The new season of The Crown, Netflix’s peerless depiction of the second Elizabethan age, contains exactly one sympathetic character. Michael Fagan, an out-of-work painter on the verge of a mental breakdown, famously scaled the walls of Buckingham Palace on a summer evening in 1982. As played by the terrific Tom Brooke, Fagan makes his way to the queen’s bedroom and awakens her for a chat about the plight of the underclass. Plaintive, breathless, and more than a little disappointed by the shabbiness of the place, Fagan is a nonthreatening figure, the sort of bloke who might wheedle a free pint in a Clerkenwell pub. What he wants is something to which nearly everyone in her majesty’s orbit can relate: to be, at long last, understood.
Emotional isolation is at the heart of The Crown’s latest run, which begins, in 1979, with the Provisional IRA’s assassination of Lord “Dickie” Mountbatten (Charles Dance). A substitute father to both Prince Philip (Tobias Menzies) and the Prince of Wales (a stoop-shouldered Josh O’Connor), Mountbatten leaves among his papers an accusatory letter. Charles, rather than pining after the unsuitable Camilla Parker Bowles (Emerald Fennell), must “build [his] destiny” with a wife who “knows the rules and will follow the rules.” That the beneficiary of this advice turns out to be the narcissistic Diana Spencer (Emma Corrin) is an outcome that tests the very limits of irony. One can almost imagine Mountbatten observing the ensuing mess from heaven. “Idiots. I didn’t mean her.”
Hovering over this royal landscape — “the oxygen we all breathe,” an implacable Philip tells Diana — is Elizabeth II (Olivia Colman), a woman for whom duty has come to function as a psychological suit of armor. Concerned, in a standout episode, that her relationships with her children may need topping up, Elizabeth summons her offspring to a series of private lunches. Yet how to prepare for so delicate an assemblage? Like any proper monarch, the queen turns to her staff, requesting “a short briefing document … on each child’s hobbies, interests, and so forth.” The sovereign may be hopeless as a parent, but give her this much: She knows how to keep her secretaries busy.
Why, if not for a lesson in domestic bliss, might one tune in to The Crown? For starters, the series’s production design, by the brilliant Martin Childs, remains top-notch, with interiors that evoke both grandeur and Britain’s “sick man of Europe” dilapidation. (“You should hire me,” an appraising Fagan informs the queen.) So, too, is it the case that The Crown’s unlovable royals are perfectly cast. A familiar face from such productions as Game of Thrones and Outlander, Menzies remains excellent as the Duke of Edinburgh, for whom husbandly protectiveness is akin to a religious obligation. And while O’Connor is splendid as the resentful Charles, Erin Doherty’s underused Princess Anne practically demands her own show, so delicious is her haughty, insubordinate ennui.
Alas, the series is on far shakier ground in its attempt to render the other figures one associates with England in the 1980s. As Diana, Corrin does much to capture her character’s misery but fails to break through the surface to her calculating core. As Margaret Thatcher, whose entrance coincides with the Princess of Wales’s, the overrated Gillian Anderson is all mimicry and no subtlety, bringing to the role little of the flinty humor that defined Meryl Streep’s performance in The Iron Lady. Where Diana is concerned, the problem is at least partly one of focus: We see the princess in the grip of bulimia, but creator Peter Morgan declines to show her throwing herself down the palace stairs. Far less defensible is Anderson’s work as Britain’s first female prime minister. Never mind that her Thatcher is a breathy scold. Anderson’s mannered style simply makes no sense alongside Colman’s naturalistic Elizabeth.
So unfavorable is The Crown’s representation of its new PM, in fact, that one wonders if the series’s producers set out intentionally to smear her. What else to make of the silence surrounding Thatcher’s defiance of the IRA or defeat of the Marxist trade-unionist Arthur Scargill, who had brought about the collapse of Ted Heath’s government in 1974? How else to explain the fact that the program gives a full episode to Thatcher’s South Africa policies while ignoring her invigoration of Britain’s economy? (The conservative leader thought anti-apartheid sanctions were an offense against free trade.) While every historical narrative must pick and choose the events to which it gives attention, one can’t help noticing that Thatcher’s greatest achievements are uniformly overlooked here. Perhaps the most striking omission is the great lady’s role in winning the Cold War. The Crown’s latest episodes conclude barely a year after the Berlin Wall fell. Yet, for all its characters seem to know, the Soviet Union never so much as existed.
A complaint of this kind is not, it should be said, a purely partisan lament. Among the virtues of Morgan’s series has been its ability to remain neutral, to stand, like the queen, at the periphery of world events while doing nothing to tip the scales. For a drama that means to be personal rather than global, such restraint is imperative. Start taking sides, and audiences will soon drift away. Who could care, after all, about the royal family’s politics? Or, extending the principle, about Morgan’s?
Whatever its missteps, The Crown remains and will likely continue to be one of the best shows on television. Such is the thrill of looking behind the curtain that a great deal can be forgiven by those who glance. Should the series wish to regain its peak glory, however, it would be wise to heed its own advice. “Mummy, I have a voice,” a distraught Charles tells Elizabeth midway through season three. Her response, as iron-clad as an imperial decree? “No one wants to hear it.”
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
