In the fifth season of The Crown, series creator Peter Morgan doesn’t have to take many creative liberties to illustrate a monarchy in disarray. Unfolding primarily in the early to mid-1990s, this chapter in Netflix’s royal saga covers a particularly volatile period for the family, one that includes the divorces of three high-profile couples, a badly damaging fire at Windsor Castle, the rise of newly elected prime minister Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia†attitude, and increasing public debate about whether the monarchy should still exist at all. If by some chance viewers don’t grasp how each of these factors signifies a less than sturdy House of Windsor, The Crown makes sure to drive home those metaphors with the subtlety of a sledgehammer blasting through drywall.
“What happens when the family falls apart? I say the institution falls apart,†says Princess Diana in the season’s very first episode, offering what may as well be a bold, italicized, underlined thesis statement for this absorbing but choppy fifth go-round.
Perhaps it’s appropriate that a season featuring so much brokenness feels more disconnected than usual from the previous seasons of The Crown. Spanning the decades from 1947, when then–Princess Elizabeth wed Philip Mountbatten, to the present, The Crown has always engaged in time-jumping and the recasting of its principal characters every couple of seasons. But where those transitions have been smooth in the past, the seams between season four, which dropped on Netflix in 2020 and paused its action in 1990, and five, arriving Wednesday on the platform and resuming the royals’ story in July 1991, look more frayed.
While all of the new actors taking over key roles this season do strong and considered work — most notably Imelda Staunton as Elizabeth, Jonathan Pryce as Philip, Dominic West as Charles, and Elizabeth Debicki as Diana — the switches are more jarring in certain cases. Some of that can be attributed to how little time has passed chronologically: Though only a few months have passed since season four’s narrative concluded, Elizabeth is now being played by an actress nearly two decades older than her Elizabeth predecessor, Olivia Colman. Ultimately, though, it’s the writing of these characters that is most responsible for the whiplash induced by these ten episodes.
For the first time since season one, Morgan has the sole writing credit on every installment, and the perspectives he brings to many of these well-known figures skew in new directions. While season four empathized with the young and miserable newlywed Diana, played last season with credible naïveté by Emma Corrin, the new episodes are not quite as forgiving to the Diana inhabited by the impeccably cast Debicki. Looking uncannily similar to the glamazonian People’s Princess, Debicki projects a shyness reflective of the soft-spokenness Corrin established before; she fidgets, frequently turns her glances downward, and speaks in the hushed tones of someone trained to worry that she might be overheard at any moment. But there’s also a steely quality to Debicki’s Diana, most visible every time she clenches her jaw, that makes it clear this is a woman who has moved on to the “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore†phase of her despair.
The Crown shows us how taxing this moment is for Diana: Overzealous paparazzi dog her, as does a perhaps-not-unfounded sense of paranoia. But it also hints pretty aggressively that she’s become overly self-involved. Her famous decision to speak candidly about her marriage to Martin Bashir in a nationally televised BBC interview comes across as brave but also slightly thoughtless to her soon-to-be ex-husband and the royal family. Her elder son, Prince William (Senan West, Dominic’s actual son), has to beg his mother to stop blathering on about her budding romance with a new man, surgeon Hasnat Khan (Humayun Saeed). And while Netflix hyped up the appearance of the much-touted revenge dress, the off-the-shoulder LBD that Diana publicly wore shortly after Prince Charles publicly admitted to his extramarital affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, it goes by in a blip. What could have come across as a sly but defiant “fuck you†to the royals hardly registers.
Charles, on the other hand, receives more sympathetic treatment. Although he can still be snobbish and uptight — during what is supposed to be a romantic second honeymoon, he chastises Diana for expressing an interest in, gasp, shopping — he is largely portrayed as the royal family’s primary agitator for a more modern monarchy and an enthusiastic leader forced to spend his most productive years on the sidelines while his mother continues to reign. Some may appreciate the nuance in Morgan’s treatment of Charles, who has so often been characterized as the villain in his marriage to Diana. Others may feel like The Crown is both sides–ing the story of Charles and Diana by suggesting they share the same amount of blame for the events leading to their divorce.
Even the lowest points in Charles’s story — yes, nearly an entire episode is devoted to the so-called tampongate scandal — humanize him and his relationship with Parker Bowles (an earthy, almost unrecognizable Olivia Williams), who comes across as more grounded and authentic than the fashionable Diana. It’s doubtful that the now-king will watch this season of The Crown, but if he does, he might appreciate elements of this portrayal, not including, obviously, the parts when he talks about wishing he could “live inside Camilla’s trousers.†Even the revisitation of Charles break-dancing in 1985 — a real thing that actually happened — makes him look smoother and less awkward than he did in reality.
While the image of Charles, now the modern-era king he apparently longed to be, gets a bit of a buff and polish in this iteration of The Crown, his late parents, most notably his mother, recede into the background a bit. Elizabeth has always been the protagonist of The Crown and technically still is, though she is much more peripheral and passive this time than in seasons past. Staunton delivers a disciplined performance that is purposely restrained; she’s particularly moving in episode six when she suppresses her tears after realizing how close Philip has become with Penny Knatchbull (Natascha McElhone), a woman with whom the duke has much more in common than his own wife. But too often, Elizabeth is someone to whom things happen, a steady presence continually bombarded by controversies created by her children rather than a person of action.
As portrayed by Pryce, Philip’s sharp corners have been practically babyproofed this season. In past Philips Matt Smith and Tobias Menzies, resentment and edginess were always bubbling just below his surface. But Pryce comes across much more gentle. Even when he essentially warns Diana not to participate in the book that Andrew Morton is reportedly writing about her — “Don’t rock the boat. Ever. To the grave,†he tells her — he seems more grandfatherly than threatening. Morgan, again, seems so focused on writing toward a more well-rounded, likable version of Philip that he seems like a different man than the one we met in seasons one through four.
Perhaps these changes are deliberate attempts to highlight how transformational this period was for the royals. The problem is that, as The Crown argues repeatedly, the monarchy, or “the system,†is supposed to remain immovable and unchanged. If Queen Elizabeth and the royals began to adapt to contemporary expectations, particularly in the wake of Diana’s death, which won’t be addressed until the sixth and final season, it’s because they were forced to by the times — not the other way around. Yet season five of The Crown makes them seem already altered.
The constant Crown presence who seems most like herself is Princess Margaret, Elizabeth’s sister, played this time by a gregarious Lesley Manville. Like Vanessa Kirby and Helena Bonham Carter before her, Manville infuses Margaret with dry wit, a penchant for taking long drags on her cigarettes, and a laissez-faire attitude. The Margaret we see in season five is a changed Margaret and an older Margaret but one who also feels very much of a piece with the Margaret we’ve always known.
That’s why so much of the rest of this season feels a tad off. While it depicts tumultuous and unpredictable times for the royal family, it also presents some of the members of that family in ways that seem inconsistent with what we’ve come to expect from them, both within the context of this series and in the real world. This many seasons into any show, viewers should feel like they know its characters very well. Too often, season five of The Crown makes them hard to recognize.