Uneasy lies the head
Second season of The Crown feels as restricted as the monarch herself
The Crown Streaming now on Netflix
Thanks to the engagement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, 2017 was a gift to those who treat the British Royal Family like a particularly delicious soap opera. Netflix, of course, has the good fortune to actually be producing a soap opera on that subject.
The Crown was very much welcome in its second season, full of gorgeous vistas, enviable clothes and fabulous facial expressions. But the season also was an illustration of how a show’s rigid format can hamper its storytelling, boxing in its characters as much as their royal roles can.
Theoretically, Netflix ought to be the perfect location for a show like The Crown, in which seasons and even episodes can cover several years at a jump, roles are intended to be recast and the vista is long. Without the constraints of a network or cable season, The Crown ought to be able to vary the number of episodes in each season, and to play more dramatically with the length of each individual episode, as plenty of other Netflix shows have done, though often for worse.
But The Crown seems to be proceeding at a stately, predictable pace: 10 episodes per season, each about an hour. And in the second season, that’s simply not enough to get done everything The Crown is trying to do.
This is especially true for the plot that ought to be the spine of the season: the journey of Philip (Matt Smith), the Duke of Edinburgh, away from his wife, Queen Elizabeth II (Claire Foy), and then his discovery that he still loves her and wants to do the job of supporting her — if she’ll still have him.
The first half of this is handled well enough: Philip may be petulant about a bargain about which he ought to have been fairly clear-eyed, but his adventures at sea are the rare opportunity to see what he’s good at and why he thrived in the navy, and how badly he misses having a comparable role and mission. But though The Crown gets Philip back to England, it doesn’t quite leave time for him to make the emotional round trip.
Smith and Foy almost sell the 10th-episode turn in their relationship on pure force of acting. But The Crown undermines them by cramming Philip’s change of heart into a 10th of the season, and having it all hinge on a catty conversation with Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby) and her husband, Tony Armstrong-Jones (Matthew Goode), about Elizabeth’s political struggles in the wake of the Profumo affair.
The rest of the season suffers from the same sense of restriction. Margaret’s marriage to Tony is squeezed into three hour-long acts. The series does the same thing to Margaret here that she accuses her sister of doing, shoehorning her in around the margins, fitting in her concerns where they’re convenient to a larger narrative. That’s a shame, not least because the two marriages would have made for a richer contrast had The Crown made time to actually allow them to develop.