‘The Crown’ shifts focus away from the queen
We are, undoubtedly, living through a Dianassance. Twentyfive years after Princess Diana’s tragic death, audiences are now able to pick from a veritable menu of film, TV, stage and even podcast adaptations that tell the story of her short life. Rocketing to the top of the watchlist this week is a riveting fifth season of “The Crown,” which hits Netflix on Wednesday, Nov. 9.
This season unfolds throughout the 1990s, making it a landmark for viewers like me. For the first time, I’m seeing “The Crown” dramatize events that I am actually old enough to remember as an elder Millennial.
Before the series premiered in 2016, Netflix made the smart decision to title it “The Crown,” not “The Queen” (plus, the latter title was already taken by the excellent 2006 Helen Mirren film). It has always been a show about a system — “The Firm,” as Meghan Markle called it in her infamous 2021 interview with Oprah — not one woman alone. This season, series creator Peter Morgan shifts the lens increasingly away from Queen Elizabeth II (played wonderfully by Imelda Staunton, known for playing the villain Dolores Umbridge in the “Harry Potter” franchise) and positions Diana as the beating heart in this era of the monarchy.
The twin specters of grief and dread loom over the entire season. I felt my breath catch with emotion when I caught the first glimpse of Elizabeth Debicki as a still-hopeful, stillmarried Diana in the season five premiere.
These days, I am no royalist — I felt no sadness when I read the news that Queen Elizabeth II died on Sept. 8 at age 96 — but I grew up a ’90s girl, and Diana is inextricably linked to my youth. In an autobiography I had to write in 1997 for my seventh-grade English class, the “current event” I included was a newspaper clipping of Diana’s death after that awful Paris car crash. As a young child, the first piece of international mail I ever touched was a creamy envelope postmarked from Diana’s office, when my big sister received an actual reply to her fan letter, penned kindly by one of the princess’ ladies-inwaiting.
As I’ve seen over five seasons of “The Crown,” the royal fami
ly (at least, the loosely fictionalized version depicted here) chews its people up and spits them out. That callous disregard of kin in season five isn’t limited to Diana.
At times, I caught myself feeling empathy for the show’s progressively frustrated Prince Charles — or rather, the dramatized character that a brilliant Dominic West brought to life with surprising effect, even if he is far too handsome for the role. Here is a man itching to lead, or at least assert his own public identity, forced to live under the thumb of a mother and sovereign who all but controls his sex life and marital affairs.
One episode, titled “Annus Horribilis” (Queen Elizabeth’s sobriquet for the year 1992), movingly follows the queen’s aging sister, Princess Margaret (Lesley Manville, “Phantom Thread”), as she revisits her cruelly quashed youthful romance with her father’s equerry Peter Townsend (two-time James Bond Timothy Dalton) and mourns for a lifelong love that never flourished.
Another episode underscores the downright cold-blooded refusal by Elizabeth’s grandparents, King George V and Queen Mary, to rescue the king’s first cousin, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, and the Romanov family from certain, violent deaths during the Bolshevik Revolution.
All the while, the season ticks forward, nearing the year of Diana’s own death.
Season five ends before that fateful night in Paris, but these 10 episodes lay the groundwork, devoting hours to introducing not only Diana’s future lover Dodi Al-Fayed (a softspoken, docile Khalid Abdalla) but also his strong-willed billionaire father, Mohamed AlFayed (Salim Daw), who buys shamefully into the myths of white supremacy and neocolonial assimilation.
With the queen’s recent death, much ado has been made over the timing of this season’s release. But the key words to remember here are “fictionalized” and “dramatized.” I, for one, know not to take “The Crown” as wholesale, historical truth, and I sincerely doubt fellow fans are, either. As an adult, I would never kid myself into thinking that I really knew Princess Diana or Queen Elizabeth, nor would I lionize either woman today. In Diana’s case, yes, she was beautiful, stylish and extremely generous in spirit, but she was also flawed like the rest of us.
Instead, I see “The Crown” serving as a narrative mirror of today’s world, teasing out story lines with exceptional actors and a dash of history to ask us to consider the pitfalls of celebrity, aging, toxic family dynamics and changing times — all over a pipinghot cup of very strong tea.