‘THE CROWN’ STILL RULES, MAY SHIFT PUBLIC PERCEPTION
Season 5 of the Netflix drama finds the characters spiralling into chaos
Early in the first season of Netflix’s The Crown, Queen Elizabeth II’s grandmother advises the newly anointed 25-yearold royal in a moment of uncertainty to remember that the monarchy answers not to the British public, but to a higher power.
Elizabeth, inscrutable even in her younger years, gives her a long look.
If it was wishful thinking in Season 1, it’s a joke by Season 5. The new season, which is out now, finds the royal family in 1991, in the thick of one of the ugliest periods of its recent history; almost everyone is up to no good.
But in a major feat for creator-writer Peter Morgan and the third iteration of the show’s cast — keeping the tradition of replacing actors every two seasons as the characters age — The Crown remains as sumptuous and compulsively watchable as ever. As the story creeps ever closer toward current events, however, storylines tread on recent-enough ground (read: the tabloid spectacle of Charles and Diana’s divorce) to potentially rankle some who lived through the original scandals.
DAILY LIVES
As Netflix tells it, the royal family’s hobbies in the 1990s included sailing, carriage driving, watching horse races, having affairs, grousing about one another and asking for favours from a Britain with which they share an increasingly strained relationship.
Elizabeth (Imelda Staunton), now in her 60s, pesters one prime minister and then another about a £15 million (Dh65 million) repair job for her royal yacht. Her husband, Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce), spends conspicuous amounts of time aboard private jets with the wife of one of Prince Charles’s friends. Charles (Dominic West) and Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) squabble on vacations and sulk in separate castles while Charles carries on his years-long extramarital relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles (Olivia Williams) and Diana airs the dirty laundry to anyone who will listen.
Virtually every marriage in the family that’s still standing is miserable, and it is Prime Minister John Major who gives the season its thesis early on when he meets the royal clan in all its sprawling, decadent chaos.
“The House of Windsor should be binding the nation together. Setting an example of idealised family life,” he remarks to his wife as they retire to their bedroom. “Instead, the senior royals seem dangerously deluded and out of touch. The junior royals, feckless, entitled and lost.”
And yet. As always with The Crown, the strokes of genius lie in the selection of anecdotes, and the new season finds compelling stories to tell even about characters it has soured on.
One episode takes a fascinating detour into Philip’s pivotal participation in a 1993 effort to confirm the identities of bodies suspected to be those of the murdered Russian Romanov family. (As a descendant of the Romanovs, Philip gave a DNA sample that proved the link.)
Diana’s brief postCharles relationship with a British-Pakistani cardiac surgeon earns its short, sweet arc. And Princess Margaret — imbued with equal parts whimsy and dignity by the wonderful Lesley Manville — anchors a masterful episode about love lost and changing social mores: She shares a tender reunion with Peter Townsend, the royal equerry she was engaged to decades before but was forbidden by Elizabeth from marrying because he was divorced.
LOVE FOR THE ROYALS
Curiously, while the show seems to have to dig deep sometimes to find affection for its characters, it seems to have the easiest time with Charles. Conveniently for the real-life king, who awaits coronation to officially ascend to the throne, the show’s depiction of the dissolution of his marriage to Diana presents a challenge to the version of events that has calcified into the American collective memory over the past three decades. Season 4 reinforced that version: Diana’s struggles with depression and selfharming behaviours were portrayed as outgrowths of the royal family’s chilly demeanour and tacit approval of her husband’s infidelity.
But Season 5 presents a reversal. Charles? Less evil than you think, it seems to say. Diana? Kind of a little twerp, now and again.