One of the craziest parts of the “review-bombing” of With Love, Meghan is that so many of the critics acted like they had never heard of or seen any cooking or lifestyle shows before. I will keep making this point: the Duchess of Sussex is not breaking new ground with WLM – there used to be cute cooking and entertaining shows like this all the time, but now there’s an endless parade of cooking competitions with names like “Death March To BEEF.” That’s so tedious, especially for those of us who just want to watch a relaxing program of a woman or man cooking and arranging flowers and having drinks with friends. Well, Sandra Lee used to have a show like that. She wasn’t even a professional chef, but her show had all kinds of workarounds – it was called Semi-Homemade Cooking, and it was very popular once upon a time. Well, Sandra is a big fan of WLM and she defended Meghan in a recent red carpet interview:

Sandra Lee counts herself a fan of Meghan Markle’s “beautifully filmed” With Love, Meghan docuseries — and has a pointed message for any critics.

“I was actually surprised about the backlash to the show. It didn’t seem fair,” Lee, 58, exclusively told Us Weekly at the New York Women in Film and Television 2025 MUSE Awards on Wednesday, March 26, at NYC’s Cipriani 42nd Street. “[I’ve been] in the lifestyle space for years. We have mixed relatable and unrepeatable elements [too].”

“Meghan’s show is very well done [and] beautifully filmed,” Lee gushed to Us. “[It has] calming, serene content — and she even used my trick of using a plastic bag as a piping bag for her cake! I’m happy for her. Her crew is doing a great job.”

Lee further offered Meghan “good luck” upon the news that With Love would return to the streaming platform for a second season.

“Keep on going, and inspire people to make beautiful things,” Lee concluded on Wednesday.

[From Us Weekly]

Exactly with the “calming, serene content.” That’s it exactly – it’s not a competition, it’s just chilled-out. Sandra is right about how the backlash wasn’t fair, probably because people were geared up to go apesh-t on Meghan no matter what. Speaking of, NPR’s Morning Edition did a segment on WLM and Meghan, and they interviewed Leslie Gray Streeter, a columnist for The Baltimore Banner. Streeter spoke about what’s really behind the “hate” for the show:

“The real reason is I’m going to say racism and jealousy that is couched in racism and a little classism and just, you know, basically being mad that people have things that we might want that we don’t have. And then racism…. The response to her has always been couched in race. And I think that in this thing, it kind of shocks people, even though you know at this point she’s royalty and that she is very wealthy. She was a successful actress who was a millionaire before she even married Prince Harry. But seeing her having a soft life, having a life where she can be at leisure to have bees in her backyard and make fruit rainbows and balloon arches, seems like that’s the final straw. Something about that offends people.

If you look at things like The Barefoot Contessa or anything in a Nancy Meyers movie, where it’s just a person who is probably a woman who has a means who can, like, sip chardonnay in a white sweater looking off the coast of her huge kitchen onto the deck or whatever. But I think that the soft life part comes with money and it comes with money to buy the time to do that. And that is not something I think that women of African descent are expected to have. The idea of what black femininity is is not that.

[From NPR]

Both things are true: no matter what Meghan did or said or cooked, they would have lost their damn minds because she’s Meghan; AND she did that “soft life” Nancy Meyers-kitchen aesthetic better than most women, and so there was just a lot of rage that Meghan is Black and she has the money and time to live a soft life.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images, Netflix.