Since 2016, we have cultivated a new national pastime: moaning about the latest series of The Crown. Every time Netflix’s royal soap opera appears on our screens, we become united in our determination to spot errors of fact and taste in Peter Morgan’s show, ranging from the trivial to the major. No wonder that Morgan, in a tetchily defensive interview with Variety last month, said ‘I just don’t like talking about it. I don’t think it’s possible to have a sensible conversation about The Crown in the United Kingdom.’
Morgan will have felt vindicated, perhaps, by the dismal response the first four episodes of the sixth series have received from television critics and royal historians alike. They were always going to be controversial, dealing as they do with the final days in the life of Princess Diana and the aftermath of her fateful car crash in Paris on 31 August 1997. Few, however, could have imagined how divisive those episodes have been.
Instead, The Crown should be seen for what it is: Dynasty, with cut-glass accents and better dresses.
The writer A.N. Wilson described the new series as ‘a rather cruel, horrible programme’ and singled out an invention of Morgan’s, in which the ghosts of Diana and Dodi return to their families, as ‘morally repellent’. The Guardian’s TV critic Lucy Mangan dismissed it as ‘plummeting into the abyss’, and wrote that the show is ‘now simply a crass, by-numbers piece of film-making, with a script that barely aspires to craft, let alone art, any more’.
The first two seasons of The Crown, which introduced Claire Foy to the world as the young Princess-turned-Queen Elizabeth, are regarded as some of the best drama of the past few years. As such it is a great surprise to see that what might have been the show’s artistic highpoint has met with such contempt. (It should be noted that its reception in France and the United States, where the royal family and Diana are regarded in a different light, has been generally kinder.)
It was always going to be a difficult task for Morgan to pull off. It was he that dramatised the events around Diana’s death in the much-acclaimed 2006 drama The Queen, which won Helen Mirren an Oscar. He also knew that, with sensitivities riding high around Princes Harry and William, the on-screen depiction of them as children was going to be controversial. But has he really made such a right royal mess of it as the critics have suggested?
Certainly, The Crown is not as good as it used to be. Such delicately written and beautifully acted scenes as season one’s probing conversations between John Lithgow’s Winston Churchill and Stephen Dillane’s Graham Sutherland in the episode ‘Assassins’ have been absent for several series now. They have been replaced by increasingly on-the-nose dialogue that feels, as Mangan astutely notes, as if ‘it is the very definition of typing-not-writing.’
The show’s fascinating side-stories that used to allow for brilliant character actors like John Heffernan and Samuel West to come and steal scenes have been pared back. In their place we have The Diana Show, complete with Mohamed al Fayed as a scheming pantomime baddie. (That characterisation, at least, should go down well in Buckingham Palace, where the ‘Phoney Pharaoh’s’ name is mud.)
Yet I have difficulty joining the show’s most vociferous critics. For one thing, it remains elegantly mounted prestige television, with some truly excellent performances: Elizabeth Debicki is so convincing, and affecting, as Diana that it seems impossible that she will not walk away with every award imaginable for her work here. For another, despite the clunkiness of some of Morgan’s writing, it is impossible to imagine how another screenwriter might have dealt with the material in a better way.
The treatment of Diana’s death – not depicting the car crash onscreen, muting the dialogue in the scenes where her family are informed – is notably tactful, rather than prurient. Episode four, ‘Aftermath’, really does pack an emotional punch – even if some of the details have been fictionalised. Importantly, the show has never pretended to be a factual documentary, but instead should be regarded as an imaginative work – a Game of Thrones based on real-life characters.
It is easy to see why it has caused such offence, and why Prince Harry – hitherto the only major royal to have confessed to watching the show – will be giving this instalment a miss. But to make the mistake of taking it so seriously elevates it to a level that it neither deserves nor has aspired to. Instead, The Crown should be seen for what it is: Dynasty, with cut-glass accents and better dresses. That, surely, is the way to enjoy it, rather than castigate it.
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