The 1990s... The time period that Season 5 of Netflix's drama behemoth "The Crown" chooses for its new ensemble cast was an especially rough decade for the British royal family, a time filled with scandals, not least but the most sensational of which was certainly Charles and Diana, the Prince and Princess of Wales, whose faltering marriage finally broke down for good and in public.
In the weeks leading up to the premiere, there was a good deal of foot-stamping in the media from Buckingham Palace and royal reporters concerned that Charles, just two months into his reign as king, would be portrayed harshly. The words “lurid” and “unflattering” have been bandied about. Anyone who was around when the events of the season unfurled will remember how messy things got: She was the embodiment of warmth trapped by an unforgiving system; he was the remote, ice-cold cheater who had done her wrong.
But Charles and his palace courtiers needn’t have worried about the newest chapter of the Netflix series. His snappish behaviour over leaky pens and other annoyances caught on camera in the days after his mother’s death proved to be uglier than anything on display here.
That’s because the show, from Peter Morgan, has always been royalist propaganda, viewing The Firm as a gilded cage – and the dysfunction within a direct result of that – rather than an innately corrupt endeavor.
The queen “never puts a foot wrong” Prince Philip says at one point and the show is all but tipping its hand, because this is a specific phrase you see a lot in royal reporting these days (usually in regard to Kate Middleton). Hyperbolic and absurd, it presumes a perfection no human can obtain, and yet here it is, presented with unblinking sincerity. As for Charles: “I have enormous sympathy for a man in his position – indeed, a family in their position,” Morgan told EW in an interview last month. He’s not cloaking his biases, but telling audiences in very clear terms where he comes down on all of this.
Another reason Charles’ worries about the season were unfounded? The show remains far more interested in his mother, which will perhaps come as either a relief or profound frustration for him. He may be king, but his mother remains the main event even still.
Imelda Staunton steps into the sensible shoes of Queen Elizabeth this time out – taking over from Olivia Colman, and Claire Foy before her – with a performance that suggests a woman who is steely, as opposed to stubborn and slow to take action. I wonder at the accuracy of this interpretation; Helen Mirren’s incarnation of Elizabeth in 2006′s “The Queen” (also from Morgan) remains the version that to me seems closer to the truth.
By the time the ‘90s rolled around, the marriages of her three eldest children – Charles, Anne and Andrew – were falling apart, leading to some awkward optics, but “The Crown” either doesn’t know how or doesn’t care to get inside the head of the queen, who was such an inward figure. The show tends to be self-serious, but even when it aims for humor it doesn’t have the best judgment. When Andrew (James Murray) warns his mother about the infamous photos of his then-wife Sarah Ferguson caught with a man sucking her toes, he tosses off a one-liner: “People tell me I put my foot in it from time to time, but at least I don’t put it in someone’s mouth.” Considering the allegations about Andrew that have surfaced in the years since, why give this guy jokes?
The casting of Dominic West as Charles is flattering more than anything – he is far too handsome and looks nothing like the real thing – but he gets enough of the mannerisms and vocal inflections right, along with that uncertain mix of entitlement and insecurity. Restless in middle age as his mother clings to the throne, he is forever maneuvering to be “incorporated earlier.”
He is obsessed with his press coverage and is willing to play games to juice it, but Morgan is silent when it comes to the games the print media plays right back, propping up and tearing down the royals depending on unknowable whims. We’re given, at least, a glimpse into the unspoken pact between the royals and the British newspapers when Charles is handed an advance copy of a story – a journalistically unethical leak – suggesting the queen should abdicate in favor of her son.
Charles may be self-pitying – he calls himself a “useless ornament stuck in a waiting room gathering dust” to a roomful of his closest friends – but really, the whole family is self-pitying. Even Diana. Not that you blame her.
Played by Elizabeth Debicki, she is self-aware and soulful and has a far more legitimate claim to indignation than anyone else in these musty old rooms. And yet we don’t get as much time with her as you’d expect, considering her outsized influence and the continued worldwide interest in her. Her wigs are the closest any project has gotten to the actual cut, color and shape of Diana’s hairstyles.
Morgan would rather take long detours that speculate oh-so-delicately about Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce, dialing up an avuncular side I’m not sure ever existed in the man) and his alleged affair with the much younger Penny Knatchbull (Natascha McElhone), who was his godson’s wife. Or devote an entire episode to Princess Margaret’s (Lesley Manville) ongoing pampered discontent.
Or another episode to Mohamed Al-Fayed – the Egyptian-born Anglophile attempting to buy his way into royal circles – and his son Dodi (played by Salim Daw and Khalid Abdalla, respectively) – the latter of whom Diana dated post-divorce, and who would ultimately die with her in the 1997 car accident in Paris, events which will be covered next season.
But it is also in this episode that we see Debicki make the most of the role. The queen attends a horse show sponsored by Mohamed, which means, in theory, she’s supposed to sit next to him in the stands and grant him an audience. She finds the prospect too distasteful, so Diana is sent in her stead and Debicki captures her ease with strangers, her quick laugh and the way she was able to put people at ease with a combination of informality and self-deprecation. Diana may have been deeply unhappy, but she was also wonderfully personable and her charisma was unmistakable and disarming. She’s fun. In this one moment, you get a glimpse of how that might have worked on a one-on-one basis.
Occasionally a sentiment is conveyed with some poetry. The growing chasm in the marriage between Elizabeth and Philip is captured in a scene that sees her happily playing with her corgis alone, as he stares down the hallway from afar, no interest in joining in. But too often the show is built to simply tick off the boxes – the queen’s “annus horribilis” speech; the embarrassing intercepted phone call made public between Charles and then-mistress Camilla Parker Bowles in which he joked about being her tampon; the “revenge dress"; Andrew Morton’s book on Diana and, later, her “three of us in this marriage” Panorama interview; the eventual divorce.
None of it builds to a larger thesis about these people or the institution itself. The impressively lavish settings can’t make up for the emptiness of the script. Scenes – and emotional arcs – don’t get a chance to play out, but flit from one location and set of characters to another.
Shoehorned in is a flashback to the Romanovs – when the Russian czar and his family were forsaken by their cousins in the British royal family and left to be executed in 1918 by Bolshevik revolutionaries – and it’s emblematic of who Morgan is most interested: the elite. Decades later, when meeting with Russian President Boris Yeltsin, Elizabeth scolds him about these deaths, as if she holds the moral high ground.
But Queen Elizabeth isn’t one to talk. Imagine if “The Crown” acknowledged or even contemplated the antipathy the British royal family itself has amassed over centuries – along with considerable wealth – from people across the globe who have been brutalized in the name of empire and its colonial projects.
The closest the season gets to any sort of critique about entitlement or finances is a discussion of the queen’s royal yacht Britannia, which is in need of an overhaul to the tune of 14 million pounds ($16.42 million). Prime Minister John Major (Jonny Lee Miller) suggests the queen, rather than taxpayers, bear the cost. “All my palaces were inherited, they all bear the stamp of my predecessors,” she argues back, wounded, “only Britannia have I truly been able to make my own.” To which one might be inclined to reply: “So pay for it on your own.” But Major folds like a napkin: “I understand.”
The 10-hour season feels overly long but also curious for what it leaves out. The show has never alluded to the other women with whom Charles was rumored to have affairs – he’s painted as true blue for Camilla throughout it all. Nor do we see evidence of his temper, which also has been well publicized over the years.
When the queen died two months ago, her personal fortune was estimated at half a billion dollars. As king, all of that has gone to Charles, untouched by inheritance tax. That’s because the royal family was able to negotiate this exemption for itself in 1993 – during the very period that Season 5 takes place. And yet no mention of this, either.
If the various players here weren’t members of the Windsor family, would their lives be deemed interesting enough for a TV series? One would argue no – they’re not compelling enough as characters. The ongoing fascination with “The Crown” is dependent on their position in the world.
And what is that position? Upon the queen’s death in September, there was both an outpouring of grief, but also a burst of deep-seated anger aimed in her direction and that of the monarchy itself, particularly from the Irish and those in Commonwealth nations who suffered under a history of British exploitation. The show prefers to envision the insular world of the royal family as an elaborate and gloriously photogenic backdrop for a soap opera of stiff upper lips while offering little in the way of analysis or insight.
As an ongoing project, “The Crown” argues that the royals are long due a humanizing portrait, even as it glosses over a past and present suffused with racism and classism. Focusing on their private lives is a handy way to avoid probing conversations about how this family, by its very existence, reinforces the idea that there is only one correct form of Britishness, which, among other things, resulted in the banning of ethnic minorities from office roles in the royal household, and more recently saw the king’s biracial daughter-in-law hung out to dry.
What does clinging to the monarchy – to the past, really – say about a nation’s identity? Wouldn’t it be nice if Morgan had a point of view broader and more complex, and wondered who benefits when these porcelain dolls are protected at all costs?
