A Crown we’re better of f without

I’ve been meaning to write about Netflix’s hit drama series The Crown, released all at once as a 10-episode season last month. I don’t know if I need to invent some fake year-end pretext for this. If it will make the editors happy, we can say that this is a piece about my worst disappointment of 2016 as an arts consumer.

As everybody knows, and if you don’t believe me just wait 20 minutes for the next thinkpiece about it, television and movies are gradually converging in the world of online media platforms. TV “seasons” are being handled as objects unto themselves, dumped onto the web for binge-watching purposes and for those series, there is no analogue of a traditional television rating, no opportunity or need for a program to build an audience slowly. TV shows are increasingly judged by the amount of excitement they can stir up in advance of their “opening night”, the way movies have been for decades.

The Crown was a big success in this regard. Everyone knew it would look rapturous in high-definition, which it does, and the cast is an anglophile’s dream, with the weird wrinkle of John Lithgow being cast as Churchill. Netflix must have sold a great many new subscriptions on the back of the anticipation for the show. The reviews from those who watched the whole thing have almost been beside the point; indeed, they seem to be consciously given in that spirit.

For viewers who like their costume and-castle porno to also work as drama, the selling point for The Crown was its writer, Peter Morgan. Morgan wrote the 2006 film, The Queen, which pulled off a remarkable trick. The Queen was a story about the royal family that made heavy use of sheer invention and inferred conversations but it captured the genuine flavour of a historical event successfully, and even the real Queen gave Helen Mirren’s performance a quasi-official endorsement.

Partly this was attributable to Mirren hitting the role out of the frickin’ park. But partly it is because Morgan understands the personality and thinking of the Queen well enough not only to make her onscreen character sympathetic, but to flatter. Putting a speech about duty and sacrifice in the mouth of Michael Sheen’s Tony Blair was a smart move, if Morgan wanted to earn a sort of informal licence to make highly imaginative fiction about the royals.

That is what he seems to have gotten. But a licence is always capable of abuse in the wrong hands. The problem with The Crown is not with Claire Foy’s version of the Queen, who is, by design, an attractive nullity at the centre of the show’s events. It is that Morgan’s daring inventions have become downright ridiculous.

Lithgow’s postwar Churchill is a fragile, pretentious ruin of a man a fair-enough choice, perhaps. Less easy to justify is Morgan’s Duke of Windsor, played by professional Windsor imitator Alex Jennings, who becomes a confidant of the Queen and occasionally acts on her behalf as a sort of secret agent. If you’ll believe that you’ll buy anything, and you had better be ready to. Jeremy Northam is dragged in to play Anthony Eden, and is mostly seen suffering and taking injections; anyone who does not know the actual history will think the character is meant to be a junkie. The dates and sequences of real events are molested with impunity. The drama surrounding Princess Margaret’s romance with Group Captain Peter Townsend is given a bewildering constitutional spin that involves the Queen somehow being misled about the Royal Marriages Act of 1772.

Above the whole mess hovers Matt Smith’s Prince Philip, who is just about the most unpleasant creature anybody has ever pointed a camera at. The real Duke of Edinburgh is known to have had possible regrets about his curtailed naval career, along with brief moments of remorse about submerging the name of his own royal house in the Windsor corporate identity. Following these tiny hints, Morgan makes him into a sullen, tantrum-throwing monstercretin. Smith’s gigantic, horrible head does not help: at times one feels fear for the physical safety of Miss Foy.

The historical thesis here seems to be that Philip was late to realize that in marrying the Princess Elizabeth, he had been one of the luckiest individuals on Earth. I suppose it is possible that Morgan has sources, or other reasons, for this supposition: maybe the real Philip does mope and gripe and shout endlessly when no one is watching. But he has given the opposite impression, and very strongly, for his whole long life as the consort. Where Morgan formerly seemed to be handling history with ingenuity and insight, he has crossed over into fantasyland: he is now just toying carelessly with plasticine versions of real people. Yuk. Claire Foy in a scene from The Crown, Season 1 on Netflix.