The Crown a new realm for Netflix
The Queen, dressed in black, protected from the drizzling rain by a large umbrella, looked up at the statue on its plinth before her; it was draped in the British flag. Around her stood flocks of dark- suited dignitaries; below, in the Mall, a massed crowd waited silently. She began a short speech in her distinctively high- pitched, clear voice, then tugged the string that would pull down the flag to reveal the statue. It began to slide, then stuck halfway. A team of helpers rushed in.
Claire Foy, playing the young Queen Elizabeth II in Netflix’s new series, The Crown, laughed. “I bet that never happens!” she said. It was a grey, damp day last December, perfectly suited to the otherwise solemn scene being filmed, in which Elizabeth was about to unveil a statue of her father, King George VI. His death three years earlier, at 56, had suddenly transformed her from a shy young wife and mother into a queen. And at this mo- ment, it becomes clear that Elizabeth — unlike her tearful mother and sister nearby — is able to conquer her swirling emotions and fully inhabit her public persona.
That conflict between private and public, between woman and queen, is the central subject of The Crown, an ambitious, sumptuous television production about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II that will have its Season 1 debut Friday, in all of Netflix’s 190 territories.
As the success of Downton Abbey displayed, there’s a global fascination with the British Royal Family and aristocracy. But where Downton Abbey was fiction, The Crown is based on fact, with a far weightier dose of history and politics, including nuanced issues of constitutional duty and complex political infighting. And that raises the stakes for both its creative team — headed by the writer Peter Morgan and the director Stephen Daldry — who must balance seriousness of intent against popular appeal, and for Netflix, which is hoping to attract a big enough global audience to justify one of its most expensive forays yet into original programming.
Morgan, the creator of the show, has extensive experience writing about Queen Elizabeth. His 2006 film The Queen won several Academy Award nominations and the best actress award went to Helen Mirren as the monarch, facing public reaction to the death of Princess Diana. Then in 2013 came his successful play, The Audience, also starring Mirren and directed by Daldry, which swoops through some 60 years of the weekly meetings between Queen Elizabeth and her prime ministers. The experience of writing The Audience gave him the idea for The Crown.
“I was really struck by the relationship between Winston Churchill, this old, frightened fading lion, and this beautiful young girl who had become queen much earlier than she hoped,” Morgan said in an interview on set last year.
“I thought, this could be a film, and I started writing it with that intention. Then I began to think, shouldn’t the story start earlier, with her wedding to Philip, and then realized: There might be a TV show in this.”
Daldry became involved in t he project early on, together with the producer Andy Harries. Their pitch: Six 10- episode seasons that would each span roughly a decade each of the queen’s reign, covering both the personal events within the royal family circle and the political events of the time.
“We wanted to do the first two seasons straight up, no pilot,” said Daldry. “It was demanding from us, but we felt confident and excited about the material and we wanted a serious commitment.”
Netflix provided t hat commitment—filming f or Season 2 is underway — and provided a budget widely reported as over US$ 100 million for Season 1. Cindy Holland, vice- president for original content at Netflix, would not confirm the figure, but said that the budget “was not outside the realm of other things we are doing or were considering at the time.”
The first s eason covers the years between the 21- year- old Elizabeth’s marriage to Philip Mountbatten ( Matt Smith) in 1947, and her later decision not to allow her sister, Princess Margaret ( Vanessa Kirby), to marry a divorced man, in 1956. Each hour- l ong episode revolves around a central storyline, even as longer- running themes — the tensions in Elizabeth and Philip’s relationship after she becomes queen; Margaret’s ill- fated affair with Group Capt. Peter Townsend; Churchill’s tenacious hold on power — are threaded throughout.
As Morgan mapped out the season, he took into account changing viewing habits, understanding the audience could binge all 10 episodes at once rather than wait a week for its appointed time. “The main thing to avoid is a rhythm of repeating the same thing. You want to change who your protagonists are, what your focus is. I don’t want anything to be predictable.”
He also tried to avoid rehashing stereotypes about particular decades.
“I’m always trying to tell stories that people don’t know,” he said, citing the toxic fog that blanketed London for five days in December 1952, killing at least 4,000 people, and that is at the heart of Episode 4. “I wanted to avoid the whole journalistic ‘ that was the year that was’ idea.”