The Crown became bad royalist propaganda

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By Kayleigh Donaldson | TV | December 18, 2023 |

After six increasingly drawn-out seasons, Netflix’s The Crown came to an inglorious conclusion this month. What was once the jewel in the streaming service’s roster of original content, a multi-Emmy winning ratings draw, stumbled hard as it headed towards the beginning of a new millennium for the Windsor family. Indeed, showrunner Peter Morgan had initially intended to end the series after the fifth season rather than a sixth, and boy, can you tell it with this final stretch of tedious, unintentionally hilarious, and borderline insulting episodes.

The sixth season, which was split into two parts to drag out proceedings even further, followed the royals from 1997 onward, starting with the weeks preceding the death of Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) and concluding with the wedding of Prince Charles (Dominic West) and Camilla Parker-Bowles (Olivia Williams and her unmoving wig.) Tony Blair becomes the new Prime Minister and terrifies the Queen. Prince William enters adulthood and meets his future wife at university. Other things happen but not much. Really, it’s kind of fascinating how little plot occurs over ten episodes and the eight or so years they document. It’s hard to escape the sense that Morgan doesn’t want to be here. But here we all are, and so is Netflix’s exorbitant budget for the climax of this narrative. So, what does he do with it? He drops all pretences of creative curiosity and delves into straight-up royalist propaganda.

The accusation of The Crown being nothing but a glossy PR campaign for the Windsors has haunted the series since it premiered in 2016. Morgan has a long history of writing fiction about Queen Elizabeth II and her extended family, and his perspective was always one of utmost respectability. In The Queen, his examination of the week following Diana’s death, Morgan focuses on the turmoil of the country’s symbolic and spiritual leader facing public scrutiny for maintaining a stiff upper lip in the face of nationwide grief. Elizabeth, he argues, is staunch and admirable, a lifelong believer in public service who has pushed aside all other desires to dedicate herself to Britain. How dare we be cross at her for not being sadder in public over the passing of a woman who could have benefitted from her protection and kindness in life. He expanded upon this admiration of her duty in The Audience, a West End and Broadway hit that saw Helen Mirren reprise the role of Queen to cover decades of her life and the various Prime Ministers who served under her. It’s all about duty, and the glimpses of the human beneath the tiara.

None of this is necessarily uninteresting. The first two seasons of The Crown worked because Morgan offered layers to an under-discussed part of Elizabeth’s life, when she was still a young woman and in the earliest days of her reign. Morgan had an appropriate amount of distance, both in terms of history and iconography, to explore something aside from the familiar beats. The emotions had real heft to them, especially when it came to Elizabeth’s struggles to have it all and Margaret’s battle between duty and love. Even back then, The Crown was called ‘a PR triumph for the Windsors’ by the Daily Telegraph. It certainly flinched with certain aspects — we all know that Philip was WAY more racist than that — but it felt fully drawn and lived-in amongst the glitz.

It would be hard to call the first half of the series propagandistic because it clearly had other ideas and intentions behind it than mere marketing buzz for an archaic institution. There were stories to explore, dynamics to delve into. Plus, with general audiences far less savvy in their knowledge of the pre-Diana years (particularly non-British viewers), Morgan could take a big swing with moments like the Aberfan disaster. He never felt comfortable with wilder speculation and the show always remained remarkably faithful to known history. But this also made it clearer when Morgan simply wasn’t interested in certain people, and they often ended up being women. Seriously, why not include the failed kidnapping attempt of Princess Anne?!

As the show entered its latter seasons, it was hard to escape the sense that Morgan and company had gotten timid. Young Prince Charles had been portrayed as the sympathetic result of cold parenting but wasn’t excused for his treatment of his young and naïve wife. Yet the divorce years saw him portrayed in a borderline adoring manner that felt utterly at odds with what preceded it. Even the infamous tampon call was treated as the opposite of a joke. Camilla, meanwhile, went from an active schemer betraying a young bride to a stalwart supportive partner who never complained about her lot in life, like a proper royal spouse.

It’s not simply the character changes that felt like Windsor PR. The sixth season goes out of its way to portray the Queen as the exemplification of leadership, a figurehead of such power and respect that no democratically elected PM could ever hope to replicate it. The most unintentionally hilarious moment of season six comes when the Queen has a nightmare that Tony Blair becomes so popular that he’s crowned King. There’s a curious kind of smugness in the scenes between the Queen and Blair, played by Bertie Carvel, wherein the series wants you to root for her. It’s not hard to make people root against Tony f*cking Blair these days, but having her aides pat her on the back for memorizing names and doing a fun speech at the Women’s Institute feels intensely patronizing. It doesn’t help that the vague emotional motivation for this arc - Elizabeth’s fear that her own popularity will fall short of the Prime Minister’s - has been done to death over several seasons. The Queen Mother even chastises her for forgetting that PMs come to power amid a wave of celebration but always end up crashing and burning.

The unwillingness to portray the frontline Windsors as anything but intensely sympathetic cannot help but shine a light on how the non-royals are shaped in this narrative. Morgan cannot add anything salacious to the William and Kate relationship lest he upset some Daily Express readers, so he has to turn Kate’s mother Carole into a scheming modern-day Mrs. Bennet who all but forces her passive daughter to pursue a Prince. Prince Harry’s Nazi uniform scandal gets at most 45 seconds of screentime and it’s mostly to chastise him for not listening to dutiful William’s advice (forgetting that this is the same dude who held an Out of Africa themed birthday party for himself.)

The finale gins up a crisis of confidence for the Queen to create a sliver of drama for its conclusion, imagining her considering the prospect of stepping down as Monarch. As if they didn’t spend dozens of episodes prior establishing the well-worn fact that Elizabeth would never consider abdication, even if her life depended on it. The emotional resonance of those early seasons is long gone, replaced only with a regurgitated package of buzz phrases about duty and dignity. The show posits that we should be grateful, not just for Queen Elizabeth but for the entire institution. Why? Because duty! In fairness, that is an easier message to sell when you almost entirely omit things like Prince Andrew, repeated instances of racism, and vast interference in the democratic system from the equation.

The final season feels like Morgan’s application for a knighthood, so bereft of ideas and perception it is. There are moments where the series seems genuinely unnerved by the idea of taking a creative license or even lightly speculating about adding some sort of emotional layer to a Wikipedia-esque skimming of recent history. By stripping this story of anything remotely challenging, Morgan has left behind nothing more than a meek, if well-funded, advert for a constitutional monarchy. It’s so hilariously out of step with the rest of the world, but it’s also not even a good piece of propaganda. If the purpose of propaganda is to rile up skeptics to your cause, The Crown just leaves you feeling weary over the inevitability of this institution’s continued existence. This is what we’re stick with? At least we don’t have to deal with a seventh season of The Crown.