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Other shows with unlikely, unlikable hosts

By Ed Goldman

Calling a cooking-and-lifestyle TV show “With Love, Meghan” might have been a misguided decision by the Netflix marketing department.

The name implies that Meghan Markle, who became in a few short months (a) fresh new English royalty and (b) disgraced former English royalty, has the cuddly sort of personality we might attribute to the late Julia Child or the punctual Ina Garten, televised chefs known as much for their warmth as their recipes.

But ever since Markle and her husband, Prince-ish Harry (his status isn’t clear at the moment) quasi-quit the Crown without the standard six-generations’ notice, her popularity has waned a bit. It was neither aided nor abetted by Harry’s ghost-written book “Spare” (whose original subtitle was reportedly “Nobody Wuvs me/Evwybody Hates Me/I’m Gonna Eat Some Worms” until the publisher sobered up).

“With Love, Meghan” is serving as both a showcase for the Duchess of Something as well as a chief irritant for that rarefied group of first-responders I call social-mediacolytes.  Even so, I think the undeniably glam, former co-star of “Suits,” the nine-season Netflix smash, may be onto something: counter-intuitive cooking shows hosted by unlikely, unlikable personalities. Here are a few waiting for air dates:

– “HUGS AND SMOOCHIES FROM DADDY VLADDIE”. Deceptively dimply Russian President Vladimir Putin takes viewers inside the kitchen of one of his six or seven mansions to dish up traditional plates of blintzes and borscht. “And if recipe doesn’t work, here’s what to do,” he says to the camera with that adorable accent and twinkle in his eye. He then takes a panful of overcooked blintzes to the window and tosses them out. “I treat bad blintzes like enemies of state,” he says, cracking up everyone on the crew except for a lighting director, who soon thereafter “sleeps with the blintzes,” as they say in the KGB.

– “EGG FOO YOUNG AND OLD, WITH XI JINPING.” While he quips “It’s a state secret,” the president of the People’s Republic of China not only has a delicious sense of humor but also a few thousand years of accumulated Asian recipe cards at his disposal—which is also what thousands of his dissenters have been. Videotaped outdoors in Tiananmen Square—site of the 1989 massacre during the reign of Chairman Deng Xiaoping—”Egg Foo Young And Old” gives Uncle Xi, as he demands viewers call him but never aloud, the chance to joke around, as only a Communist Party-on-dude can. 

“I admit,” he says through his translator, “that an hour after eating this scrumptious meal, you may still be hungry to achieve world domination.”