The Crown Season Five Review

Season five of The Crown, the penultimate season of Netflix’s look into the life and times of Queen Elizabeth II (and her family and close associates) was released last week on the streaming service. And while the wait for this season was longer than in the past – thanks to filming delays due to the pandemic – it, unfortunately, wasn’t really worth the wait. Where past seasons have taken a more holistic approach to the House of Windsor and its failings and successes, season five was taken over by the crumbling marriage of Charles and Diana – with that particular storyline sucking up all the oxygen throughout the storytelling, leaving anyone who didn’t particularly care to see that relationship become the center of this show’s universe less than enthused at the overall arc of the season story.

Now, as anyone who even has a passing knowledge of the mid to late 1990s knows, the rocky marriage and ultimate divorce of Charles and Diana was an insanely influential story of that period. It was literally splashed across the news around the world. In fact, as an adolescent myself during that time, it was my first real exposure to the British Royal Family, as I heard news of their divorce and the bitterness it brought out in the tabloids and various interviews. So, I can’t fault The Crown for making it a focal point of the season, as it did suck all the oxygen out of the Royal Family during that period as well. But in making so much of the season about Charles and Diana’s marriage finally dying – which, in turn, sets us up for the final stretch of Diana’s life in the final season of the series – the show took a turn away from what made it such an interesting series and instead cemented itself as a story of only three characters: Charles, Diana, and (often forgotten in the drama, surprisingly) Elizabeth.

Think back to past seasons of the series. What were the most resonate storylines and character beats? Well, they tended to be centered around less well-known moments in history or characters we, a modern-day audience, are less inclined to think about when we think about the current Royal Family. Someone like the late Princess Margaret, who’s story arc in the show’s first two seasons was – for my money – the highlight of those seasons. Perhaps it’s a combination of Diana fatigue – there have been so many Diana-related pieces of content in the past few years that it’s hard not to be tired of seeing the same story get told over and over – and recency bias – most viewers of the series likely recall these years of the House of Windsor much more vividly than something that Elizabeth did back in 1963 – but much of this season felt like the show was simply spinning its wheels, drawing out the arrival of the inevitable death of Diana (and, coincidentally, the events of The Crown showrunner Peter Morgan’s other royal-focused story, the film The Queen, which he should simply tell folks to watch in lieu of once again telling this exact story).

It’s not a surprise that the season’s best episode – by a long shot – was the fourth, which didn’t focus on the simmering tensions between Charles and Diana, but rather on the comparison between Princess Anne’s remarriage and Elizabeth’s choice to deny a similar right to Margaret and Peter Townsend 40 years earlier. And while the cast this season was almost uniformly excellent (if there’s one thing The Crown nearly always gets right, it’s the casting, although I’m still not sold on Dominic West’s Charles), Lesley Manville was exceptionally effective in her one showcase episode (despite stealing every other scene she was in, along with Claudia Harrison as Anne). Did it rehash the past pain of Margaret? Yes. Did it rely on the past perhaps a bit too much – we didn’t need those flashback scenes, although it’s always lovely to be reminded how great Vanessa Kirby was in the role? Probably. But that episode was a stand-out because it stayed true to the overall purpose of the series: Shedding light on the way the crown can crush those around it by the weight of its power, influence, and prestige – and how Elizabeth, while she may live and die for her role, doesn’t always get it right and sometimes people around her suffer for it. Spending multiple episodes watching Charles and Diana grow further and further apart – not to mention the episode introducing the al Fayed family – served to lean into the more sensational aspects of this family and their role within the world and not in telling stories that explore the impact of the crown on those close to it. We know this central relationship was impacted by the crown (in that Elizabeth refused Charles a choice in who to marry), but we didn’t need this much work setting up a conclusion we knew was coming.

Now, was it necessary to introduce Dodi al Fayed as more than just Diana’s paramour who tragically died along with her? Yes. But when you know that the clock is ticking down on a series – and this season, in particular, had the feel of a giant clock ticking down to August 31, 1997, in nearly every moment Charles, Diana, Dodi, or William were on screen – this isn’t the time to hyper-focus on the one story everyone watching knows. It’s the last chance to provide our characters with greater depth before they shuffle off into the ether. We know that Diana, Margaret, and the Queen Mother’s deaths will all be covered in season six. We know that Diana’s will, almost certainly, once again be shown to be a shockwave that brings the Royal Family to their knees (again, Morgan told this story beautifully with The Queen, so I’m not sure he benefits from doing that same story over again unless he can find another angle). But there are other interesting members of this family – for good (Anne, Edward) and for ill (Andrew) – whose stories would be interesting to see more of.

The divorce did, clearly, have an impact on the crown and those within the family – and in how the public saw and felt about the Royals moving forward. Yet, the show had the chance to give us more this season (hell, why not really dive into the mechanics of Andrew and Fergie, because that was another explosive relationship and it has certainly become an issue time and again for the Royals), to show us sides of their characters we hadn’t already seen play out in the press for years. But it opted to simply tell us a story we already knew – and did so with, at times, some truly atrocious writing (Morgan has always been a bit rough with his blatant uses of metaphor, but wow, there were some doozies this time around) – which was a disservice to how interesting and compelling this story could have been. Hopefully, season six rectifies these things a bit – and gives us the chance to get real time with everyone – before the show is done.