The fifth season of The Crown premiered on Netflix on November 9th, 2022. The series goes through the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, starting at the marriage of her and Prince Phillip in 1947. The new season covers the British Royal Family in the 1990’s and is largely centered around the relationship between Princess Diana and Prince Charles, who is the current king. Their relationship caught the hearts and minds of many around the world as everyone pictured Diana and Charles as a fairy tale story. As The Crown shows, their marriage was anything but magical.
There has been much sensitivity centered around this new season of The Crown, receiving possibly the most blowback out of any of the other seasons. This is partly due to the death of Queen Elizabeth II in September, who was Britain’s longest reigning monarch. Filming has already begun on what is supposed to be the final season of The Crown, season six, and they took a pause in production to honor the Queen. Critics called for the Netflix series to push back the release of the new season in respect to the Royal Family even though the season was already pushed back two years due to the coronavirus pandemic. The new season of The Crown is one of the most revealing compared to the other seasons and is very dramatic from start to finish.
The season begins in 1991 and goes through 1997. It includes the infamous year of 1992, coined as the “Annus Horribilis”, meaning horrible year, by the Queen herself. That year, Windsor Castle caught on fire, the marriages of Queen Elizabeth’s children were all in turmoil, and Diana helped write a book detailing serious allegations about her mistreatment in the Royal Family. Also during this time, the season covers a scandalous phone call made public in 1993 between Charles and Camilla while Charles was still in a marriage with Diana. In response, Diana went out in her “revenge dress”, garnering worldwide attention. The end of the season shows the interview with Diana and former disgraced BBC journalist Martin Brashir. The process of Brashir getting the interview brought a lot of details to light and showed how Brashir manipulated Diana to make the interview. If you couldn’t tell already, most of season five is negative and there aren’t many positive parts of it.
The first episode of the season begins with the Royal Britannia, the yacht that formerly belonged to the Royal Family. It was a symbol of the family for nearly fifty years and was used to travel to British colonies, among other uses. The scene transitions to the new actors and jumps right into the drama. Producers connect the Royal Britannia ship with the “Queen Victoria Syndrome”, a term phrased by a British newspaper claiming that the British people were getting sick of Queen Elizabeth and wanted someone young and vibrant to lead the country, someone like Prince Charles. As shown in the first episode, much of the series is dramatized and is complete fiction. Nevertheless, the first episode does its job in drawing the viewer in to watch the rest of the season as it appears the Queen’s grip on Britain and the Royal Family is disintegrating.
There was much controversy surrounding the actors chosen for season five and later season six. The Queen for the next two seasons, Imelda Staunton, has received mixed reviews from viewers. Some say while Staunton is a good actor for the role, she doesn’t compare to the previous two that were in the role, Claire Foy and Olivia Colman. Personally, I liked Colman and Foy better but I believe Staunton was still a good pick for the role. After all, she plays the Queen during the hardest period of her reign, with so much internal and external conflicts taking place for all to see. This season was clearly the hardest season an actor could play the Queen because there is so much emotion during this time. There were also a few other actors chosen that I didn’t particularly like for their respective roles. For example, I didn’t like the selection for Princess Margaret, the Queen’s sister. The directors chose Lesley Manville, who is a great actress, but didn’t seem to fully get into the character. The directors also failed to show her declining health as Margaret seemed to be doing fine through most of the season. Hands down though, my favorite actor in the whole season was Elizabeth Debiki who played Diana, Princess of Wales. Debiki managed to garner the full emotion Diana went through as she excellently and accurately expressed Diana’s feelings, a task that is not easy to do especially when you didn’t personally know Diana.
Overall, I did indeed like this season. I wouldn’t say it was as well written as previous seasons– my favorite season of The Crown is season four, which covered the Royal Family during the 1980’s, from the reign of Margaret Thatcher to the rise of Diana. While season five wasn’t my favorite season, it also wasn’t the worst, and this was in my opinion the hardest time period to cover the Royal Family because much of what happened took place behind closed doors. Season five for sure brought the drama as the viewers were always on the edge of their seats on what would happen next. I will definitely need to watch season five again to fully understand all that went down because it was such a monumental season that is leading up to the final season of The Crown, season six.
