Netflix has dropped its first trailer for season five of its flagship drama The Crown.
The newest season, which will have its global premiere on 9 November, is expected to be the series’ second to last. It is set in the 1990s, a decade that introduced manifold sources of instability to Buckingham Palace, many of which can be glimpsed in the trailer.
“The royal family is in genuine crisis,” declares Martin Bashir – played by Ten Percent star Prasanna Puwanarajah – in the wide-ranging trailer, which depicts the marriage of Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) and King Charles III (Dominic West) in a state of disintegration.
Later, the trailer shows Diana taking a chair for her now infamously discredited Panorama interview and driving recklessly through an intersection. “People will never understand how it’s really been for me, I never stood a chance,” Diana reflects amid the chaos.
The Crown is returning to television in a moment of increased scrutiny following the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the anticipation of the King’s coronation on 6 May. As the series progresses, its historical timeline inches closer to the present-day.
On Wednesday (19 October), Dame Judi Dench joined the chorus of Hollywood’s bold-face names calling for Netflix to take a more active role in differentiating the fictional drama based on the royal family from a documentarian’s account.
In a letter to The Times, Dench wrote: “The programme makers have resisted all calls for them to carry a disclaimer at the start of each episode.
“The time has come for Netflix to reconsider — for the sake of a family and a nation so recently bereaved, as a mark of respect to a sovereign who served her people so dutifully for 70 years, and to preserve their own reputation in the eyes of their British subscribers.”
John Major, played by Johnny Lee Miller in the series, recently condemned the series as a “barrel-load of nonsense.”
Based on the trailer, the forthcoming season promises to include some of the most controversial moments in Diana’s marriage to the former Prince of Wales, which ended in divorce in 1996 after a separation in 1992.
In the season five trailer, Queen Elizabeth II – played in her latest incarnation by Imelda Staunton – can be heard chastising her son for the upheaval his broken marriage is causing. “You as future king have a duty,” she says.
Series creator Peter Morgan has confirmed that The Crown will end after season six.
