Finally, there’s some good news to come out of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s Netflix partnership. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex famously signed a rumoured multi-million dollar deal with the streamer back in 2020, not long after they had stepped back from royal duties and stepped into life in the Californian enclave of Montecito. One of only a handful of projects that materialised from said deal was With Love, Meghan, a lifestyle series in which the duchess opened the doors not to her Santa Barbara home, exactly, but to a home – a farmhouse a few miles down the road rented for the purposes of filming – and shared her secrets to becoming the perfect host.The show, it’s fair to say, was not a universal hit. It went down with critics about as well as you’d imagine a copy of Spare might be received in the Windsor Castle library. Reviewing it for this paper, I found it to be sickly sweet and a bit exhausting – there were so many edible flowers to be sprinkled over every available surface, so many guest gift baskets to curate, so many stilted conversations with Mindy Kaling and other celeb guests. It ran for a second season – my esteemed colleague Helen Coffey described the viewing experience as akin to being “gaslit by a multimillionaire insisting that constructing homemade necklaces or flower arrangements is a cinch” – and a Christmas special, but was cancelled by Netflix earlier this year. Viewing figures, by all accounts, were dismal – season two ended up ranking as the streamer’s 1,124th most-watched show between July and December 2025.In March, Netflix also parted ways with Meghan’s lifestyle company As Ever, which sells jams (sorry, preserves), candles, teas, and Napa Valley wines (the streamer, I should add, still holds a first-look deal with Meghan and Harry’s Archewell Productions). Sour taste: The Duchess of Sussex’s series ‘With Love, Meghan’ didn’t inspire much love from its viewers (Netflix)Now, though, it looks like With Love is getting its (edible) flowers. Earlier this week, it was announced that it has been nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award for outstanding lifestyle series. “A huge congratulations to the amazing crew, producers and team who worked on With Love, Meghan on Netflix,” the duchess wrote in a celebratory Instagram post. It is news that has inevitably raised eyebrows – how could a show that was panned from all sides and failed to win over many viewers be in line for one of America’s biggest television awards? But the hand-wringing from the duchess’s detractors largely misses the point – I’d even go as far as to argue that the nomination makes perfect sense (and I’m far from a With Love devotee). Put frankly, it’s not exactly like With Love is up for the TV equivalent of the Oscars’ Best Picture award. The Daytime Emmys tend to be considered the lesser-loved sibling of the main event. The Primetime Emmys are where you’ll see the likes of The Pitt and Slow Horses slogging it out, while the Daytime version is all about soapy stalwarts like General Hospital and Days of Our Lives, or Drew Barrymore versus Kelly Clarkson in the talk show category. Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 dayNew subscribers only. £9.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.Try for freeADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 dayNew subscribers only. £9.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.Try for freeADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.With love... again: the second series was savaged by critics when it was released in August (Netflix)Over in the lifestyle category, Meghan faces stiff competition. There’s A Different Breed, a “dogumentary” about competitive sports for dogs; George to the Rescue, a home renovation show that appears to star the American equivalent of Handy Andy from Changing Rooms, The Motherhood, a Hallmark reality show where White Lotus star Connie Britton helps busy moms balance their lives, and the brilliantly titled The Wizard of Paws, about an animal prosthetics expert. Acting like Meghan’s show doesn’t serve to be named in the hallowed company of these presumably solidly made but ultimately run-of-the-mill reality programmes is, as the canine stars of A Different Breed would probably put it, barking mad – and shows how anything can be stretched into an anti-Markle controversy. In fact, these kinds of shows are probably the peers that With Love should have been measured against in the first place, rather than reviewers – myself included – expecting that a bit of glossy fluff might serve as some sort of compelling docu-drama.And if the organisers of the Daytime Emmys are hoping that Meghan and Harry (or “H” as she so relentlessly nicknames him on screen) turn up to sprinkle their ceremony with a bit of stardust, who are we to judge? It will certainly earn them more press coverage and more intrigue than they might otherwise expect. If anything, this nomination is a fascinating benchmark of the Sussexes’ celebrity status right now. When they left the royal family, they aimed for the upper echelons of the A-list. But these days, they’re hanging on to a much lower rung of the Hollywood ladder.