Netflix's The Crown Is Historical Buzzkill
I still love it tho
Last week, Kate Middleton’s disappearing act filled all my waking thoughts. I was convinced she was either in a coma or Gone Girling.1
When the news dropped last Friday that Princess Kate has cancer, taking the wind out of the internet’s BBL jokes, I found myself still wanting to speculate wildly. Though not creatively — somehow all my theories were predicated on the movies of the moment. She and Charles both get cancer at the same time? Camilla is obviously pulling a Saltburn taking every family member out one-by-one until she can dance around naked in Buckingham Palace.
When it comes to the royal family, no tale seems too tall. It’s a problem the crown casts on itself, with its otherworldly divinity. The shadows blanketing a family with bad teeth and mouthy accents make the inner workings of their lives seem sparkly and irresistible, even if they’re really quite boring. To be a lightning rod for the imagination of a vulgar, hungry public is both a duty and a curse for the royals.
Netflix’s The Crown has always approached both edges of this sword with a sweeping Bird’s Eye view, one I decided to cling to as my trove of TikTok conspiracies turned to bitter ash. The show’s final season aired last fall/winter but I stalled on finishing it, largely because I can’t really get behind Imelda Staunton as the Queen — she’s Professor Umbridge, I’m sorry! But it felt like divine intervention that those episodes were left waiting for me, a forgotten Christmas present, as the current Princess of Wales went AWOL.
Ever since I watched Clare Foy put on that gaudy gold and maroon hat in season one, I’ve consumed The Crown with a kind of blind faith in its educational value. I left every episode as if my Royal Studies 101 professor could give me a pop quiz I’d pass with flying colors. Write you a DBQ on how King Philip should have never sent that poor boy to boarding school in Scotland? Coming right up! The show has always masterfully balanced the gossip-y flair of the royal family with pivotal political events, embedding them with a measured blend of obscure historical details and fictional interpersonal relationships/character arcs, all painted together with such delicate strokes that you come away from it confident you now know what really happened — a dangerous illusion.
It’s also easier for this to be my experience with the show because I came into it with a blank slate. Before Matt Smith played him I couldn’t even tell you the name of Liz’s husband let alone that he was her cousin and also maybe related to Nazis?? My previous relationship to the British royals could be distilled into a tour of Buckingham Palace in which I took illegal iPhone pictures during my study abroad trip to London. But after hours of watching these funny-talking Brits in stuffy cardigans bicker in hushed tones, I feel I have a grasp on a wide span of history — a beautiful feat of storytelling you could really only achieve in the television format or a 17 hour Ken Burns documentary.
In the earlier seasons, I viewed the tone of The Crown as refined and even-keeled, interested not in the salacious headlines about the royal family but in politely dissecting their hearts and minds and pressing their existence up against history. The show was always finding new avenues to approach familiar figures and stories. We’re introduced to Princess Diana through her sister. We first encounter the infamous Fayeds through Sydney Johnson, personal valet to ex-king Edward VIII. Even the current Princess of Wales we meet through her mother. With these unexpected entry points, The Crown presents us with an opportunity to wipe clean our perceptions and expectations of these real-life people and nuzzle up next to them alongside a roaring fireplace in Balmoral Castle. But as the series encroached on territory I was already familiar with, I realized this empathy softens some edges that should have remained sharp.
Across all seasons, I had occasionally rebuffed the show for sympathizing too closely with the likes of Margaret Thatcher or the putrid, adulturing now-King Charles and his racist narcissist father, the Duke of Edinburgh. The show laid bare many of the royal men’s most abhorrent acts, from cheating to hot-headed tyrades directed at the poor women who married them. But even setting aside the fact that casting both Josh O’Connor and Dominic West as Charles and Matt Smith and Tobias Menzies as Philip was GENEROUS beyond belief to both of those real life uggos, The Crown has a way of nudging the viewer to ease up on them. It shows us Charles’ tough time at boarding school or a string of Philip’s existential crises as if to say, It’s not really their fault. They’re a part of an oppressive system that squashes all their individuality, of course they’re acting out. Blame the crown. But then what use would it be blaming an inanimate object? And thus our pitchforks are blunted, our rage immobilized. Everyone is a villain and no one is.
This presents a problem for victims, from Princess Diana to the colonies.
The show projects a morally neutral cloud of gray that in previous seasons seemed trustworthy, but in the final season, felt frustrating, nearly malignant. The Crown has always positioned itself as the adult in the room, an antidote to the salacious, unwieldy tabloids. But being dispassionate doesn’t make you right. We see it in politics, in classroom debates, in fights in the comment section of an Instagram post. The louder, more emotional voices are dismissed as radical and the ones dismissive of those voices are perceived as mature, neutral, and therefore triumphant. We can see how this drips into Hollywood, and our obsession with “true stories.”
I’ve written before about how you can glimpse what kind of motive or angle TV creators might be writing from when they depict real life people. You can look at what gets left out, who gets cast, what aspects of the characters’ inner selves are emphasized through fictional dialogue, scenes from inside living rooms and kitchens that surely couldn’t have been true retellings. And these days, it’s rare that we’re interested in watching the “real life” story of someone who was good. We want to know the inner lives of serial killers, scam artists, and of course rich, powerful families who are destroying the world. And when telling those types of stories, an amoral lens is attractive, if not necessary. There’s no point in making a movie or TV show about someone if you are not going to sink into what makes them who they are, and in order to effectively do that, most writers at the very least put their personal judgment on hold.
It is possible to tell a story about real-life villains not at the expense of their victims. Dopesick didn’t exactly make you empathize with The Sacklers. I didn’t come away from The Dropout thinking that Elizabeth Holmes deserves justice. But for the most part, it’s not fun to watch a show that hits you over the head with “these people are bad and here’s why you shouldn’t like them.” As a viewer, I am always in need of nuance. I want to feel conflicted, challenged, like a priest seeking out contradictions to his faith only to strengthen it. And I also understand that depicting a bad person as a person in a television show or movie doesn’t mean the creators are endorsing their behavior. There’s certainly an epidemic of media illiteracy, if the internet is any indication. Folks complained that Oppenheimer hardly showed the impact of the atomic bomb, not understanding that was the point. This was Oppenheimer’s perspective — how little the movie focused on the victims of Hiroshima is a statement on how little that man considered it. And the more I look at The Crown through this lens, the more I think it took a very similar approach.
Looking at the plodding tone of The Crown, you start to see that all of these stories are told from the Queen’s perspective. The show doesn’t always depict her in a good light: It raises questions about her maternal instincts, her lack of empathy or true understanding of the British people. But all of these are presented not as character flaws but as pillars of the job itself. Over and over again, the show tells us that the crown is a symbol, a fixed object, and the person who wears it must settle into that role as well, not acting as a mother or daughter or sister would but as a sovereign would. Many would find the job hollow, unsatisfying, but not Lilibet. The detachment of the role suits her. She is THE adult-in-the-room in any argument, looking at almost everything with a calm detachment and a waning curiosity. And so the show does the same. This lens often robs the viewer of vitriol and in many cases, undercuts some real life pursuits of justice.
For me, this was all good and fine when it was in the distant past, telling tales about people I didn’t know from Adam and had no individual attachment to. But The Crown began to feel more like a facade of respectability as it walked us through perhaps the darkest moment for the royals in recent memory: the death of Princess Diana.
Now, it’s not that I believe the House of Windsor literally killed Diana. But if someone told me that the Queen herself cut the breaks on the car that drove Princess Di and her boyfriend at the time, Dodi Fayed, through that Parisian tunnel in 1997, I wouldn’t immediately dismiss it as preposterous. The evidence might not be there and don’t ask me to trudge through all of that — what am I? A reporter? But I know I’m not alone in thinking that the demons the royal family brought into Diana Spencer’s life got her killed. This is a narrative that it seems The Crown wanted to clarify, if not entirely rebut in a fashion far more brazen than its usual removed storytelling.
The emotional upheavals Diana went through at the hand of a husband who loved someone else and resented her for existing felt like a distant fever dream watching Diana in her final days on The Crown, newly divorced, hanging out on a rich Egyptian’s yacht. She’s depicted as lost, addicted to chaos — all remnants of the trauma she experienced while married to a future king, but the show doesn’t spend much time connecting those dots. Instead, it sends Diana on a dangerous path driven by a different wealthy family. Despite a few sweet scenes between Diana and Dodi in a Ritz hotel room — conversations we’ll never hear the true versions of — viewers should largely come away from the first half of The Crown’s final season blaming Diana’s death entirely on the Fayeds.
She was supposed to fly back from vacation to London on a commercial flight, but wanting to impress his father, Dodi convinces Diana to fly back on his private jet, making a stop in Paris where he plans to buy her an engagement ring and propose. The paparazzi are coming at them in swarms, not just because of Diana’s fame but because of her situationship with Dodi, whose former fiance sued him over dumping her for the ex-princess and whose father is seeking British citizenship, something a connection with the royal family could speed along. Diana, exhausted by the unwanted attention and unnecessary pit stop, could have just hidden away in Dodi’s flat, but he insists they go to dinner, so he can propose. It’s his driver who gets drunk at the hotel bar waiting for them and it’s Diana who decides she’d rather sleep back in Dodi’s flat than at a hotel room in the Ritz. No cut breaks. No royal scheming. They weren’t even supposed to be in Paris.
Watching this sequence of events unfold, I began to feel even more devastated. Princess Di’s death has always been tragic but there was some strange solace in feeling like it was inevitable. That she couldn’t survive as the rallying cry against the royals. She was too good, too pure for that institution. I realized it wasn’t that I was sure the Windsor family had killed her but I was sure that it would have even if she survived that car crash.
But The Crown made it seem wholly avoidable. If she had insisted on flying straight home, if Dodi’s father hadn’t been so insistent his son lock down their relationship for his own selfish gain, if she had never met the Fayeds, Diana would have been back in London, perhaps she and Charles would’ve patched things up enough to be civil co-parents and she would have focused her attentions on being a mom. All of this seemed possible in The Crown’s palace, where Queen Elizabeth might not be warm exactly, but she is largely passive if not a little sympathetic to Diana, certainly not plotting her death. And Charles might break out in fits of childish rage before truly admitting his own wrongs, but ultimately he loved Diana in his own way and, more importantly, loved his sons. We’re reminded of this as a very dead Diana appears before both of them, not haunting them like an angry ghost, as she should have been, but assuaging their guilt as a guiding spirit.
She even mimics Andrew Scott’s final words in Fleabag, shooting Charles a loving “that’ll pass” as he expresses his regret.
And then the show moves on, Diana’s presence not even thick enough to become another plot point. It’s a reminder that this isn’t her story. It’s not Mohamad Al-Fayed’s story. It’s not Prince Charles or Prince Williams’ story. It’s Elizabeth’s. And this is where the show goes beyond just an amoral perspective on a controversial figure. Because when you get to the final episode, watching three different versions of Queen Elizabeth II stare down the barrel of a grand casket she will one day lie in, it’s clear that The Crown isn’t just a detached story. It’s a thesis statement: This woman is the only person for the job, and she’s held onto it longer than perhaps any person on earth has held onto a top job because without her Corgi-loving, bland disposition, the monarchy crumbles.
It’s a lackluster conclusion, that a sprawling epic about the most well-known family in the West with its bloody handprints all across the world is boiled down to a story about a woman who was good at her job. But it also explains all the places the show thrives, and all the places it falls short.
This is a thesis that doesn’t concern itself with righteous arguments about whether the monarchy should crumble, which is why the show can mercilessly take apart the condemnations piece by piece until they don’t really make sense anymore, taking the wind out of accusations about calculated assassination attempts and even wild speculating about Kate Middleton’s buttocks surgery. Watching the final scenes of the finale, I realized The Crown’s ability to stay above the fray of gossip and scandal wasn’t a product of maturity or neutrality but inevitability. The monarchy will fall. It won’t exist without Elizabeth. The series, it seems, knew this from the beginning. Through six seasons, it was concerned only with telling us why.
B Plots
Question: What’s your favorite TV scandal?
Mallika: It seems so silly that the first thing that comes to my mind is when Gossip Girl caught Serena buying a pregnancy test that turned out to be for Blair, but there you have it. There are soooo many GG scandals — Dan’s boinking his teacher, Nate’s girlfriend hooking up with her step son, Ivy turning out to be The Talented Mr. Ripley — but there is something so pure about a pregnancy fake out (second example: Blair thinking Dorota’s test is Eleanor’s on Thanksgiving). The icing on the cake? Blair refuses to take the test after all that because she doesn’t want to know whether she’s actually expecting. As someone who just took that online test to identify how we self-sabotage and got a bit-too-high score for “avoidance,” I get that. We love a delulu queen!
Rachel: Maybe it’s just because of the title but I distantly remember Scandal having some jaw-dropping murder plots. If you see Cyrus Beene gardening, you know shit has already hit the fan. IYKYK. And while we’re in Shondaland, that Derek Shepherd had a wife will always be top tier drama. “You must be the woman who’s been screwing my husband.” - Addison Montgomery, ladies and gents. ADDISON MONTGOMERY HE met her in the summer she, was cutting up a very dead bodyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. Ugh, we used to be a proper country.
C Plots
If you are in line to write a sitcom about friendship and dating in New York since it’s now been as many years since Girls premiered as it was since Sex and the City premiered when Girls premiered and blah blah blah… you can step out of line because Rachel Sennott has taken up the mantel. The Bottoms comedy queen has a pilot that’s already been picked up by HBO about a “codependent friend group” that reunites and navigates how time apart, ambition and new friendships have changed them. This announcement also comes as Derry Girls’ Nicola Coughlan and It’s a Sin’s Lydia West have received high praise from The Guardian for their new Channel 4 comedy Big Mood: “Big Mood is the first realistic and humorous portrayal of millennial life we’ve had in a while.” Pens down, ladies! The Lena Dunham void has been filled. Plus, we told y’all it was our Irish queen’s YEAR.
Speaking of the Irish, this is for the girlies who loved watching Paul Mescal instruct the Chicken Shop girl on how to split the G (this sounds dirty but it’s not… or is it): Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight is making a series about the founders of Guinness. According to Deadline, The House of Guinness will look at the Guinness family dynasty in Dublin, made up of four children grappling with how to take over after their father, the patriarch of the company, dies. Succession with Irish accents and those cute newsboy caps? Sign us up!
And since we’re talking about The Crown this week… Caitlyn Jenner and Lamar Odom are taking a page out of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s book of what to do when you are booted out of the most powerful family in the world… make a podcast of course! About sports?? How… pedestrian. We don’t think Barack Obama is funding this one.
Many are calling Pedro Pascal the people’s princess and now it’s because he too has had his life saved by Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The residuals from Pascal’s one-episode arc on season 4 (which we briefly discussed a few weeks ago) apparently saved him from homelessness. “It was literally the reason I was able to not give up.” Girl, same.
Euphoria will reportedly be back filming in two months! And Zendaya, Jacob Elordi and Sydney Sweeney were spotted pouring buckets of glitter eye shadow into the harbor in protest. Suck it up sweetie, Mama Nika King needs you! In actual news, Sam Levinson’s initial script for the new season apparently included Rue working as a private detective, but it was obviously scrapped by HBO. Babe… let’s take a page out of Nic Pizzolatto’s book and let a woman who is good at her job take over. Although we would noooot be mad about a Rue/Veronica Mars crossover episode.
At one point, after discovering she and King Charles were supposedly discharged from the hospital on the same day, I was going around pitching fanfiction to my friends about a Poor Things-esque brain swap. Who was to say Charles didn’t want a second shot at youth and the poor Princess of Wales wasn’t walking around with baby king brain?