The Crown Season 2
Ihave to confess, I wasn’t the biggest fan of The Crown when the first season arrived last year. It felt to me like a rather indulgent, over-long and not particularly illuminating attempt to show what it might have been like for Elizabeth Windsor to become the Queen and deal with the men in her life, from Prime Minister Winston Churchill to her husband Philip. But what the show did have was a spectacular performance by Claire Foy as HRH, and a pretty damn great one from Matt Smith as The Duke Of Edinburgh, too. Now that I’ve seen most of season two, it feels like the whole massive and hugely expensive enterprise has stepped up a level. Once you get over the fact that writer Peter Morgan couldn’t possibly know what actually went on behind closed doors when Elizabeth and Philip were having marriage issues, for example, and you just go with the flow, the series is full of riveting set-pieces and truly fascinating threads. Elizabeth’s sister Margaret (Vanessa Kirby) steals the show as ever, but the episode in which she meets her future husband, the intoxicatingly freewheeling photographer Anthony Armstrongjones (Matthew Goode), is particularly stunning. As is the depiction of the Queen’s meeting and burgeoning friendship with First Lady Jackie Kennedy (Jodi Balfour), herself pretty much as close to royalty as an American will ever get (apart from Meghan Markle, obvs). Above all, this second run grapples with much more daring ideas: the former King Edward VIII’S Nazi flirtations, Prince Philip’s unpleasant treatment of Charles and his Queen, and the sense that the Queen must have had a rather compromised emotional life, prioritising the idea of duty above all else . We’re not asked to pity her, though, just to understand her.