The Crown Has Nothing Left to Say

The final season has swans, ghosts, and King Tony Blair, but it doesn’t have a message.

I’m going to miss The Crown. At its best, it has been alternately soothing, nostalgic, and educational, and even at its worst, it has always been well acted and gorgeous.

Unfortunately, the second half of the sixth and final season is very much The Crown at its worst. These six episodes, released yesterday on Netflix, are an unfocused canter around the paddock of the late 1990s and early 2000s: Prince William turns 18, Prince Charles finally makes an honest woman of Camilla Parker Bowles, Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother die, and Elizabeth II ends the series by being talked out of abdication by the ghosts of her former selves. The final scene has her walking out of an abbey door into bright-white sunlight, which feels like an admission of defeat. How do you sum up a life this long and varied, and end a show that had such vaulting ambitions? Guys, what if we make it look vaguely celestial—like she’s passing into history? All we need is a really big lamp.

Having watched Elizabeth and her family bicker, backstab, and breed over the course of six seasons and six decades, the sheer volume of melodrama in The Crown has had the counterintuitive effect of convincing me that the British monarchy will stay in place forever. If all of this couldn’t empower republicanism, what else possibly could?

The whimper of an ending is a shame, because the first half of the sixth season, covering the 1997 death of Princess Diana, was provocative and revisionist. The press intrusion suffered by the Royal Family is usually presented as a simple hero-and-villain story of beastly phone-hacking tabloid journalists and their paranoid, perpetually hunted victims. The Crown gave a more nuanced account, showing both Charles and Diana using the media to win the battle for public opinion after their divorce. Diana, knowing she looked fabulous in a swimsuit, showed off her newfound freedom by frolicking on yachts—just as she had signaled her marital unhappiness by posing alone in front of the Taj Mahal. Charles, who could never win a glamour contest, retaliated by dragooning his unwilling sons into a photo opportunity by a stream in Scotland, depicting himself as a doting, domestically minded father in contrast to his floozy ex-wife and her playboy boyfriend, Dodi Fayed.

Were journalists blameless in all this? Certainly not. But 25 years on, The Crown can acknowledge that both sides used the media as a weapon. (As Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, did two decades later—after initially claiming she had no involvement with a friendly biography by Omid Scobie, she was forced to reveal in court that she had prepared a list of talking points and licensed an aide to deliver them to the author.) For Diana’s sons, her death was a straightforward tragedy. For everyone else in the Royal Family, it was also a PR crisis. Although the first half of this season revisited material that Peter Morgan, The Crown’s creator, already covered in his 2006 film The Queen, the passage of time allowed him to be sharper about the convergence of private lives and public opinion.

The second half, however, had no such focus. Several themes competed to break through: Did Charles’s jealousy of Diana’s starriness transfer to his feelings about his son William? How hard is it to be No. 2, like the Queen’s sister, Margaret, and William’s brother, Harry? Was the apparently dutiful Queen actually the kind of saucy minx who would hook up with an American GI while doing the jitterbug on the day World War II ended in Europe?

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Sadly, none of these questions sustained the writers’ attention. Instead, the season gestured to events such as George W. Bush’s election, 9/11, and the Iraq War. The collapse of the Twin Towers was jammed into an otherwise touching episode about Princess Margaret’s declining health; she heard the news on the radio while sitting in a wheelchair in an empty room. Why? The scene had no tension, and no message—if you squinted, it might seem like a commentary on her gradual withdrawal from the world through escalating illness, but that would presuppose that Margaret had a lively interest in the rise of Islamist terrorism beforehand. Scenes like these made the back half of the season feel like the world’s most lavishly produced family Christmas letter: Dear Everyone, it’s been a busy year here: Auntie Margaret’s had a stroke, and that nice Al Gore was robbed of the presidency by the U.S. Supreme Court. Little Harry is all grown up and an absolute fiend for marijuana. Also no one likes Tony Blair now. All our love to you and yours.

Audiences fell in love with The Crown because its early seasons evoked a lost time and explored a single question. At only 25 years old, a woman born before the invention of television—a woman born into a dying empire, who never went to school, who grew up in a castle during wartime—became the ruler of a fractious kingdom, in a world that was just about to invent miniskirts, pop music, and the concept of the teenager. Would she, and the monarchy, survive?

But as The Crown’s scope has drawn closer to the present, it has lost the useful distance of history as well as its grandeur, and its sense of permission. To a Millennial like me, the soundtrack to the final season was a nostalgic delight—The Cardigans! The Chemical Brothers! “Tubthumping,” by Chumbawamba!—but it underscored the questionable ethics of fictionalizing the darkest moments of living subjects. While my own friends were smoking their first cigarettes to the New Radicals’ “You Only Get What You Give,” William and Harry were being persecuted for acting like normal adolescents, only months after their mother’s death. The Crown condemns the media’s intrusion into private grief but forgives itself for the same offense.

The other sour note is the straightforward depiction of Carole Middleton as a scheming social climber, intent on landing a prince for her precious daughter Kate. This feels like such an anachronism—Kate even compares her mother to the vulgar Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice—that I want some strong evidence to support it, and that evidence does not exist. Kate and William have now been together for two decades, but her parents have never sought the limelight, or even defended themselves, Harry-style, from the relentless snobbery and sniping they have faced. The worst anyone can fairly say about the Middletons is that their party-supply business cashed in by peddling royal-themed balloons and later went bankrupt after sales collapsed during the pandemic. This season of The Crown finally does right by Camilla—“boo-hoo, poor me,” she says after Charles invites her to complain, with a stoicism that eventually leads even the judgmental Queen to accept her—but it extends no such grace to Carole, a self-made millionaire who is the happily married mother of three well-adjusted children. Nor does The Crown ask the rather obvious question: Why would Kate want to be Queen, when the writers have mounted an hours-long propaganda campaign depicting it as the worst job in the world? (Her sister, Pippa, dated a duke but married a hedge-fund manager, and thus gets all the lovely frocks and houses without ever having to listen to a regional mayor extol the benefits of the town’s new traffic-calming measures.)

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The most surprising turn in this final season, however, comes in the sixth episode, “Ruritania.” Prime Minister Tony Blair, high on favorable opinion polls and his own messianic self-belief, advises the Queen that she could be similarly popular if she submitted the Royal Family to a modernization program. Does she really need a warden of the swans, an herb strewer, and someone to fold her napkins into a Dutch bonnet? On-screen, the Queen interviews them all—prompting a lovely, if unbelievable, shot of a line of men in various absurd costumes waiting in the hallway—and marvels at their conscientiousness and skill. Big Liz concludes that, yes, she will be keeping her swan keeper, thank you very much, because when visiting a palace, her subjects “want to feel like they’ve entered another realm.”

That conclusion rings hollow in factual terms; Elizabeth II kept modernizing until the end. In 2013, she signed off on a bill to end male primogeniture. In old age, she was an enthusiastic iPad user. When the coronavirus struck, she turned to Zoom. Almost her final act as monarch was announcing that she would like Camilla to be styled as Queen, rather than the lesser Queen Consort.

Even as they junk the moral of the earlier seasons, the final episodes reinforce The Crown’s overarching flaws. For a family supposedly racked by emotional suppression, these characters tell one another how they feel with the flat-out barbarity of Real Housewives of the Home Counties. Harry tells William he isn’t likable. William tells Charles that his abandonment of Diana led to her death. The Queen keeps reminding everyone that Harry is surplus to requirements.

Meanwhile, lavish budgets have resulted in some truly sumptuous dioramas, but also made the producers lose their minds. The first indication that the show was succumbing to imperial overstretch came in 2020, with the decision to commission a replica of Diana’s huge soufflé of a wedding dress. The garment took 14 weeks and five fittings to make, and was on-screen for approximately 27 seconds. This season, we get a dreamy version of the coronation of King Tony of Blair, complete with an imagined regal cipher and a choral version of the New Labour election anthem, “Things Can Only Get Better.” The scene is weirder even than the earlier apparition of Ghost Diana.

The last problem is that because of the show’s international appeal and its mass audience, its dialogue relies heavily on parentheticals that seem cribbed from Wikipedia. At one point, Prince Philip and Elizabeth explain the state opening of Parliament to their assembled family, complete with a reminder that the last king to enter the House of Commons—who got his head cut off as a consequence—was Charles I. The Crown does not portray the Windsors as a particularly intellectual bunch, but they have at least a vague acquaintance with the history of monarchy. In the same vein, a rather beautiful scene where Lesley Manville’s Princess Margaret dreams of saying goodbye to a younger version of Elizabeth, telling her that she won’t go inside the palace and join her for breakfast, is followed by a title card noting that she died in her sleep. If this writing team had done The Sopranos, the final episode would have cut to black—and then flashed up a text box outlining exactly who killed Tony and why.

[Helen Lewis: Prince Harry’s unwitting case for abolishing the monarchy]

In fairness to Morgan, The Crown is sailing into strong headwinds. The dutiful docu-drama approach struggles to compete with the mind-bending revelations of Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, published in January. The book shows Harry teaching the Queen Mother how to speak in Ali G patois, talking to a trash can while high, and applying his mother’s favorite moisturizer to his “frost-nipped” crown jewels. The Crown’s Harry, although played beautifully by the novice actor Luther Ford, is too peripheral. His curdling from lovable joker into a mess of thoughtless resentment begs to be placed center stage. The real-life Harry and his wife, Meghan, have officially split from the Windsors. In September 2020, they signed a multimillion-dollar development deal with Netflix, which has resulted in a saccharine documentary about their rejection of royal life (and not much else). In a 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, he and Meghan—who is biracial—suggested that, before their child Archie was born, unnamed relatives of his had worried about how dark the couple’s offspring might be.

The sense among royal-watchers is that Harry’s rage has burned itself out—and still the monarchy survives. The second volume of revelations from Omid Scobie, portentously titled Endgame, caused few ripples in Britain, even though the Dutch edition “accidentally” published the names of two royals who had supposedly fixated on Archie’s skin color. Harry himself, in a book-promotion interview in January, downgraded the accusation from racism to unconscious bias.

The other headwind facing The Crown’s interrogation of a struggling monarchy is that King Charles’s first year on the throne has been quietly successful. His biggest political intervention was wearing a tie with a Greek-flag pattern to a public event on December 1, which was read as a rebuke to the current prime minister, Rishi Sunak, for refusing to meet his Greek counterpart because of a spat over the Parthenon Marbles. (Sunak probably should have remembered that Charles’s father, Philip, was born a Greek prince.) To translate that into American: In the pantheon of scandals, the tie incident was very much “Obama’s tan suit” rather than “Donald Trump’s indictments.”

The misfortune of this final season, then, is to land at a time when the British people seem broadly content with the Royal Family, and the royals themselves have turned the soap-opera dial right down. Prince Harry is a spent force, Prince Andrew has been hidden in a cupboard, Princess Anne still loves horses more than people, and no one remembers that Prince Edward exists. King Charles is happy discussing traffic measures with regional mayors, his heir has settled into comfortable middle age, and Kate and Camilla continue to follow Elizabeth’s advice to “never complain and never explain.”

The Crown’s last scene is set in Windsor Chapel, where both the Queen and Prince Philip are buried. The pair have been planning their funerals all episode, and the writers try to inject some drama by having Prince Philip warn the Queen that none of her heirs can match her. “You were born ready,” he tells her, like a boxing manager psyching up a prizefighter. Then he admits that monarchy is a ridiculous concept. That’s undeniably true—see above, for the herbs and swans and folded napkins—but Britons seem to like it nonetheless. The stolid reign of King Charles has achieved what his mother could not. He has ensured that The Crown has nothing left to say.