THE CROWN RETURNS
As The Crown hits Netflix for series three, Boyd Hilton takes a look at why it’s so special…
The Crown is so vital to Netflix, it arrives on a different day to all their other shows. As subscribers to the streaming service will know – all 150million of them – big new Netflix original drama series routinely drop on Fridays, but the hugely anticipated season three of this royal family saga will drop in full next Sunday, 17 November, as if to underline how important this ultra-prestigious project is. The release day is just one of many unique elements. It also happens to be one of the most expensive series in TV history, with a reported budget of around £130million per season. And then there’s the little matter of the entire cast changing every couple of seasons as the story of HRH and her family gallops forward in time. So, out goes Claire Foy as Elizabeth II, and in comes the great Olivia Colman, no less. Yet this super-lavish undertaking, which is set to play out over six series and 60 episodes, had humble beginnings…
MODEST ORIGINS
The show’s creator Peter Morgan is something of a specialist in turning big historical moments and real-life stories into gripping drama, and ones involving the royal family in particular. He wrote the 2006 film The Queen, with Helen Mirren as HRH, focusing on the controversial period after the death of Princess Diana, when the royals were accused of being emotionally distant and were stunned by the British public’s outpouring of grief. Then, in 2013, Morgan wrote a stage play called The Audience, again starring Mirren as the Queen, focusing this time on her weekly meetings with her prime ministers, from her coronation in 1952 to the present day. Despite Mirren’s star power, the play was a modest affair, set in one room in Buckingham Palace where the Queen holds her weekly audiences. But it was a big hit in the West End and Broadway, and the writer and producers knew it could make for the basis of a much bigger project.
Huge ambitions
In contrast to the original play, the TV series was a massive undertaking from the start. The Crown set out to tell not only the story of the Queen’s interactions with her prime ministers – still a crucial element of the show in this third season – but to explore the country itself. As the show’s lead director and producer Stephen Daldry, who also worked on the play, puts it, “It’s not just the story of the royal family. It’s the story of who we are and why we’re here and what we dream of. It’s the story of a nation.” So, despite having all the trappings of a classic BBC Sunday night drama – which is perhaps why Netflix unleashes it on a Sunday – the BBC could never match the scope and ambition of what Netflix wanted to do with this series.
This is a project that dares to think big. Very big. The series is built around a life-size replica of Buckingham Palace, and major recreations of key events involve thousands of extras, around 7,000 costumes, and nearly as many wigs. In the new season, which covers the mid-1960s through to the Queen’s silver jubilee in 1977, there’s an episode that depicts the Aberfan disaster of 1966, when an entire Welsh mining village was devastated by a huge landslide, and it’s recreated on an extraordinary scale, feeling more authentic than any Hollywood disaster movie.
Rolls-royce casting
The producers decided from the start that rather than try to age the original actors portraying the iconic main roles of the Queen and her family, using make-up or CGI, they would instead re-cast the show every other season. So, in this new run, as well as Olivia Colman doing an instantly perfect job as the Queen, we get Tobias Menzies (Outlander, Game Of Thrones) instead of Matt Smith as the tightly wound-up Prince Philip; Helena Bonham Carter as a riotously fun-loving Princess Margaret, and Josh O’connor (The Durrells) as Prince Charles, now a sensitive Cambridge University student forced by
Mummy and Daddy to get to know the Welsh, bearing in mind he is also Prince of Wales. There are also plum roles for Charles Dance as Lord Mountbatten, who at one point gets embroiled in a mindboggling establishment plot to topple the then-prime minister Harold Wilson (Jason Watkins), and Emerald Fennell (Killing Eve season 2’s showrunner) as Camilla, future paramour of Charles. And, in season four, the thrilling casting will continue when we get to see Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher.
Fearless storytelling
In the end, what makes The Crown so special isn’t its starstudded cast, expensive sets or incredible recreations of big occasions, it’s the storytelling. This is, after all, a depiction of the royal family that doesn’t flinch from showing them as flawed human beings with issues like the rest of us. It’s just that their issues also affect the country and sometimes the world. The tone was set in the very first episode, when Elizabeth’s father King George VI used the word “c**t”, and it hasn’t let up from there. In the third season, we see just how coldly Charles was treated by his parents, who felt he needed toughening up, while Philip seems way more moved by the moon landing than he does by the arrival from her home in Greece of his elderly mother, whose existence he barely acknowledges. Season three also has Russian spies, a disastrous decision to let the BBC make a documentary about life in the palace, Princess Margaret’s affair with a gardening guru, and the Queen and Prince Philip trying to revive their love life. It all adds up to one of the most intriguing and revelatory TV dramas of our time. And we’re only halfway through… n
The Crown season 3 arrives Sunday 17 November on Netflix