When discussing the final batch of episodes in The Crown’s sixth and final season with a friend, he mentioned something that got me thinking about how the series slowly, over the course of the last four seasons, fell apart. He lamented that the latter seasons of the series couldn’t manage to capture the heart and emotional heft of the initial few. And he was completely right. The Crown, in the last several seasons, became less a story about character and turned into a tabloid-influenced history book that took so much of the humanity and complexity of the characters at its center – because despite being based on real people, these are, ultimately characters – and created caricatures that felt almost soulless at times.
Some of that shift from character driven storytelling to allowing the tabloid tales and salacious gossip to drive the story comes, yes, in part from the role that actual tabloids played in the lives of Diana, Charles, Camilla, William, and Harry. But it also is the result of the fact that the cast of characters swelled to such a number in the final two seasons that it was not possible to serve each character the way they needed to be served to feel complete and fully realized. In seasons one and two, the story revolved around a triangle of characters – Elizabeth and her relationships with her husband Philip and her sister Margaret (the “spare,” a theme that would get a great deal of play in these final six episodes of season six with the emergence of Prince Harry as someone with a similar difficulty of wearing the title that his late great aunt did throughout her life). Throw in some time with Winston Churchill for good measure and you have a series that allows for plenty of time to explore each character’s wants, needs, and conflict with one another. The characters drove the story and when writer Peter Morgan (who penned every episode in the series) chose to deviate, the story still had a moral to it that reflected back a central character’s own situation – heavy-handed, to be sure, but Morgan never lost sight of the characters at the heart of the story he was telling.
But now, having finished the series, boy were these last several seasons a disappointment in comparison to those early days. Yes, some of that is also recency bias – ending the series in 2005 means that most of the viewing audience was alive for, if not fully cognizant of, much of the action this time out. However, season six, on the whole, never felt like a story about people. Rather, it felt like a story about how the world at that time saw these people. We rarely were granted time with the inner thoughts and lives of the characters as they simply related to their lives – everything was always revealed (again, often heavy-handedly, such as the return of Claire Foy and Olivia Colman as the ghosts of Elizabeth past to convince their elder self – played with grace and poise by Imelda Staunton – to refuse to abdicate and stay the course) in relation to some major outside stimuli. A poll says that the Royal Family is outdated – let’s watch the existential crisis unfold! And inquest is made into Diana’s death – how does that impact William and Harry, and how will that impact William’s nascent relationship with his future wife, Kate? We didn’t get time with William alone, working through how such a situation would impact him personally. We didn’t get to see how dating Kate was a source of strength and freedom for him – it was just another box for the show to tick to make sure it covered a key historical plot point.
This unfortunate choice to make character development secondary to the outward situations dictating the storytelling was made all the more glaring by Morgan’s choice to make episode eight of the season a spotlight on the late Princess Margaret, detailing her final months before her death – a death that, by all accounts, shattered her elder sister at the time (which was followed, rather quickly, by the death of the Queen Mother). This decision to take a break from ripped from the headlines inspiration for stories and tell a much simpler tale made this episode the best of the season by a long shot. The relationship between Elizabeth and Margaret has been one of the two central pillars on which the series has been braced since its start. Watching the final chapter play out in tandem with the rumored VE night escapades of their younger selves allowed us to once again take stock of how their push and pull over the decades never severed their sibling bond (even though Margaret had every right to remain furious with her sister for the heartbreak she dealt with in the past). Exploring those final moments of this sister bond brought the series back to the beginning, when it was focused on how the institution of the monarchy impacted the relationships of those within it and made me nostalgic for those early seasons, when things were simple and the characters shone.
The rest of the second part of season six suffered from what plagued part one and season five: a reliance on story to drive character. This wasn’t a story about the impact of the monarchy on these characters. Rather, it was a story focused on how others saw the monarchy and not on how the monarchy impacted those within it. Such a disappointing choice to remove the interesting internal elements – those quiet moments where characters interacted, argued, fought, and strove for a place in their family hierarchy. Episode eight allowed for that spirit to return – not to mention allowing the show’s two Oscar nominated actors of Staunton and Lesley Manville the chance to really dig into some complex character work for the first time in two seasons (the series was always at its best when Margaret was at the center – something it solely lacked in the final four seasons that only ever deigned to give Margaret an episode per season to shine – perhaps an indication that while the crown rests on the head of “number one,” it’s the life of “number two” that ends up being the much more cinematic and intriguing with the “freedom” they are allowed clashing with the rigidity of the expectation that they serve as the support and often shield for their older sibling).
The Crown was an interesting series for a number of reasons, chief among them the sharp dip in quality as time rushed on in the story. Without the overwhelming presence of Diana in these final episodes, I was hoping the series might find the magic it had at the start. Alas, it continued to push on without real thought for the characters within its story, throwing historical moments at us without the time or energy to truly unpack how they impacted the people involved. A shame for a show with such great promise to go out with such a whimper – and a lack of understanding about what made the series – and the institution of the monarchy itself – so interesting to so many. It’s not the scandals or the events, it’s the people. I wish we got to know them a bit better.
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