It’s clear upon watching the episodes, though, that many of these concerns have been blown way out of proportion. West presents Charles with a few more nuanced shades than his predecessors, while Morgan’s script emphasizes his relative progressivism within the family and his establishment of The Prince’s Trust (the youth charity that is, in all fairness, one of the modern royals’ most impressive achievements, even if it does mean we have to watch a cringe-inducing scene of him breakdancing with a group of kids in south London), generally painting him in a far more sympathetic light. Meanwhile, where Emma Corrin’s Diana—neglected, wracked with self-doubt, suffering through postpartum depression and an eating disorder—felt wholly sympathetic, here, Elizabeth Debicki presents a steelier, stranger Diana. In an astonishing performance that serves as one of the highlights of the season, Debicki not only inhabits the princess’s look and mannerisms with uncanny precision, but also presents her as a more complex figure. Here, she is a woman whose decade of pressure and scrutiny from both the Firm and the British tabloids has made her, understandably, myopic, deeply paranoid, and frankly, a little manipulative. In the War of the Waleses, this season makes it more than clear there were no winners.
It’s really the Charles and Diana of it all that has left The Crown with a fundamental problem, one which the starkly divided reviews of the current season possibly attest to: The show must now, essentially, serve the two very different audiences that represent Britain’s generational divide over the relevance of the monarchy. The early seasons set further in the past could more easily retain the show’s tenuously held prestige-TV veneer, whether thanks to its glossy, lavishly produced period trappings or the simple fact that the first few seasons tended to be a lot more sympathetic to the royal family. With Season 4, and the beginning of the Charles and Diana saga, the show attracted a new and younger audience. (Myself included—I only went back to watch the original seasons after wondering how Emma Corrin would play Diana, finding myself thoroughly gripped, and bingeing all 10 episodes over the course of a single weekend.)
And whether you find them to be in poor taste or not, it is the scenes involving Charles and Diana that are, inevitably, the most compelling. A two-episode arc covering the shockingly unethical methods used by Bashir to book his interview with Diana (the true depths of Bashir’s deceit were only fully uncovered last year, in an independent report commissioned by the BBC, lending it an extra frisson of topicality) makes for some of the most gripping television of the year. The interview itself, it turns out, took place on Bonfire Night—as you might imagine, Morgan doesn’t miss the opportunity to wring that metaphor dry—as all of the royals would be out of Kensington Palace. The bare-bones television crew enters under the guise of installing a hi-fi system, lending it all the nail-biting tension of a heist movie. A scene in which Diana goes to meet the queen at Buckingham Palace to give her advance warning of the interview shows Staunton’s more passive, out-of-touch queen regain some of her nerve, and the chemistry between her and Debicki is electric. Finally, a visit Charles pays to Diana in the penultimate episode, when they make scrambled eggs together, is both emotionally devastating and the final confirmation—if you needed it—of the couple’s fundamental incompatibility, realized with riveting gusto by both West and Debicki.
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