The Crown season five controversies explained
It seems everyone has an opinion about The Crown as the Netflix show catches up to history and recent events intrude
TV Features The Crown
As we approach the premiere of the fifth season of Netflix’s The Crown, the conversation over the show’s interpretation of real-world events is heating up. Controversy is nothing new for The Crown; its warts-and-all depiction of the inner lives of the British royal family has been a source of irritation for Buckingham Palace and its supporters since the show first premiered. Creator and showrunner Peter Morgan has always asserted that The Crown is a fictional drama and not intended to be taken as unbiased truth. Netflix even added a disclaimer stating as much before the season five trailer on YouTube: “Inspired by real events, this fictional dramatization tells the story of Queen Elizabeth II and the political and personal events that shaped her reign.”
The show’s unflinching and sharply focused narrative seemed more removed when it was dealing with events from, say, the 1950s, ’60s, or ’70s, but as the story inches closer to the present day and events that are still fresh in the public consciousness, it feels more like a contemporary drama than a historical one. To complicate things further, the new season comes at a time of turmoil in the U.K., with the nation still in the process of mourning the queen and transitioning to a new sovereign, King Charles III. As the British public openly questions the necessity and utility of the royal family in the real world, the series will be taking us back to a period, not so long ago, when those same questions were at the top of everyone’s mind. It all makes for a minefield of sensitive topics just waiting to provoke outrage. Here’s a rundown of the stories that have already made headlines.
Buckingham Palace is ready to defend the king
Season four ended with Charles and Diana’s marriage on the rocks, and despite Queen Elizabeth’s refusal to let Charles be with Camilla and Prince Philip’s reminder to Diana that her duty first and foremost is to the queen, we all know what’s coming next. Season five will include events from the year 1992, or the “annus horribilis,” as the queen once referred to it in a famous speech, as well as Diana’s death in 1997 and its aftermath. It was a low point for the monarchy, from which no one emerged unscathed. And it’s probably the last thing they want the public thinking about right now.
As the show heads into the “all-out war” behind the scenes of the failing royal marriage, the palace is already prepared to denounce anything that paints the new king in an unflattering light. Speaking to The Telegraph, a source reiterated the palace’s official stance that The Crown is, “a drama, not a documentary.” The same story quoted a friend of the king, who called the show “exploitative.” So it’s safe to say that there’s no love lost between Peter Morgan and the institution.
A letter of resignation and a hint of approval
This season, Dominic West will take over the role of King Charles while Elizabeth Debicki steps in for Emma Corrin as Diana. West told Radio Times that when he found out he got the part he sent a letter to King Charles offering to resign from his position as ambassador of The Prince’s Trust charity. He received a reply directly from the king’s private secretary politely turning him down, which he summed up in the interview as the institution saying, “You do what you like. You’re an actor. It’s nothing to do with us.” He also said that he got a tacit nod of approval from Camilla when he ran into her at a party and she jokingly referred to him as “Your Majesty.”
A former prime minister has his say
Season five reportedly includes a scene in which Prince Charles and Prime Minister John Major (played by Jonny Lee Miller) meet in secret in 1991 and discuss the queen’s potential abdication. There’s also a scene that shows Major and his wife making disparaging remarks about the royal family. When news of these dramatic liberties broke, a spokesman for Major put out a statement denouncing the show in no uncertain terms: “Sir John has not cooperated—in any way—with The Crown. Nor has he ever been approached by them to fact-check any script material in this or any other series. … Discussions between the monarch and prime minister are entirely private and—for Sir John—will always remain so.” The statement went on to say that The Crown is “nothing other than damaging and malicious fiction” and “a barrel-load of nonsense peddled for no other reason than to provide maximum—and entirely false—dramatic impact.” Tell us how you really feel, Sir John.
Dame Judi Dench has entered the chat
Judi Dench is no stranger to playing fictionalized versions of English queens. Nevertheless, she denounced the new season of The Crown in a letter published in The Times, calling it “cruel and crude.”
“Given some of the wounding suggestions apparently contained in the new series—that King Charles plotted for his mother to abdicate, for example, or once suggested his mother’s parenting was so deficient that she might have deserved a jail sentence—this is both cruelly unjust to the individuals and damaging to the institution they represent,” she wrote.
Dench was also one of the driving forces behind Netflix’s decision to add that disclaimer about it being purely fictionalized, not just to the trailer but to every episode of the season.
Netflix reacts to the backlash
The controversy over the new season of The Crown has also spilled into other programming decisions at Netflix. Besides adding the disclaimer, Netflix has also delayed a documentary it was planning to release about rogue royals Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess Of Sussex. The project was never officially announced, but Deadline reported that it has been pushed into 2023 so as not to irk the institution any more than it already has. According to Deadline’s source, “they’re rattled at Netflix and they blinked first and decided to postpone the documentary.”
Jonathan Pryce to the rescue
Meanwhile, Jonathan Pryce, who takes over for Tobias Menzies as the older Prince Philip this season, also had his say about the controversy swirling around season five. “I just find it very disappointing that a handful of people, and it is a handful of people, are being critical of this in any way without having seen it,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “I mean, they say it’s hurtful, unjust, dangerous—none of those things I see in this production. I don’t think any of us do.”
Viewers will get to see for themselves and decide whether they agree that The Crown is properly respectful to its subjects when the fifth season drops on Netflix on November 9.
39 Comments
Netflix’s decision to add that disclaimer about it being purely fictionalized, not just to the trailer but to every episode of the season.This part of the controversy (if you can really call it that) confuses the hell out of me and is part of a larger, more worrying cultural trend. Some people evidently cannot separate a fictionalized retelling from reality. The Crown never claimed to be the 100% true story; I never watched it assuming it all happened exactly as told.So this concerted effort to make explicitly clear that it’s not a documentary is truly bizarre. I get that it’s more a PR move than anything else, but are there really people out there watching The Crown and taking everything as gospel?
Look, they shouldn’t, but people definitely think that way. Watching TV is easier than picking up a well-researched book with citations.
but are there really people out there watching The Crown and taking everything as gospel? You live in a world where millions of people seriously believe that Hillary Clinton organized a pedophile ring from the basement of a pizzeria. So of course, there are people out that will watch this as gospel and seriously believe it to be real.
Fucking Americans.
Thank you.
Of course the former spokesman of the British Green Party, David Icke, claims that most people in authority (including the royals, if I recall) are lizard people in disguise. Craziness is universal.
Let’s be clear: those are the Americans that don’t fuck. Not fucking is the reason they are that way.
You sayin’ people are dumb?
Because, if you are, I’m agreein’ with ya!
I had to Google the scene where Diana eats a live human baby to see if it was something that really happened. (it was)
You’re experiencing thing I realized years ago that there’s a lot of dumb people. Your intelligences are not necessarily the medium average of everyone elses. There are a lot of people that see something on TV and think “this must be truth”. I’m not kidding you. I guess we’ve gotta all slow down for these people unfortunately.
When it involves real people viewers will likely think some of it might have happened, or a version of it, so when they completely make scenes up then it does add to the misconceptions about real events
If we’re really mad about historical inaccuracies, how about Charles being hot? Talk about fiction for dramatic impact.
Just wait until he channels Jimmy McNulty and starts speaking in a Baltimore accent.
“You’re an asshole Phillip Arthur George.”
“What the devil did I do?”
He’s good police.
Will be so disappointed if Prince Charles’s reaction to tampongate isn’t “The fuck did I do?”
I was staying with them until Charles and the Earl of Halifax solved a mystery by saying “fuck”
And while the Queen wasn’t half-bad looking in her youth, she was never as attractive as any of the people playing her are.
The Crown’s casting director has been VERY kind to Charles, Anne, and Camilla.
The early reviews are all saying the season is a lot more sympathetic to the family than you’d expect from the stink they’re making.
The very slightest criticism should be treasonable, in their eyes. Just like the old days.Personally, I think they should seize their assets and toss them out on the street (or maybe take them for a nice long walk in the woods, like they did with the Romanovs, but that’s my Irish grandpa talking, not me).
We sent them to a farming collective upstate where they’ll have lots of room to . . . rest.
You can still get thrown in jail in Thailand for telling a joke about their king, so there are places still like that.
It has been throughout. The entire situation with Charles and Diana is so crazy that it’s unbelievable.
Charles is also terrified of criticism. That’s why he couldn’t handle being married to Diana. It’s why he’s allowed his son over and over to be trashed in the media to take the focus away from his actions.
Is it me, or has the “oh, this show is so unfair to the Royal Family” stink grown as we’ve gotten to a point in the tale where events are more and more in living memory? People weren’t having a fit about the implication that Phillip cheated on Elizabeth during his world tour in season 2, but now that we’re to the whole Charles/Diana scandal crap and a lot of the PMs and family being depicted are very much still alive, more are getting a lot butthurt about these dramatic licenses.Furthermore, while no character has come across as a shining paragon of humanity, I think that on the whole, all of them have come across as human when it would have been very easy to turn them into unsympathetic caricatures. In S4, Charles and Diana were both kind of awful, but the show also depicted them as being in super shitty situations over which neither felt they had much control and in which both were understandably miserable. I can’t see how the last two seasons will be any different with how they continue to depict the Windsors. It’s not going to be an historical documentation of these people, but it will depict human characters who resemble the historical figures.
It’s definitely a combination that season 4 earning all those Emmy awards made a lot of people way more aware of this and like you said, more scrutiny paid to it as it gets more modern. Winston Churchill is long dead, so the show could largely do what it wanted with him. Someone like John Majors is very much alive, and can speak up if he disagrees with the show.
I think you’re mixing up John Major with Lee Majors there.
The British Crown have always been the biggest babies when it comes to protecting their image, and they’ve got a lot of defenders. Charles is far less popular than his mother, and they know that, so in a time of insecurity they’re lashing out even harder. If it gets to the point where people are seriously demanding an end to the monarchy expect it to get even more brutal, with libel/slander lawsuits aplenty and as much crackdown as they can get away with.
I really hate defending them or especially Margaret Thatcher, but the general public is so ignorant of history and current events that to add to that only makes things worse. There were so many real life terrible things Thatcher did that to focus on a made-up scenario where she tried to disband parliament waters down other legitimate stories as possibly false in the public eye.
Interestingly, I think the show managed to succeed in humanizing Thatcher while still keeping her reprehensible. It was truly remarkable.
True, you do get to see where she came from and her understandable bafflement at the Royals
Honestly ridiculous to have Dominic West as Prince Charles. If Prince Charles was that good looking, the entire history of the modern crown would have been completely different. Diana and the country would have loved him. Here’s much better casting:
Whoa Martin Freeman melted!
“The Windsors” is so savage. That is one series I want to take as the truth.
Season five reportedly includes a scene in which Prince Charles and Prime Minister John Major (played by Jonny Lee Miller) meet in secret in 1991 and discuss the queen’s potential abdication. There’s also a scene that shows Major and his wife making disparaging remarks about the royal family.Well, I suppose they had to do something to make John Major interesting.
Wonder how they’ll manage the Prince Andrew years. However will they hire an actor who doesn’t sweat?
It’s probably not possible, unless you grow up in the UK, to fully understand just how strange the relationship is between the royals and the media. Anyone criticising the estate stands a good chance of their career being ruined, so you get celebrities having to fawn over them to either just keep their reputation clean or, more sociopathically, to get their feet under the table. I mean, when the queen died newsreaders were FORCED to “look and speak in a sombre manner” ffs.