The elegiac mood of the fifth season of The Crown couldn’t have been better scripted for the moment. For the first time, the audience comes to Peter Morgan’s serial treatment of the House of Windsor with the knowledge that its principal subject, Queen Elizabeth II, is no longer with us. The opening images show the young Elizabeth (Claire Foy) commissioning the Royal Yacht Britannia at the outset of her reign. The montage is conveyed in black and white, incorporating newsreel footage of the actual event, before the visuals turn color and Foy’s dovelike eyes give way to the crow’s-feet of Imelda Staunton (the most recent player to portray her late majesty). It’s a monarch in autumn that she embodies, in a season suffused with loss and foreboding tragedy. Without even intending it, Morgan and his collaborators have anticipated the death of the queen.
The operating structure of the series has been to tell the twin story of Britain’s social and political history alongside that of the royals, joining the two narratives in the relationship between Her Majesty and various prime ministers over the decades. This pairing began with her tutelage under Winston Churchill (John Lithgow) and continued through Labour’s Harold Wilson (Jason Watkins) and on to Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson). This season opens in 1991, Elizabeth’s 65th year and the first of the new conservative Prime Minister John Major (Jonny Lee Miller). Miller plays Major as affable and retiring, sympathetic to Elizabeth’s personal troubles. But the portrait of British society through his tenure is nonexistent. The audience gets little sense of his policies, leadership, or effect on the population. For much of the season, he serves as an informal marital counselor for the royal family, guiding Charles (Dominic West) and Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) through the rocky shoals of separation and divorce while offering a tender ear for the queen. Miller purrs along soothingly in the part — you wish you could go home with him instead of being trapped in the psychodrama behind the palace walls.
If the season seems fixated on the royals to the exclusion of wider Britain, that might be because Britain at this time was unusually fixated on them. The first episode shows a calculating Charles taking Diana and the boys on a Mediterranean cruise, ostensibly to repair their marriage (a second honeymoon, he calls it) but in reality just to play the paparazzi. During the divorce negotiations, Camilla hires a PR guru to polish her image. Earlier, Philip (Jonathan Pryce) demands that Elizabeth show herself in public with Penelope Knatchbull (Natascha McElhone), the wife of his first cousin, in order to launder their relationship. The media’s cycle of burnishing the monarchy on the one hand while airing its titillating scandals on the other suggests the toxic nature of the whole affair.
The turnover in casting this season speaks to the generational sea change, played out most directly in the romantic and marital dynamics of the household. Elizabeth’s strength, in the series, is her sober devotion to duty and quashing of her personal feelings for the sake of the nation. Yet this adherence to protocol betrays her when it comes to her relations. By failing to allow her sister, Margaret (Lesley Manville), or Charles to marry for love, she repeatedly thwarts herself. In “Annus Horribilis,” which chronicles the harrowing events of 1992, Charles and Andrew (James Murray) ask her for permission to divorce, while Anne (Claudia Harrison) requests a blessing to remarry just a few years after the dissolution of her first union. Meanwhile, Philip and Elizabeth continue to negotiate their own complex marriage. When the queen asks Major about the key to a successful partnership, he quotes Dostoevsky’s wife, whose answer was to have nothing in common with one’s spouse and make no demands on their soul. The souring of marital bliss emerges most painfully in the saga of Diana and Charles. Episode nine intersperses mock interviews with everyday Britons seeking legal termination of their marriages as the prince and princess join them in line. Humanizing the royals has always been Morgan’s strength.
The writing and direction take on a more sparse quality in this season. Morgan doesn’t dramatize details with the usual specificity. He counts on our memories of these very public events to fill in the gaps, going for emotional resonance over strict plotting. At times, especially in the initial episodes, this lends an oblique, muted quality to the show. The true narrative spine doesn’t emerge until the latter episodes, especially with Diana’s famous BBC interview. As usual, the acting lifts the production, with nearly every player turning in fine-tuned, arresting performances. West is a counterintuitive choice as Charles (he seems too self-possessed), but he locates the prince’s vocal and facial tics and intellectual idiosyncrasies palpably. Olivia Williams is unrecognizable as Camilla, so thoroughly does she take on the woman’s persona. And Murray and Harrison make for striking analogues to their characters.
But it’s Debicki as Diana who truly stuns the viewer. Her resemblance to the doomed princess goes beyond mere physical appearance. She transforms herself so completely into Diana Spencer it’s breathtaking. She seems inhabited by the woman’s ghost, from her blushing shyness to her shimmering effect in public. Episode seven showcases Diana’s romantic relationship with Hasnat Khan (Humayun Saeed), a British-Pakistani surgeon. When she beckons him with her eyes to kiss her, standing at her door, you find yourself falling completely for the woman. In other moments, you ache for how she misreads the family’s intentions and sabotages her own position.
There’s one weak point, and it’s a major one: the title role. Claire Foy and Olivia Colman (who portrayed Elizabeth in the previous two seasons) each put their own mark on the queen while maintaining a continuity of spirit. Staunton makes admirable attempts, but that fellow feeling is lacking in her performance. Her Elizabeth comes off as weak in her dotage, an emotional simpleton. Your mind goes to Helen Mirren’s portrayal of the monarch in this same period in Morgan’s 2006 film The Queen, in which she mixed aloofness with a strong, regal presence. That presence eludes Staunton. Her Elizabeth sits in the shadows, outshined by the rest of the ensemble.
Throughout its five seasons, The Crown has taken up the question that animates the films of the great director David Lean: What does it mean to be British? The sunsetting of the empire forms its backdrop, never more so than in this latest season, and the shifting mores and character of Britain continue to baffle its monarch and her hidebound institution. Whatever it means to be British, keeping the monarch floating above the public is essential. Or as Fintan O’Toole puts it in a recent essay for the New York Review of Books, “To occupy her royal persona, Elizabeth had to suppress her human one, to make herself as much like a dead person as possible.”
And now, her actual death has come. The last episode depicts the decommissioning of Britannia and Britain’s handover of Hong Kong, with Charles looking particularly anemic next to the striding Chinese officers. The discordant views of his and his mother on the monarchy come to a head at last, his attempted alliance with Tony Blair (Bertie Carvel) and New Labour blowing up in his face. You watch with the ironic knowledge that it will be another quarter of a century before he accedes to the throne, during which time Elizabeth will achieve unrivaled love from her subjects, even as the family dysfunction cascades through her grandchildren. Charles wants the crown for himself, thinking it will afford him the self-expression he so desperately craves. But heavy is the head that wears it. And as Diana tries to warn him, there is no real freedom for royalty.
Nick Coccoma is a Boston writer and critic who’s been published in New Politics, Critics at Large, and Full-Stop. Follow him on Substack at the Similitude and @NickCoccoma.
