You were waiting for it with great impatience and so are we: the royal family continues to reveal its less than stellar backstage in the fifth season of The Crown, available on Netflix. And these new episodes, surrounded by many controversies, are even stronger since the death of the queen.
Prepare your cup of tea, your bone china, your Scottish plaid, and revise your best regards to the crowd, Queen Elizabeth II is back. Well, obviously, she didn’t literally come back from the dead. But Netflix causes a beautiful illusion with season 5 of The Crown.
As usual, the series is of a formidable elegance and efficiency. Especially since, that’s it: the queen has aged well and now looks more like our last real memories of the sovereign. To the extent that The Crown continues to chain the controversies (which is rather funny, given the content of the series, which precisely unpacks all the royal escapades).
From its first season, this historical fresco, despite having won numerous awards, has not ceased to be criticized from all sides. The queen herself, Claire Foy, was thus paid less than her male colleague, Matt Smith (House of the Dragon, Doctor Who). Then, it was voices close to the royal family and the government who spoke out against The Crown. Even before the broadcast of this fifth season, two former Prime Ministers as well as the British actress Judi Dench have already taken the floor to denounce the inaccuracy, even the lies of the series.
To appease the spirits, Netflix had to include a warning in its trailers, specifying that the story is “inspired by real events”. It must be said that this fifth season clearly does not take tweezers with his Royal Highnesses and their image continues to shine in these ten new chapters.
Elizabeth II becomes more sensitive
But before dwelling on the narrative springs of The Crown, you will already have to go through a familiar process: adapting to a new cast. Every two seasons, the original Netflix creation is indeed equipped with new actors and actresses to embody the key characters of the monarchy and the British government. From season 3, Olivia Colman had thus worthily succeeded Claire Foy, becoming a much colder and more self-confident queen.
For this royal renewal, it’s Imelda Staunton (known for her role as Umbridge in Harry Potter) who must now wear the crown. And his interpretation, which reveals a more fragile and emotional face of the character, is well worth a new rain of rewards. The actress proves to be overwhelming in the four episodes that we have been able to see, out of the ten that make up this penultimate season. Two months after the death of Elizabeth II in real life, this new fictional face gives unexpected depth to The Crown. The series now becomes a way to extend our familiarity with the queen, while perfectly recounting events from the past. As always, this original Netflix creation therefore remains timeless.
Politics in the background
Alongside the formidable Imelda Staunton, other remarkable actors and actresses are entering the great royal family: Elisabeth Debicki (tenet) embodies Princess Diana, while Jonathan Pryce (Game Of Thrones) dons the costume of Prince Philip. Only Dominic West (TheWire) is slightly less convincing in the role of the future king, Charles. But their outstanding performances make it possible to give life to a new decade: the 1990s. This entire fifth season thus dwells on the crises experienced by the royal family: the divorces of the Queen’s children, entangled in destructive marriages like that of Charles and Diana, the fire at Windsor Castle, the leak of sulphurous private recordings that have become public…
The Crown now tends to talk more about personal and intimate matters. The political intrigues, however central in the fourth season with the Thatcher years, are here relegated to the background. Consequence: when the narration touches on feelings, it is indeed more difficult to claim historical accuracy at all times. The criticisms addressed to these new episodes therefore seem partly justified: we feel that Peter Morgan, the creator of the series, moves away from the documentation to put both feet in the emotion. But this sentimental exploration is not necessarily a defect: it simply transforms the series into another work, which is closer to fiction and no longer to faithful transcription.
The Crown is no longer a long calm river
We are not going to lie to each other: this new season is clearly to the disadvantage of the royal family, whose perfect image is falling apart. We are even surprised to hate almost all these characters that we had loved so much for four seasons. But this narrative positioning ultimately seems to be the logical continuity of previous episodes. The Queen’s sympathy had already been widely questioned in the first two seasons, for example, with the story of the aborted marriage between Princess Margaret and Peter Townsend. If we take The Crown as a whole, the series is finally of an unparalleled coherence and navigates perfectly between the scandals of the past.
And if these last seasons are more tumultuous, it is mainly because the decades that it addresses are also more tumultuous, while being much closer to our reality. The relationship between Charles and Diana is well known by the greatest number and has mostly been commented on long, wide and across, until today. Finally, the start of the reign of Elizabeth II, unveiled in the first seasons of The Crown, was almost a long, quiet river by comparison. At the time, the sovereign was surrounded by a rather solid family and marriage, while being generally in tune with her Prime Ministers. But by the 1980s, scandals took precedence over royalty, something the show can’t really ignore.
Bringing the royal family to life in our imaginations
However, The Crown is far from being disrespectful, on the contrary: we come out of this fifth season with more empathy for the queen than before. His recent death brings a new dimension to Netflix’s original creation, which always makes you want to go to the history books to find out the real anecdotes behind the fiction.
Season 5 is all the more relevant today as it largely focuses on Charles’ ambition and a queen who begins her own decline. While Charles III is now king, this season, certainly unflattering, will at least have the merit of continuing to keep this royal family alive for decades to come in our imaginations. And that’s already a lot.
