Reaction to Meghan Markle‘s Netflix cooking show turned negative as California woke up, lending weight to perceptions that U.S. audiences have played a major role in the backlash, Newsweek can reveal.
The Duchess of Sussex released her cooking show With Love, Meghan on March 4 at 8 a.m. in the United Kingdom, 3 a.m. Eastern Time and midnight Pacific Time. Ultimately, it was ridiculed, but the backlash did not gain pace for several hours.
Listening agency Hootsuite monitored mentions on social platforms, news sites, blogs, forums and videos on Newsweek’s behalf and identified the moment negative reactions started to outweigh positive ones.
Positive responses were winning before the show’s release and kept the lead for hours afterward as British fans and journalists were frantically watching the show.
Courtesy of Netflix
Meghan’s Netflix Reactions As It Happened
The balance between positive and negative posts dropped to net zero around 2 p.m. ET, or 11 a.m. in California, where Meghan and Prince Harry live.
By this point, it was 7 p.m. in the U.K. and British journalists and commentators had 11 hours to watch the series and react. So far, the sentiment had not definitively soured.
By around 4 p.m. ET, negative responses started to outweigh positive ones, and the backlash then broadly dominated for most of the next 24 hours. By this time, it was 9 p.m. in Britain.
Reaction hit its most negative, though, at around 8 p.m. ET, by now 1am in Britain, and maintained dominance through the night as Brits were asleep.
The data appears to undermine the conventional wisdom that British distaste for Meghan dominates the backlash against her and points to a new era in which strong opinions exist on both sides of the Atlantic.
Hootsuite
This would certainly be born out in the reviews, with U.S. publications including Time, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter delivering scathing verdicts.
However, British outlets gave the show its fair share of criticism.
And indeed, North America delivered more posts about Meghan over the three-day period than any other region, accounting for 136,500 mentions, or 69 percent of the total.
Europe, including Britain, came next with 41,700, or 21 percent, while 7,700 were from Africa (3.9 percent) and another 13,000 were spread across Asia, Oceania and South America.
The Calm Before the Storm
Positive mentions (40.4 percent) for Meghan’s show outstripped negative ones (31 percent) over the three days studied—they were just heavily grouped before the episodes were released.
Therefore, they may not indicate organic audience reaction to a show that was not yet available, but they may signal an effective marketing strategy.
Meghan held a prerelease screening for fans who followed her lifestyle blog, The Tig, before she met Prince Harry.
She attended in person, posing for photographs, which the fans then put online and she published her own photos and videos on her Instagram page. Coupled with her interview for the cover of People, this ensured plenty of positive content was out there to inspire supportive mentions in the run-up to release.
Ultimately, though, the hostile reception the show received took over in time.
Engagement With Posts
There may have been a larger number of positive posts but negative ones also got more engagement.
Over the whole three days, there were 1.2 million engagements with the 61,700 negative mentions and 1 million engagements with the 80,400 positive mentions.
That also appears to be born out in the two standout viral moments on X, formerly Twitter. The first was a clip of the duchess correcting Mindy Kaling after the actor called her “Meghan Markle.”
The duchess told her friend: “It’s so funny too that you keep saying ‘Meghan Markle,’ you know I’m Sussex now.”
A post by GB news presenter Alex Armstrong, viewed 1.3 million times and liked 11,000 times, described the moment as “insufferable.”
The second moment was when Meghan put Trader Joe’s Peanut Butter Pretzel Nuggets into a sandwich bag and labeled it.
The Quick Qs Podcast posted the clip on X with the message: “I’m so glad Meghan Markle has a new show on Netflix where I can watch her take pretzels out of a labeled bag and put them into a new bag…then label it. The people’s Martha Stewart!”
It was viewed 1.6 million times and liked 10,000 times.
Volume of Mentions
It was not all bad news for Meghan, though, as the show created a significant amount of noise, which may translate into an audience. There were 190,000 total mentions over three days, which, for context, is far more than for Prince Harry’s Invictus Games a month earlier.
There were 7,400 mentions of “Meghan” and “Invictus” between February 8, the opening ceremony at which she was present, and February 14. “Harry” and “Invictus” returned 11,200 total mentions, and in both cases, positive and negative sentiments were roughly equal at around a quarter for each.
Jack Royston is chief royal correspondent for Newsweek, based in London. You can find him on X, formerly Twitter, at @jack_royston and read his stories on Newsweek’s The Royals Facebook page.
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