Dethroned
What caused Netflix's The Crown to fall from grace?
“I used to think that the interesting issue was whether we should have a monarchy or not. But now I think that question is rather like, should we have pandas or not? Our current royal family doesn’t have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren’t they interesting? Aren’t they nice to look at? Some people find them endearing; some pity them for their precarious situation; everybody stares at them, and however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it’s still a cage.” -Hilary Mantel, Royal Bodies
“The hereditary system is absolutely mad. I wouldn't like to go to a dentist who, just before he drilled my teeth, told me he was not a dentist himself but that his father had been a very good dentist.” -Tony Benn
“I’m going to miss The Crown. At its best, it has been alternately soothing, nostalgic, and educational, and even at its worst, it has always been well acted and gorgeous. Unfortunately, the second half of the sixth and final season is very much The Crown at its worst. These six episodes, released yesterday on Netflix, are an unfocused canter around the paddock of the late 1990s and early 2000s.” -Helen Lewis, The Atlantic
What is the point of the British royal family, anyway? One of the panelists on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour answered this question by describing them as “the world’s longest running reality TV show.” This analogy hit home for me, since I often find myself mocking and dismissing reality TV as silly and not worth my time in the same way I’ve long been befuddled by the widespread fascination with the British royals, the Kardashians across the pond. I slept well for years knowing I’d never enjoy watching The Crown.
However, if there’s a mantra that my writing about tv has taught me it’s been: “be open to being pleasantly surprised.” Just as Derry Girls floored me with with its charm and The Bear won me over with its nuanced approach to family dynamics, from the first episode of The Crown I was captivated by the searing dialogue and hard hitting performances. I quickly found myself empathizing with the very aristocrats I once mocked, and loving the indulgent joyride across both well known and obscure corners of British history.
The star power Peter Morgan assembles around his project combined with the momentous scenes they smash into the stratosphere results in some downright excellent TV, no matter what you think of the real life royals. This starts with the 3 actors tasked with bringing the queen to life. Claire Foy, Olivia Coleman, and Imelda Staunton all deliver career best performances, especially Foy, who makes you understand the terrible and inescapable burden of becoming queen at a young age. The supporting cast is also uniformly excellent. Jon Lithgow’s Winston Churchill, Helena Bonham Carter’s Princess Margaret, and Gillian Anderson’s Margaret Thatcher were especially delightful to watch and helped get me invested in interpersonal drama and geopolitical intrigue that might otherwise put me to sleep.
There are no outright villains in The Crown. Even the most loathsome characters like the Duke of Windsor, whose Nazi sympathies become a key plot point in one of the best episodes, are played with enough subtlety that they feel like real people. However after consuming six seasons of this story it’s clear to me that the undeniable villains of the British royal family aren’t actually people, but the act of smoking and idea of divorce.
Queen Elizabeth’s father and uncle died painfully and preventably from illnesses clearly tied to their heavy smoking. It’s just as clear to armchair historians like me that had the royals been a bit more chill about letting people marry and divorce who they wanted they would have been spared the cascading suffering caused by the abdication of the Duke of Windsor on the doorstep of World War Two and the ill-advised marriage and subsequent messy divorce of Charles and Diana. Similarly, the queen’s refusal to let her sister marry divorced Peter Townsend and later permissiveness towards the divorces of all three of her adult children epitomizes the untenable alliance of family, political power, and religion at the heart of the British monarchy. While the chain smoking is understandable given the time period, the fact that these people learned none or all of the wrong lessons from their own ancestor King Henry VIII, who literally founded his own religion just to get divorced, is astounding to me.
This made me realize that, at its core, this show is about the dangers of refusing to change your ways in a world that is doing nothing but that, how the royal family’s repeated reluctance to adapt to the modern era caused them mountains of self-inflicted misery despite their extreme privilege. The royals, like Britain, spend much of the show desperately clinging to stuffy traditions that ossify their former relevance, a microcosm for the British Empire’s half century long implosion that is at various times dramatic gold and melodramatic cotton candy, but consistently watchable TV.
As an American viewer, there is a certain foreignness to all of this that makes it more captivating but also more perplexing. Within the microcosm of the royal family’s reluctant embrace of modernity is, nested like Russian doll, yet another microcosm: British stoicism. Not only are they trapped in the gilded cage of an outdated institution that requires the monarch to repress their own humanity and alienate their family members, but their family is defined, for better or worse, by their stereotypically British “stiff upper lip.” The Crown left wondering if British people really hate talking about their feelings more than they hate seasoning their food.
The show was never perfect. The main sin of seasons 1-4 was overlooking or tokenizing hugely important world events in order to explore the petty melodrama of a few out of touch aristocrats. Apparently I was wrong to assume that a huge subplot of the first two seasons would be the collapse of the British empire. Instead I saw some suspenseful episodes about the Suez crisis, a curious dance between Queen Elizabeth and Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, and precious little else. For Peter Morgan, decolonization is mostly just colorful wallpaper. Again, at the start of season 4, I was excited to see The Troubles become a key plot point, only to witness Morgan spend exactly one episode on decades of Sectarian violence, offing Lord Mountbatten in a fiery fashion and then quickly and cleanly moving on in the exact way that the real life Irish and Brits did not.
To be fair, compressing so much history into binge-able TV was always going to have casualties and none of Peter Morgan’s major omissions or fabrications were dealbreakers for me. Quite the opposite: The Crown won me over early and held my attention firmly for four glorious seasons.
When Netflix’s crown jewel returned in 2022 and again this past winter, I was eager to see how Morgan would cover the royal drama of the 90s and aughts. What I got was a pair of seasons that managed to cover some of the most gripping real life events in a strange, directionless, and paint-by-numbers way. If seasons 1-4 succeeded in making esoteric royal intrigue into gripping television through great writing and acting, seasons 5-6 fail in making gripping recent history feel fresh or relevant through baffling creative choices.
Starting The Crown felt like beginning to ski down an enormous mountain, the slow build of momentum along the precarious descent as thrilling as your surroundings were vast, majestic, and immersive. Finishing The Crown felt like slowing to a crawl on the flat, scraped off, dirty snow at the bottom of that mountain and realizing that your legs hurt and traffic home is going to be terrible. A transcendent journey that began in a gorgeous alpine forest skids to a halt in a generic, crowded parking lot.
The Crown’s magic vanished as Peter Morgan’s once masterful style began to feel heavy-handed and obvious, making the history somehow feel both tedious and rushed, alternating wildly between between telegraphing the message and having no message at all. Has Morgan’s formula has run out of gas, is his approach ill-suited to the heavily documented subject matter, or are the events recent enough that it’s now painfully obvious when he’s just making stuff up for dramatic effect?
As I sat with my own profound underwhelm, I arrived at three theories for why all of this fell apart.
Peter Morgan abandons his protagonist, Queen Elizabeth II. Imelda Staunton is just as good an actor as Claire Foy and Olivia Coleman, but in her two seasons as the queen she’s given next to nothing to do, as most of these seasons focus on her son’s (and eventually grandson’s) romances. Not since The Hobbit films sidelined Martin Freeman’s Bilbo have I seen a beloved British actor forgotten about in a project that’s set up to be about them. While Morgan’s desire to spend more screen time covering the fallout between Princess Diana and Prince Charles is understandable given the salaciousness of this material, the casualty of this pivot is having a clear protagonist and thematic focus. Once Diana meets her tragic and untimely end, we’re trapped in a show that has no one left to root for and no central character to ground or filter our experience of the history, hence the peculiar aimlessness of the final season. As Inkoo Kang notes in The New Yorker: “As the more charismatic characters recede into the background, Morgan’s mypoic focus on the handful that capture his attention— a coterie that doesn’t include Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, those other tabloid fixtures of the nineties— begins to feel claustrophobic.”
Pacing, focus, and tonal whiplash. One way in which the latter two seasons of the Crown differ most notably is quantitative. Each of the previous seasons spanned roughly a decade of British history. The final two seasons span 6 and 7 years a pop, but much of this is centered on a predictable speed run of Princess Diana’s Wikipedia page, including three episodes on the last months of her life. The way the series both slows down and zooms in as it approaches the modern day is noticeably disorienting. Despite there being plenty of juicy scandal to cover, Morgan seems to have lost his appetite for exploring it. Instead, he ends up taking Gladwell-esque detours to fill the runtime by covering:
Dodi Fayed’s dad’s life
Office politics at the BBC
The final hours of the Romanovs
Prince Philip’s love of carriage racing?
What explains Morgan’s approach to unpacking the last few decades? Equally plausible is that this recent history is so well known, even by younger American viewers like me, that there was simply no intrigue left to wring out of it, or that he grew afraid of offending the real life royals and monarchists in Britain for whom these are still tender topics. Regardless, the paradox of the latter seasons is that as Morgan is given some of the most interesting history to re-enact, the re-enactments become some of the least interesting ones we’ve seen so far.
Suddenly getting soft on Charles. A noteworthy feature of The Crown is that the entire cast changes every two seasons. While in lesser hands this could have been a flaw, it turns out to be feature not a bug. I was very impressed by how the actors they got to riff on the royals each managed to leave their mark on the character and help them gain texture and maturity over time. This streak ended with the casting of Dominic West as Prince Charles in season 5. While I’ve adored West since his time as McNulty on The Wire, he isn’t just too good looking and too charismatic to play Charles; his character also gets a sudden and confusingly glowing treatment in the script. In seasons 3 and 4, Josh O’Connor brought an appropriately nuanced take on the role, equally selfish and pitiful as he was sad and lonely, reminiscent of Joaquin Phoenix’s iconic performance of Commodus in Gladiator. West’s Charles on the other hand is eminently likable and rational. His role in the latter seasons is often to serve as a sort of audience surrogate, pleading for more empathy from volatile Diana, his stodgy parents, and his moody children. While this works great for West and the real life King Charles, it doesn’t work for the role of Charles as he’s been set up in the series or in real life. It feels like a safe and apologetic take on a man whose whiny petulance is well-documented. This version of Charles also publicly dreams about his mother abdicating so often that I kept expecting him to pull a Simba and start singing“I just can’t wait to be king.”
After confidently slaloming through the 1900s for 4 prestigious seasons, The Crown ends up meandering through recent history at an increasingly slow pace while at every turn refusing to have a clear or consistent point of view. As my eyes glazed over during a bland “will they won’t they” exchange between Prince William and Kate Middleton in season 6, I remarked to Alexis how insane it is that a series that once grippingly covered Welsh mining disasters is now stuck recreating an inane teenage courtship whose conclusion is simultaneously forgone and uninteresting, in a way that manages to say nothing about the world the rest of us live in.
Gone is the dialogue dripping with gravitas and the momentous musings on family, legacy, empire, and duty, replaced with flat scenes that feel out of a made for TV movie. It’s like we started out devouring a Michelin-starred meal only to end up nibbling on a TV dinner. Instead of feeling like a fulfilling end of an epic story, The Crown’s conclusion has the same uninspired box-checking energy of an obligatory prequel.
As Helen Lewis elegantly put it in The Atlantic:
“Audiences fell in love with The Crown because its early seasons evoked a lost time and explored a single question. At only 25 years old, a woman born before the invention of television—a woman born into a dying empire, who never went to school, who grew up in a castle during wartime—became the ruler of a fractious kingdom, in a world that was just about to invent miniskirts, pop music, and the concept of the teenager. Would she, and the monarchy, survive?
But as The Crown’s scope has drawn closer to the present, it has lost the useful distance of history as well as its grandeur, and its sense of permission.”
What made the first four seasons so good wasn’t just how vividly it brought history to life. It was how effectively it got you to empathize with the unsustainable position of the British royals: wedded to an archaic institution that justifies their status while simultaneously constricting their humanity. Somewhere along the way Peter Morgan forgot about this in his writing, turning his nuanced characters into either chess pieces to move into the places history requires, or mouthpieces to pedantically spout the theme of each episode. This transition is what a podcaster at Vanity Fair called “going from all subtext to all text.” Case in point: when Queen Elizabeth is having trouble operating a color TV in season 5 she turns to the camera and says “even the televisions are metaphors in this place.” Check, please.
By the final episode we witness a prolonged, stylized, and clearly fictional subplot where everyone including Elizabeth speculates if the Queen is going to abdicate and let Charles be king. This is tensionless since we know she won’t do it and concludes with an on the nose monologue from Philip about the state of the monarchy, which feels heavy handed, even for Peter Morgan. I’ll admit that I did tear up a bit at the end, though I suspect this was just the bagpipes (truly the most mournful instrument) and joy of seeing Olivia Coleman and Claire Foy on screen one last time. While I suspect the cameos of the younger queens were intended to visually evoke a sense of Queen Elizabeth’s awe-inspiring life, it just made me nostalgic for when The Crown was a better show.
This series left me wondering nearly the exact same question I had going into it: what is the point of The Crown, anyway? By the end of its six season run, this show managed to become all of the things people rightfully criticize about the real life British monarchy: a bunch of expensive, self-indulgent theatrics futilely trying to justify their existence in a world that has so clearly moved past all this posh nonsense.
I whole-heartedly recommend that anyone reading this start watching The Crown if you haven’t seen it yet. The first two episodes alone could have easily been an Oscar nominated film, and feature “Duck Shoot” by Rupert Gregson Williams, one of the most moving TV scores I’ve heard in my entire life. If you enjoy those, keep going to see “Vergangenheit,” “Aberfan,” and “Tywysog Cymru,” which I’d put up there with some of the best episodes of TV I’ve seen on any streaming platform. I just can’t in good faith insist that that you finish watching The Crown. As Titanic passengers and Game of Thrones fans both learned the hard way, abandoning ship early is an underrated form of wisdom.
Have you seen The Crown? What did you think of it? When did Queen Elizabeth’s royal yacht jump the shark in your opinion?
Do you know someone that would enjoy this article? Share it with them!
If you enjoyed reading this and want to support more content like this please, consider becoming a subscriber. A free or paid subscription is a great way to support my writing and make sure you never miss a post.
Colorfully astute, as always.