TV

Should You Bother Watching: ‘The Crown’

It's not just a show for people who love the monarchy.

by Stephanie Zhang  4 September 2018
The Crown

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Welcome to ‘Should You Bother Watching’, Junkee’s new column which helps to answer the streaming-age’s biggest question: is this show for me? In this one, we tackle Netflix’s The Crown.

Haven’t gotten enough of the royal family after Harry and Meghan’s wedding? Want to know what goes on behind closed doors of Buckingham Palace? Well, The Crown might be able to satiate your curiosity.

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The Crown tells a dramatised story of Queen Elizabeth II, beginning with her wedding to Prince Philip. Show creator Peter Morgan’s vision for the show was to cover Queen Elizabeth II’s life over six seasons, ageing her and the rest of the cast to depict the different stages of her life.

The first two seasons have already aired on Netflix, with an all-star cast led by Claire Foy, Matt Smith, and John Lithgow.

Expected to be released in 2019, season 3 has replaced Claire Foy with Olivia Colman as the Queen, Prince Philip will be taken over by Tobias Menzies, and Helena Bonham Carter will portray Princess Margaret.

These past two seasons, The Crown has focused primarily on Elizabeth’s early years on the throne and the tumultuous relationship between Elizabeth and her husband Philip. It also highlighted some major historical moments like the Great Smog of 1952 and the Suez Crisis.

But the core of the show is all that juicy Windsor family drama, from Princess Margaret’s high-profile affairs to the tense dynamics at play when the Duke of Windsor, the former king, wants to return to public service.

The Crown has drawn near universal acclaim, taking home multiple Golden Globes and Emmys, both for its stellar cast and the luxurious costumes and production — and it’s oddly enthralling.

Here’s a quick rundown of the pros and cons of the first two seasons of The Crown.

Pros

Where The Crown shines is peeling back the mythos of Queen Elizabeth and revealing the human woman behind the title. Although she has been monarch for almost 70 years now, in real life she does very little in the public eye that might show her private character.

The Crown takes its time to show us her character, opening with her wedding and exploring her life in Buckingham Palace even before she assumes the crown. As the show continues, Elizabeth struggles with her new position as head of state and head of the Windsor family — she is often seen to be but a lone woman, wrestling with the weight of her position.

Her character is subtle — Elizabeth’s personality is simply much quieter than her sister Margaret’s (Vanessa Kirby), or Philip’s, or even personal secretary Tommy Lascelles’ (Pip Torrens). These other characters, in particular the (many) Prime Ministers,  continually underestimate her, and it’s in these moments that you feel sympathy for the young queen as she’s yanked one direction or another when trying to make difficult and important decisions.

Over the first season, Elizabeth steels as she grows more comfortable in her powerful position, and it’s a triumph to watch. In her first episodes as Queen, Elizabeth questions what she can do, seeing herself still as a young woman shunted off to the side while a cabinet of old, white men lie to and exclude her.

Eventually, she is able to say with confidence, “I am aware that I am surrounded by people who feel that they could do the job better. Strong people with powerful characters, more natural leaders, perhaps better suited to leading from the front, making a mark. But, for better or worse, the crown has landed on my head.”

Cons

As a show depicting the head of a colonial nation, The Crown sits in a pretty awkward space in today’s world.

We are taken through the goings-on inside the palace and the parliament, and often offered glimpses of the Queen’s empire, including Ghana and Kenya. Because it is bound by the limitation of having to abide by history, it rarely offers much commentary on the colonialism and wider political context. It attempts a kind of historical neutrality.

Elizabeth and Philip’s visits to Britain’s colonies are portrayed as simply events that have happened — which they have — but the show does not choose to portray them in a negative or positive light, only in the way that the events have been seen in the historical context.

Even when the Queen resolves tension between Britain and Ghana in episode eight of the second season, she is lauded for loosening up (she smiles, for once) but little is said about her status as the head of the Commonwealth or Britain’s place in the world.

The show, like the Queen herself, stays rather distant. Through her first few years on the throne, Elizabeth learns the sometimes difficult lesson that the crown is more important than anything else in the world, and as the wearer of the crown, she cannot be anything but impartial.

The show often goes like this: an event occurs, the Prime Minister provides this context for the audience while meeting with the Queen, and no matter how much we wish Elizabeth would take a stand, she unfortunately can only advise the Prime Minister to act in the nation’s best interests.

Then, we step back with her and watch as the rest of history unfolds. When the Great Smog hits in season one, the Queen struggles with her obligation to inaction, she pressures Churchill, but that’s as far as she can go. We together have to wait impatiently for Churchill to finally do something, and it all feels hopelessly restless.

This can’t be helped, due to the nature of the show, as well as the way Elizabeth’s character is written, but it does make for a very frustrating watch as the plot becomes not driven by the protagonist’s action, but rather by the sequence of predetermined historical events that occur.

The antiquated institution that Elizabeth symbolises doesn’t really do much, and even after a while Elizabeth’s character takes a bit of a backseat as other, more vibrant characters like Margaret take the spotlight.

As Margaret says to Elizabeth, “You’ve managed to disappear and become invisible, while wearing the crown.”

So, should you be watching?

As a drama, The Crown makes for an enjoyable watch, especially if you’re not over royal fever.

It gives you the rare glimpse into life as a queen or princess and humanises these larger than life figures, but at the same time, don’t expect the show to stick too closely to history or accurate at all in its portrayal of these figures. Even show creator Peter Morgan says that he hopes the Queen will never watch The Crown, as the show takes a large amount of creative freedom and is a dramatised story, after all.

The Crown seasons 1 and 2 are currently on Netflix.

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Stephanie Zhang is a Media and Literature student at the University of Melbourne. They are currently parent to a few small houseplants and hope to one day adopt a cat, and continue expanding their collection of animal-themed socks. Their other interests currently include cyberpunk media, poets of colour, and the rise of online extremism.