“The senior royals seem dangerously deluded and out of touch … and the Prince of Wales impatient for a great role in public life, not realizing his great asset is his wife,” says Prime Minister John Major (Jonny Lee Miller) in the first episode of the new season of "The Crown," after Queen Elizabeth II (now played by Imelda Staunton) frustratingly spends most of her time with him asking for the government to pay to repair her yacht.
It’s the first season of the acclaimed drama from Netflix to be released after Elizabeth’s death, and the onscreen drama is catching up with real time — setting out to retell the worst public period in the late queen’s life. In the weeks just before the show’s release, tempers were already frayed. Dame Judi Dench wrote a letter asking the streaming giant to call the show a “fictionalized drama” in a disclaimer. John Major himself got ahead of the news cycle and said certain scenes were a “barrel-load of malicious nonsense.” The official biographer of the late queen mother called it “deliberately hurtful.” A Guardian columnist even described it as a “war against the Crown.”
But Buckingham Palace and King Charles III — now in his own great role in public life — can rest easy. No one comes off as a villain. Not Charles, played by Dominic West in a conciliatory gesture of casting generosity. West’s charisma and layered performance make Charles’s well-known marital difficulties almost sympathetic.
Not Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce, in an acting master class) as he looms over Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) and tells her to keep her unhappiness to herself instead of sharing them with the press. It’s not a family, it’s a corporation, he stresses.
And even though Princess Margaret accuses her of wanting to blow up the firm, Diana is no villain, either. She’s a woman in pain, lonely and vulnerable but also endlessly charming and fun. She’s shown as a great mother to Prince William and Prince Harry, for whom the show must be tough viewing. Many actors have played Diana recently, but Debicki’s performance ranks as the best and the most human. Watching her attempt to recast her narrative and take back her power is a delight.
The queen is no antihero, either, even as she continually puts duty over her family’s personal happiness — one of the series’ prime tropes. Her scenes are hampered by the fact that Imelda Staunton doesn’t look or carry herself like Her Majesty. She also doesn’t seem to find any of the sense of humor or sparks of joy that Olivia Colman and Claire Foy brought to the part, making her portrayal of Elizabeth as a real person rather than an image on a bank note less cohesive. Her inner life feels thinly drawn this season.
As for the plot, it’s the 1990s and everyone in the House of Windsor is having a terrible time. Windsor Castle literally goes up in flames in a blaze that Princess Margaret (now Lesley Manville) calls “the great metaphor.” The queen’s children are having relationship problems that fill the front pages of the British tabloids, Diana has hit the end of her rope with her marriage and is ready to shake up her life, and in the fourth episode, Andrew, Anne and Charles all waltz in and complain about their miseries to their mother, one by one.
“It’s expected for the monarch to be married and produce an heir; being happily married is preference rather than a requirement,” the queen tells Charles, with little sympathy.
So much is going badly that the queen in a public speech calls it her Annus Horribilis.
“1992 is not a year I will look on with undiluted pleasure,” she tells the audience, but her very unhappy family makes for captivating viewing as showrunner Peter Morgan digs up the bones of the 30-year-old scandals, from Diana’s involvement in the Andrew Morton biography of her, to Fergie’s affairs.
Where the show shines is in its fresh look at the mythos of the royal family. Episode 3 (“Mou Mou”) focuses on Egyptian businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed, from his early life in Alexandria as a street vendor of Coca-Cola to his meteoric rise as a businessman (he bought the Ritz and Harrods). His fascination with the royals leads him to renovate the villa in France where King Edward lived, befriend and hire the king’s valet and splash out on Polo memberships to get a seat physically close to the queen, but it’s never quite enough to become part of the inner circle. He’s still an Egyptian newcomer, not British, and no amount of money can truly transcend class in the show. Watching this dawn on Al-Fayed is painful. His father derided Egyptians who thought of the British royal family as gods, but Mohamed never got past his fascination. It’s a wonderfully complex performance by Salim Daw, and Khalid Abdalla is equally fantastic as his son Dodi.
The distance from the miserable people in the palaces is a breath of fresh air, but the show never forgets that the characters are all real people.
And of course, no one knows what really happened behind the closed doors of Buckingham Palace, but it’s captivating viewing on cold November nights in London to sit and watch the (fictionalized) version of a very tough year for the Windsor clan.
The cinematography, sets, costuming and design are as splendid and expensive as ever, and "The Crown" is still must-see viewing, even though no one is especially covering themselves in glory.
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'THE CROWN'
Rating: TV-MA
How to watch: Season 5 premieres on Netflix Wednesday
