netflix, knowing how damaging the optics would be, pressed pause on this flop-in-waiting.
But it doesn’t really matter, because I for one am not buying the premise that Meghan much cares about anyone other than herself.
And the only thing likely to be cooked in that kitchen is Meghan’s reputation, scorched beyond repair.
This is a woman who not only has disregarded the feelings of her own family members but has seemed to relish in salting open wounds.
Oprah was the first salvo, Meghan emanating victimhood as she implied that the royals were racists who prevented her from seeking therapy — even though her husband, along with Prince William and Kate, famously founded a mental health initiative — all while Prince Philip lay dying.
Could she and Prince Harry have altered the air date for that Oprah interview? Put the pin in that grenade?
Then, as the late Queen Elizabeth quietly battled cancer, the Gruesome Twosome announced two more high-profile projects spilling more royal secrets.
‘Harry & Meghan’ — the Netflix docuseries in which Meghan mocked her curtsy to the Queen while her simp of a husband sat silently, a pained expression on his face — premiered just three months after the Queen died in December 2022.
Could that have been delayed, too? Surely it wasn’t a time-sensitive project. Griping and moaning have no expiration date, after all.
One month later came ‘Spare’, Harry’s mortifying memoir of his frozen todger, fantasies of killing his father, fisticuffs with William and reprinted text exchanges between Meghan and Kate — texts that only Meghan could have provided, an obscene breach of trust.
And of course, last year Meghan dropped — quite prematurely — a trailer for her ‘American Riviera Orchard’ brand, gallivanting around her $14 million estate in a ballgown.
That particular timeline is devastating.
January 17, 2024: Kate announces that she has undergone major abdominal surgery and will be out of public life for an indeterminate period — shocking news regarding a young mother of three, let alone the future queen.
February 5, 2024: Buckingham Palace discloses that King Charles has been diagnosed with cancer.
March 14: Meghan drops her ‘ARO’ trailer.
March 22: Kate, in a pre-recorded video message that stuns the world, announces she too has cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy.
One could say that the Sussexes are haunted by bad timing, luck, chance — you name it. Or perhaps these calamities have been ‘manifested’ by the Gruesome Twosome themselves, with all their dark energy and seething resentments. Karma always catches up.
It’s hard to wish well two people who have clearly sought to hurt their own families. Who push on with their empty, vainglorious projects despite the health struggles of major royals.
January 7, 2025: Meghan posts to Instagram that her dog and co-star in her new Netflix series, Guy, has died, but does not say when. Hours later, the LA wildfires broke out.
Here’s the problem: Nothing these two now do will ever be looked at kindly. Their little jaunt to visit wildfire survivors on Friday — alighting from hours away in untouched Montecito, Meghan wearing an ‘LA’ baseball cap and her most concerned expression — has been slammed online.
Actress Justine Bateman called them ‘disaster tourists’.
Harry and Meghan’s little jaunt to visit wildfire survivors on Friday – alighting from hours away in untouched Montecito – has been slammed online. (The couple are pictured at the Pasadena Convention Center on January 10).
‘What a repulsive “photo op” they achieved,’ Bateman wrote. ‘They are “touring the damage”? Are they politicians now?’
How unself-aware they are, acting like royals even though, through their own machinations, they are no longer anything of the sort, doing all the stuff they said they had no interest in doing.
Meghan’s reported remark while on her 2018 tour of Australia: ‘I can’t believe I’m not getting paid for this’ — months after she was thrown a $39 million wedding.
Imagine they had stayed. Harry and Meghan would be picking up all manner of royal duties and ceremonies as Charles and Kate convalesce.
Indeed, Meghan, as an American-born working duchess, could have volunteered to go to LA during this time of crisis, to offer some hugs and ladle some soups. And it would have mattered.
Instead, she and Harry are cosplaying at being royal.
Recall her red-carpet appearance last October, in a plunging $6,000 red Carolina Herrera gown, at a benefit for LA’s Children’s Hospital.
‘There wasn’t a great deal of warmth from people when she arrived,’ socialite Lizzie Cundy, who was in attendance, told the Mail.
And of course, there was that uninvited appearance in Uvalde, Texas in 2022, after one of the worst school shootings in history.
Meghan rocked up with a camera crew in tow, there in her ‘personal capacity as a mother’, her spokesperson told People magazine.
The online backlash was swift and merciless. And it entrenched an enduring suspicion among many Americans that Meghan Markle only does what’s good for Meghan Markle.
So forgive me if I don’t believe that she’s pausing her Netflix show for any other reason than to salvage her dented, decaying brand.
Truly: there’s no reason for Meghan to get those jams and jellies into production. America long ago stopped buying what she’s selling.