A leading comedian, podcaster and Netflix star has launched an excoriating review of Meghan Markle’s new show, calling it – and her – ‘highly inauthentic’, ‘fake’ and ‘phony’.
Christina Pazsitzky, a successful stand-up best known as Christina P, has concluded that the Duchess of Sussex is no ‘Martha f***ing Stewart’.
She filmed herself on TikTok reacting to watching the show and declared to her 1million followers: ‘I don’t know what the f*** this show is’.
‘She’s an actress playing the part of a human being right now, and it’s not working’, she said.
‘The problem from minute one is that she’s trying to be perfect all the time, and it reads as phony, as inauthentic and not fun’.
Ms Pazsitzky has had two successful Netflix comedy films called Mom Genes and Mother Inferior and lives in LA with her husband Tom Segura, who has also starred in three of his own Netflix shows. Both also have hugely successful podcasts.
Her intervention is a new blow to the streaming giant and the Sussexes, who signed a five-year $100million deal with them in 2021.
Netflix had hoped the couple would be their next Obama-style prestige stars but amid poor reviews and a series of flops since the Harry and Meghan documentary, many experts have predicted that With Love, Meghan could be the death knell for any contract renewal.
‘Meghan, you just need to be an actress. Just go act. You’re great in Suits. But when it comes to being a household branded name, you better be that thing through and through, otherwise people know that you’re being fake and inauthentic’, she said.
Describing one scene when she gets some honey from a beehive, Christina says: ‘She’s like: “I don’t even like honey, but now I appreciate it, because I see how hard it is to get”. And then she makes beeswax candles out of real beeswax. But she’s like, “I’ve never done this before”‘.
Christina concludes herself: ‘Yeah, you’ve never done any of this before. And I can tell, we can all tell’.
Christina Pazsitzky, a famous stand up and Netflix star, has panned Meghan’s new show
She urged Meghan to go back to acting because playing herself isn’t working
Meghan Markle filming for the Netflix show, With Love, Meghan,where she got honey to eat and wax for candles. But Christina claimed that it’s inauthentic
Christina also panned Meghan’s claims that she makes gifts for friends who visit. ‘She doesn’t really do this s**t’, she said
Christina told her near-1million TikTok followers that the show is highly inauthentic from the start.
She compared her unfavourably to Martha Stewart, saying America’s original lifestyle TV guru was believable because viewers knew that she did the same things on screen as off screen.
‘When Martha Stewart came out… I remember women being like, yeah right, like, who’s at home making their own beeswax candles? Yeah right. B***h who’s making their own croutons from scratch. Well, you know who was Martha f***ing Stewart, because that’s who she was. That’s who she is. She was doing all this crafty stuff, even when the cameras weren’t rolling.
‘But Meghan Markle wants you to believe that she is a beekeeper that when her friends come to visit, she is making bath salts for them in a jar. And you know what she’s doing for her dearest friend coming over to spend the night – she’s making bath salt for him, and she popped popcorn off a real corn on the cob. And then she goes, You know what this popcorn needs? Truffle oil. Like, what?’
Christina said that her guests will get, if they are lucky, wine, a bag of Cheetos and ‘weed’ or cigarettes if they smoke.
Questioning Meghan, she went on: ‘She doesn’t really do this s**t. There’s no way she’s making rainbows out of fruit every Saturday.
‘There’s no way she’s doing any of this. It hurts my stomach to watch it’.
Christina P said it was painful watching Meghan and her friend as she describes being on Suits and building The Tig between takes.
‘So I’m watching her and her oldest dearest friend spontaneously talk about how when they worked on Suits together, in between her hard job of acting, she would go into her trailer and then work on her website, The TIG’, she said.
‘And her friend is like “you mean, you were working and then you were working so more. How did you do that? How did you have a room on Suits and then make a website’, while laughing sarcastically.
She went on to lampoon Meghan making pasta.
‘They’re painfully cutting every single tomato, and you have to watch them cut. And, like, the guy doesn’t know how to do it, and he cuts his finger, and then she gives him, like, an artisanal green coloured band aid.
‘You’re like, What the f**k is this? And then, and then, she plates him pasta and gives him, like, the teeniest little like the teeniest amount, like an enragingly small amount of pasta’.
Meghan Markle ‘s highly anticipated new cooking show ‘With Love, Meghan’ finally aired on Netflix but it has received poor reviews
Christina has had two Netflix shows in the past and her husband, who is also a comic, has worked on at least three Netflix projects so her criticism will be a blow to the streamer
Today it emerged that this pasta dish bore a remarkable resemblance to a one-pot recipe made by a British chef in 2015.
Meghan Markle‘s With Love show has a lowly 11 per cent rating from viewers, falling behind wrestling and sitcoms on Netflix‘s chart.
The delayed lifestyle series was slammed by critics yesterday after its premiere as ‘gormless lifestyle filler’ with a ‘tangible desperation’.
It currently sits at number six on the streaming channel’s top 10 behind Kate Hudson‘s basketball comedy series Running Point and WWE.
Hollywood bible magazine Variety panned the Duchess of Sussex’s series as ‘a Montecito ego trip not worth taking’ in a no holds barred review.
‘The show plays out like a forced march, one in which Meghan’s guests must, as the price of getting to share an afternoon in a made-for-TV kitchen with her, praise her first,’ they wrote.
‘”With Love, Meghan” is made with a great deal of love — in the sense that the greatest love of all is the one that a person has for herself.’
Meghan Markle ‘s With Love show has a lowly 11 per cent rating from viewers with it behind wrestling and sitcoms on Netflix ‘s chart
Meghan pictured with Prince Harry who makes a fleeting appearance in his wife’s lifestyle series
The series has a lowly 11 per cent rating from more than 250 ratings from viewers on reviews site Rotten Tomatoes
The series has a lowly 11 per cent rating from more than 250 ratings from viewers on reviews site Rotten Tomatoes.
A scathing one star reviewer quipped: ‘This isn’t even a fun hate watch. It’s just bad.’
A fellow low scorer said watching With Love was the ‘worst few minutes of my life’.
Previously sympathetic left-leaning publications such as the Guardian have warned this could be the last show Meghan and her husband Prince Harry ever make for Netflix if it is not a ratings success – describing it as ‘pointless’.
Marina Hyde wrote: ‘The mildest way to describe this show is as a ghastly artefact of a particular cultural era that recently met its apocalypse. This show is sensationally absurd and trite, and if you watch it, you know it.’
In the Radio Times, columnist Caroline Frost cast doubt on claims in the Netflix blurb that Meghan would ‘reimagine the genre of lifestyle programming’ with her series.
She wrote: ‘This isn’t the most offensive TV show in the world, and useful for those who need to know how to pour Epsom salts into a jar, pour boiling water over pasta and daisies on a plate, but Brooklyn Beckham needn’t worry about giving up his chef’s hat just yet’.
Anita Singh, the Telegraph‘s arts and entertainment editor, gave the show a two-star review and said it was an ‘exercise in narcissism, filled with extravagant brunches, celebrity pals and business plugs’
She wrote: ‘The format is this: Meghan invites people to her pretend house – the show is filmed in an $8million farmhouse down the road from her $14million home – and they tell her how amazing she is. This happens for eight episodes’.
Katie Rosseinsky, senior culture and lifestyle writer at The Independent, gave the show a one-star review and said it was ‘queasy and exhausting’.
