The Leopard; With Love, Meghan

“The Leopard’s sultry good looks will make you swoon, but this beady-eyed examination of how the ruling classes navigate regime change has plenty of substance too.”
Rachel Aroesti, The Guardian

“The series, overseen by the British director Tom Shankland, really is a thing of beauty. More importantly, in detailing the dilemmas of Prince Don Fabrizio Corbera, aka the Leopard, as revolution grips Sicily and upends the aristocratic order, there’s a suitably melancholic streak too. The prince is an elegiac symbol of the old ways being replaced, of a fading splendour.”
James Jackson, The Times

“I try to steer clear of epithets involving the words sumptuous or lavish, but The Leopard is just ludicrously luxe. You can imagine it being played simultaneously on every screen in Currys as they show off the stunningly deep blacks in the latest range of Samsung OLEDs. That, of course, is not enough. You need more than fancy wallpaper to get you through six hours of drama, and in this regard The Leopard will divide. It is deliberately – sometimes infuriatingly – old school in its story-telling, happy to rinse out the melodrama where required like a chocolate box Western.”
Benji Wilson, The Telegraph

“The show is beautifully made: the locations and costumes are sumptuous, the attention to period detail immaculate. This is a period drama on a scale rarely seen on TV, more akin to the expenditure on The Crown than terrestrial dramas like Wolf Hall or The Gilded Age. As testaments to the flux of history go, The Leopard manages to be beautiful, engaging and suitably elegiac.”
Nick Hilton, The Independent

“If you thought With Love, Meghan would be a smug, syrupy endurance watch, and that you would rather fry your eyeballs than sit through it, I have news for you. It is so much worse than that. Here is a duchess presenting her extreme wealth and mind-bogglingly exclusive lifestyle as if it is available to anyone who cares enough to pop a twee personal label on a homemade beeswax candle or lay a sprig of fresh lavender on a towel.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“It’s not the activities themselves that are offensive, nor indeed the credo to glean joy from life’s small moments. It’s the lack of humour, irony, self-awareness and apprehension of the reality of this deeply unequal and apocalyptic world that makes With Love, Meghan so unlovable in the end.”
Chitra Ramaswamy, The Guardian

“It’s all too easy to sneer at Meghan Markle. Unfortunately, it is both necessary and involuntary when watching With Love, Meghan. This programme is about ‘the pursuit of joy’ and mostly involves Markle wearing creaseless white linen and inviting people to a rented house in Montecito furnished with tall wooden shelves filled with empty glass jars to use untouched white Le Creuset and Japanese knives to cook tomato pasta.”
Sarah Carson, The i

“With Love feels like a millennial blog come to life; it’s the TV version of The Tig, the website that Meghan launched and ran in her pre-royal, jobbing actor days, filmed with all the soft-filtered gloss of a Center Parcs advert.”
Katie Rosseinsky, The Independent

“Maintaining this hostess with the mostest act must be as exhausting for Meghan as it is for us watching at home. The brunch in the final episode is so laden with unspoken tension that you half-expect her to have a breakdown like Ross in Friends and wibble: ‘I’m sorry, it must be the pressure of entertaining.’”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph