Occasionally it is necessary to convene a conversation between Vulture writers to discuss an important and timely issue in culture. This time, Jackson McHenry and Kathryn VanArendonk come together to discuss what the hell The Crown’s fifth season wants us to feel about the existence of a royal family. At several points during this conversation, they will get frustrated and gesture irritably at their subordinates to find them a better pen.Â
Note: This conversation discusses the entirety of season five and includes minor spoilers.
Kathryn VanArendonk: Now in its fifth season, The Crown is full of compelling, often subtle themes about character and generational change. How much does one’s temperament define one’s destiny? How has celebrity changed our perception of leadership in the last several decades? For many public figures, vulnerability and personal disclosure is seen as weakness, but is rigid opacity actually even more damaging? Is tweed actually a timeless classic?
At the heart of it, though, there’s a much simpler question to ask about The Crown, and it’s one that has become weirdly tricky to answer: Does The Crown like the royals? Surely not — after all the damage and pain, this show hardly seems in favor of a British royal family as a healthy and sustainable way to maintain national symbols. And yet … maybe it is?
Jackson McHenry: Sight unseen, a season about the Diana and Charles divorce would be a prime opportunity for The Crown to tear down the edifice of the monarchy. And, sight unseen, it feels like a lot of the British Establishment expected it to do just that. (Judi Dench, why did you feel a need to weigh in?) But as much as I am rooting for the Conservative Party to once again melt down over whether a Netflix series is fiction, this season actually stretches itself to act arbitrarily measured in a way that feels like it ends up being kind to Charles. It even seems to lose track of Diana, a naturally compelling figure who would be at the center of nearly any other attempt to tell this story because it wants to focus so much on Charles. I’m sure he wouldn’t love the depiction of himself in the 1990s as desperate to get his mother to step aside and let him rule (supposed royal-family insiders are reportedly already incensed about that), but Peter Morgan, who has the sole writing credit on every episode this season, keeps bending over backward to afford him sympathy as if to say, If you were Charles, told you were going to rule all your life but never allowed you, wouldn’t you also be peevish? And, not for nothing, Dominic West is an overly complimentary choice of casting.
KV: Part of the challenge here is trying to tease apart The Crown’s treatment of the monarchy as an institution versus its depiction of these particular people as figureheads and participants. From the beginning, its imagery of Elizabeth coming to power tended to lean in the direction of “This institution is inhuman, but we can feel sympathy for this person who is crushed by a burden she did not choose.†And it’s always that way for the individual character arcs in this show. We see Philip experiencing a traumatic boarding-school experience, and we understand how badly he’s been damaged. We see Elizabeth struggling to feel any kind of freedom in her own life. Margaret can’t marry the person she wants to marry, so we see how her life falls apart as a result. And then the same thing happens again for the new generations. Everyone gets their own moment of personal tragedy, and every time The Crown appears to tilt toward “People innocent; institution bad.â€
Except that as soon as any one of these characters ends up in combination with any other characters, they’re awful! Miserable to one another, incapable of empathy or the barest glint of humanity to their loved ones. So many scenes in this series seem like obvious indictments of the entire system — the institutions, sure, but also all the people who support them. Elizabeth ignoring her children’s needs and desires; Philip’s snobbery; Charles’s cold continuation of an affair while Diana grows ever more miserable. How can this show possibly be arguing in favor of these people’s behavior?
But then I saw everything that happens with Charles in season five, Jackson, and I thought, Huh.
JM: Everything that happens with Charles in season five and yet does not happen with Diana! After watching the season I was reminded, Right, Peter Morgan is obsessed with these people, and I think that comes from an innate sense of sympathy for them, even as he tries to depict how cruel they can be. The show has always been most interested in what it does to a person to have all this symbology thrust upon them, and it’s just not built to address characters outside that framework.
Elizabeth Debicki is great casting for Diana, but The Crown keeps depriving her of screen time to loop back to showing how Diana’s attempts to have some agency rattle the royals who are stuck in their stodgy ways. We have to know what Charles thinks about her, what Elizabeth feels, even Margaret’s opinion. There is so much about Charles’s reaction to her that she feels secondary. He’s a natural villain of the story because he really seems like an ass! In the earlier seasons and early episodes of this season, he comes across that way, too, pontificating to Diana on their attempt at a second honeymoon and sneering at her desire to have fun and shop. But Morgan overcorrects. In episode five, the fallout from his and Camilla’s whole tampon conversation is portrayed sympathetically — and you do have to have sympathy for people who want to have their dorky flirting go unrecorded — and the episode ends with a truly corny sequence, complete with breakdancing, informing us of the good that Charles has done through the Prince’s Trust.
I think what it comes down to is that Peter Morgan is just less interested in Diana than the royals, while a lot of viewers are probably more interested in Diana than the royals. He finds the remoteness of their stature from the public more compelling. He’s more for icons than iconoclasts. I watched The Queen again recently, and that whole movie is about how Elizabeth just doesn’t understand the magnitude of the public’s affection for Diana. (I guess it will also be recreated in The Crown season six.) The Crown did a great job with Diana as played by Emma Corrin in season four, but it operated along the arc of her being stuck within the expectations set for her as an aristocratic woman of a certain class in a certain era. Once her story breaks from those expectations in this season, The Crown starts casting her as petulant, repeatedly dialing into a TV debate about the monarchy to vote against it. I liked the scene in episode nine, “Couple 31,†where Diana and Charles have one long, definitely fictionalized argument before their divorce because the show is generally pretty good at stage-like extended two-handers. But Diana gets precious little to do after that scene, while Charles gets a whole melancholy, metaphorical trip to oversee the handover of Hong Kong and give up his royal yacht.
But what did we expect? Recall this show’s many portentous deer, or its love of Winston Churchill: Obviously The Crown is going to be a sucker for the big, metaphorical, melancholy approach to people who have to give up their yachts.
KV: I love a melancholy yacht scene! I get the appeal, I do! But you’re completely right that when The Crown shows us these people talking to one another, we tend to get nuanced, messy, complicated ideas about who they are. And then when it shifts back into the mode of the HMS Metaphor, the show falls back into overly simplistic pro-monarchal sympathies.
The episode that most hit me along those lines comes a little earlier in this season — the Russia episode, “Ipatiev House,†in which we are reminded that royal families really do have it pretty rough sometimes; for example, they are occasionally murdered by revolutionaries who then bury them in unmarked graves. In its own way, it is one of the harshest depictions of Elizabeth that the show has done in quite a while. She’s stubbornly incurious to the point of near emptiness. The scene at the end where she happily plays fetch with a passel of corgis while Philip ponders the mysteries of maternal DNA matches is downright cruel to her. But even then, the takeaway is not disdain for a monarchical system that would let such a blinkered person have such power over British identity. Instead, there’s a kind of wistful sweetness to it. Sure, she doesn’t know what DNA is. But is that what England needed from her? No! It needed the person she became: a living link to the past. It’s mean to her and it simultaneously asserts that there’s something noble about the way she’s sacrificed every ounce of her interiority to this role.
More often than not, I fall for it! I am willing to be convinced by, or at least interested in, Morgan’s obvious fondness for this family. That ending with the Prince’s Trust, though — that was the moment I wanted to find myself a lifeboat and leave this whole season behind. It made me wonder whether my entire opinion of The Crown would be different if it was stripped of extra-episodic context. No ending explanatory cards, no defensive posturing in the press, no ridiculous assertions that it is a fictionalized depiction. Maybe without all that I could accept it as pleasantly ambiguous?
JM: The show’s a victim of its success in that way. It’s popular, expensive, a crown jewel in a Netflix catalog that is increasingly full of rhinestones. It feels like its statement on the royals must be definitive, almost documentary-like, when in fact it’s (primarily) the noodling of one guy who is just a little too fascinated by Queen Elizabeth II.
At this point, I’d be quite interested in a W1A-style show about the making of The Crown more so than what the series itself is capable of saying about the royals — there must be so much negotiation behind the scenes with various insiders about how to approach recent history. The details of Jemima Khan’s involvement in and departure from the series would make a great stand-alone episode, as would something about the delicate maneuvering between this show’s production and Prince Harry and Meghan’s own involvement with Netflix. The show’s become enrobed in its own self-importance, and it’s tripping over the livery — most especially when it falls back on explanatory cards and didactic credits sequences. Maybe that makes it more sympathetic to the royals, too, because the series itself has been freighted with symbolic importance. Heavy-handed is the head writer who produces The Crown.
In conclusion, congrats to former PM John Major, who got the hero edit this season.
KV: Truly an unexpected source of wisdom and measured calm! There’s something about that John Major depiction that does make me wonder about the other reality at play in a huge, popular work about an immense, well-known cultural phenomenon. There’s just always going to be a temptation for devil’s advocacy. It is the easiest route: We know that the monarchy is bad, but what this show supposes is, what if it isn’t! Similarly, we know that Diana is sympathetic and Charles is a bore and John Major is a dud and on and on and on. There is no faster route to apparent complexity than taking a widely held belief and pointing out that maybe it’s wrong.
Yes, I am sure that a lot of it does stem from Morgan’s seemingly lifelong preoccupation with this topic. There’s so much research! So many consultants, so many deep dives, so much attention to accuracy and detail. Surely The Crown is landing on its primary conclusions as a result of extensive, painstaking consideration rather than just contrariness? Except … if you were going to make a season built on deliberately counterintuitive readings just for the sake of thumbing your nose at conventional wisdom, I think it’d look a lot like this.
Despite my reservations about this season, I cannot pretend I’m not still excited to watch Morgan finally steer this ship into port. Whatever else it may be, The Crown has been unerringly correct about one aspect of royal life: It makes for good TV.
JM: Plus, we’ll get to see Peter Morgan work through all his feelings about Tony Blair!