Instead,the show delves too deeply into the media-worn story of Charles and Diana,pushing even the Queen (Imelda Staunton) and Princess Margaret (Lesley Manville) into the role of bit players,without offering much more than the multitude of telemovies on the same topic,other than casting Dodi Al-Fayed as a barely willing groom-to-be and his father,Mohamed (Salim Daw),in a dubious twist of the historical record,as their matchmaker.
Season six,part one comes with all the scale of past seasons ofThe Crown,but the pieces of the jigsaw fit awkwardly. The romance of Diana and Dodi might have sold tabloid magazines,but the fate of the crown never rested on its outcome. Which makes the season opener seem like it’s forgotten that the crown itself,and not Diana,is number one on the show’s call sheet.
Equally frustrating is that Morgan’s casting of the monarch feels like it has matured as unevenly. Claire Foy,who starred in seasons one and two,bore no actual resemblance to the late Queen,but met the audience’s uncertain memories of the younger Elizabeth with a chin-up-and-steely-faced manner that created a rare television sleight of hand. Her two replacements,Olivia Colman and Imelda Staunton,have had to play the part against the audience’s established knowledge of them both as actresses in a multitude of prior roles.
The Crown has also suffered from the same kind of evolutionary change that has worn the actual monarchy from thick with intrigue to thin and often unremarkable. In the 1950s,when the story ofThe Crown began,the monarchy’s relationship with Britain’s political machinery was more complex and mysterious,played in shadows and whispers.
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That complex (and sometimes usefully imperfect) parallel allowedThe Crown to dance through chapters of modern political history with a sharp eye for small details,elevating some of the lesser players,such as John Lithgow’s Winston Churchill,Alex Jennings’s Duke of Windsor and Jason Watkins’s Harold Wilson,to the most fascinating pieces on the chessboard.
In its modern iteration,however,the royal family is more garden variety soap opera than political thriller,and the show’s storytelling hems too closely to the established media script instead of the untold (or at least,seemingly untold) political backroom plays which supersized it initially from mere streaming telenovela to genuine blue-chip drama.
The Crown,season six,episodes one to four are streaming on Netflix;episodes five to 10 will be released on December 14.
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