At the beginning of Season 5 of The Crown—before we’re even introduced to the new lineup of top-tier British acting talent playing the royals this time around—we’re swept all the way back to 1954, with Claire Foy’s Queen Elizabeth II launching the Royal Yacht Britannia. “I hope that this brand-new vessel will prove to be dependable and constant, and capable of weathering any storm,” she says. Fast-forward to four decades later, and we meet Imelda Staunton’s queen fretting over her ageing body, growing increasingly distant from Prince Philip, and in a state of abject confusion over the failing marriages of her children. When it’s suggested that the now shabby and outdated Britannia be decommissioned, the queen argues forcefully for it to get a new lease of life, even going so far as to petition the government to pay for its refurbishment. As metaphors go, it’s about as subtle as a brick through a window.
That’s by no means the last clunky metaphor across the show’s somewhat uneven fifth season, but you have to have some sympathy for the show’s creator, Peter Morgan. Looking back at the period the season is covering—roughly 1992 to 1997, one of the most fractured moments in the history of the Windsors—it’s not hard to see why the ribboning together of these various narrative strands might end up a little disjointed. We watch the queen’s “annus horribilis,” when three of her children sought divorces in the space of 12 months and a fire destroyed swathes of Windsor Castle. We see Charles meet with then-prime minister John Major, and insinuate that it may be time for the queen to abdicate and be replaced by her more forward-looking son. And we see, of course, the roiling animosity between Diana and Charles—the infamous “War of the Waleses”—culminating in the bombshell Panorama interview she gave to the now-disgraced journalist Martin Bashir, that ultimately led to the queen granting the couple permission to divorce. While Morgan may be lightly exaggerating just how dire the circumstances were, the season’s rhythm is only really as erratic and dysfunctional as the royal family was itself.
However, the season’s pacing and sense of cohesion aren’t always helped by Morgan’s penchant for taking us on historical diversions, seemingly to offer some kind of parallel with the present-day goings-on. An episode that explores the link between the Romanovs and the Windsors, centred around Boris Yeltsin’s visit to the U.K.—but featuring flashbacks to the murder of the tsar and tsarina in early Soviet Russia—is, well, a little boring. On the other hand, one of the season’s most effective tangents is an episode dedicated to the rise of Mohamed Al Fayed—including his stranger-than-fiction purchase of the Villa Windsor in Paris, the former home of the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson, as well as his hiring of the late duke’s Barbadian butler—exploring how this obsession with earning the favour of the British royals would end in tragedy.
It’s also not helped by the biggest shadow that looms over the season: namely, the outsize public discourse it has already generated (notably, by those who hadn’t actually seen it). There have been forceful rebuttals of the show’s presentation of events by a handful of those depicted within it, including former prime ministers John Major and Tony Blair, as well as an outcry from British royalists (and the typically royal-friendly British tabloid media) over its airing so soon after the queen’s death. Much of the clamour has also targeted the show’s perceived disrespect to the living members of the royal family, specifically with the recreation of Diana’s Panorama interview and scenes depicting her with William and Harry as children. (Reports that Charles is unhappy with the show feel particularly amusing given the casting of Dominic West to play him this season; if anything, he should probably be flattered.)
It’s clear upon watching the episodes, though, that many of these concerns have been blown way out of proportion. West presents Charles with a few more nuanced shades than his predecessors, while Morgan’s script emphasises his relative progressivism within the family and his establishment of The Prince’s Trust (the youth charity that is, in all fairness, one of the modern royals’ most impressive achievements, even if it does mean we have to watch a cringe-inducing scene of him breakdancing with a group of kids in south London), generally painting him in a far more sympathetic light. Meanwhile, where Emma Corrin’s Diana—neglected, wracked with self-doubt, suffering through postpartum depression and an eating disorder—felt wholly sympathetic, here, Elizabeth Debicki presents a steelier, stranger Diana. In an astonishing performance that serves as one of the highlights of the season, Debicki not only inhabits the princess’s look and mannerisms with uncanny precision, but also presents her as a more complex figure. Here, she is a woman whose decade of pressure and scrutiny from both the Firm and the British tabloids has made her, understandably, myopic, deeply paranoid, and frankly, a little manipulative. In the War of the Waleses, this season makes it more than clear there were no winners.
It’s really the Charles and Diana of it all that has left The Crown with a fundamental problem, one which the starkly divided reviews of the current season possibly attest to: the show must now, essentially, serve the two very different audiences that represent Britain’s generational divide over the relevance of the monarchy. The early seasons set further in the past could more easily retain the show’s tenuously held prestige-TV veneer, whether thanks to its glossy, lavishly produced period trappings or the simple fact that the first few seasons tended to be a lot more sympathetic to the royal family. With Season 4, and the beginning of the Charles and Diana saga, the show attracted a new and younger audience. (Myself included—I only went back to watch the original seasons after wondering how Emma Corrin would play Diana, finding myself thoroughly gripped, and bingeing all 10 episodes over the course of a single weekend.)
And whether you find them to be in poor taste or not, it is the scenes involving Charles and Diana that are, inevitably, the most compelling. A two-episode arc covering the shockingly unethical methods used by Bashir to book his interview with Diana (the true depths of Bashir’s deceit were only fully uncovered last year, in an independent report commissioned by the BBC, lending it an extra frisson of topicality) makes for some of the most gripping television of the year. The interview itself, it turns out, took place on Bonfire Night—as you might imagine, Morgan doesn’t miss the opportunity to wring that metaphor dry—as all of the royals would be out of Kensington Palace. The bare-bones television crew enters under the guise of installing a hi-fi system, lending it all the nail-biting tension of a heist movie. A scene in which Diana goes to meet the queen at Buckingham Palace to give her advance warning of the interview shows Staunton’s more passive, out-of-touch queen regain some of her nerve, and the chemistry between her and Debicki is electric. Finally, a visit Charles pays to Diana in the penultimate episode, when they make scrambled eggs together, is both emotionally devastating and the final confirmation—if you needed it—of the couple’s fundamental incompatibility, realised with riveting gusto by both West and Debicki.
Yes, we’ve seen plenty of explosive arguments between Charles and Diana on the show before, and when the queen intervenes in the romantic lives of her family once again to catastrophic ends, it’s easy for it to feel a little repetitive. But the royals really did make the same mistakes over and over again. You might flinch at the scenes in which a young Prince William seems embarrassed by his mother’s antics, but the two princes today remain locked in a double-edged battle with their public image and their portrayals in the media. The presentation of Charles as potentially offering a more broad-minded and enlightened future for the monarchy may rankle, given he’s still part of one of the world’s most archaic institutions. But with his recent accession to the throne in the present day, the show has a semi-accidental pertinency; even if the specifics aren’t strictly accurate, it offers an engrossing and deeply researched window into what makes Britain’s new monarch tick. Season 5 of The Crown may be controversial—but really, it’s only as messy, contradictory, and darkly fascinating as the family it depicts.
This article first appeared on vogue.com
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