Meghan’s Holiday Special Had a Subtle Moment That Hints Her Relationship With Netflix Is ‘Done’
Critics argue that a scene in 'With Love, Meghan' said a lot about the streaming giant’s future with the Sussexes.
Meghan Markle's With Love, Meghan holiday special landed on Netflix on December 3, wrapped in festive warmth, but critics say one small detail may have undercut the very story it was meant to tell. Tom Sykes of The Daily Beast thinks the real message from the streaming giant is right there in plain sight.
For one fleeting moment, Markle’s ageing beagle, Guy, silently pads through the frame. The issue, as Skyes points out, is that Guy died last year, which means this new holiday special was almost certainly cobbled together from old footage, shot long before the Sussexes' original Netflix deal was downgraded to a first-refusal arrangement. Weighing in on the same, he argues the memo from Netflix is that “we are done.”
Far from a technical oversight, Sykes thinks the moment was allowed-if not deliberately preserved. "Netflix does not make mistakes of this kind. They permitted it. They wanted it seen," he writes, believing the streaming giant is signaling to investors, advertisers, and viewers alike that no fresh money was spent on this project. The cameras, in his view, are no longer rolling. What audiences are watching, he says, are carefully repackaged offcuts.
Once that premise is taken on board, the special's overall tone, a high-gloss exercise in manufactured sincerity, heavy on glitter, light on spontaneity, starts to make a different kind of sense. Sykes paints it as a production weighed down by what he calls its relentless earnestness and striking absence of humor. This festive setting feels styled to the last pine needle, but the emotional register strains to rise above polite performance.
That tension gets sharper when Markle frames the Christmas tree as a way to honor family history, a sentiment that, as Sykes observes, lands awkwardly given her very public estrangement from parts of her own family and Prince Harry's fractured relationship with the royals. A guest constructing a Christmas cracker says "intentional and orchestrated fun" makes people feel 'seen.' In most homes, pulling a cracker is an unfussy afterthought, rather than a therapeutic intervention. Sykes dryly observes that in almost any other context, 'orchestrated fun' would sound like a complaint, rather than a hosting philosophy.
Equally striking is who and what is missing. No children appear in the special, not even in passing, which for a show built around Christmas and family is a curious absence. Markle has, of course, long kept her children off camera, but their symbolic presence still surfaces through a reusable advent calendar filled with affirmations said to be for them. Skyes cutting through the same says, any British child faced with an advent calendar full of motivational slogans would immediately ask, “Where’s the chocolate?”
For him, the episode is a major contradiction. Markle seems to want the image of domestic intimacy without the disorder that usually accompanies it, "the aura of family without exposing the thing itself," as Sykes frames it. Harry appears only in the special's final stretch, his entrance feeling, in Sykes' words, almost pre-programmed. The moment briefly feels unscripted when Harry jokes that he doesn't like the salad Markle has made because it's got everything he hates in it. Then Markle turns to him and says, “Thanks for coming.” For Skyes, it appears formal. Sykes points out that it sounds like something one might say to a neighbor who has stopped by, not to a husband in his own home.
