It is December 14, 2023. It is a day that will provide future anniversaries if we take into account that one of the most applauded British series of this century, The Crown, says goodbye on Netflix with the broadcast of the last six episodes. It is also the end of a stage for Peter Morgan, the creator born in Wimbledon, who closes his particular trilogy about Elizabeth II. In 2006 he wrote the script for the film The Queen about the Queen's role in the days after the death of Diana of Wales. In 2013 he premiered the play The Audience about meetings with prime ministers at Buckingham Palace, which began in the West End and reached Broadway. And finally, he wrote The Crown (2016), which served as both a compendium of the previous texts and a historical expansion of the United Kingdom and a dissertation of the crown as a symbol.
But, if we pay attention to the reception of this final stage of television fiction, it may not be remembered with the overwhelming acclaim that it aroused. “It's so bad it's basically an out-of-body experience,” was published in The Guardian when the first half of the sixth season premiered. The title referred to Morgan's questionable decision to extend Diana's last eight weeks into three episodes (when in other seasons they could have covered five years of British history) and then allow a kind of ghost of the princess to visit Charles. or Elizabeth II.
Critic Lucy Mangan lamented that Morgan had lost subtlety in approaching the most recent chapters of The Crown: “Suspension of disbelief can never be established. "Diana's ghost dances on ruins." She wasn't the only one. Michael Hogan, from the same reference newspaper, stated that “what began as a prestigious period piece now seems like a trash TV movie” and that Morgan had lost the ability to combine the lives of the Windsors with untold chapters. of British history or the clever parallels between family and history in capital letters.
“Simmering subtlety has been exchanged for flashy melodrama,” the article reproached, accusing The Crown of having gone from being “a superior Downton abbey” to becoming “a guilty pleasure of gossip.” Perhaps this Catalan newspaper had published that the Netflix series had to face an uncomfortable truth ("The Crown has already gotten bored of its queen, without knowing what to do with her, and Staunton may not be the right actress to return the splendor character and surviving the death of the daughter-in-law), but I certainly did not despise so many minutes dedicated to Diana.
The presence of Elizabeth Debicki and the production values could almost hide, for example, the tacky portrayal of Mohamed Al-Fayed as a soap opera villain; the fanciful recreation of Diana and Dodi's last night, which was a poorly concealed favor to the people who really died in the Soul Bridge tunnel; or the washing of Charles's image now that he is sitting on the throne, even entering into contradictions with the dramatization of Diana's death in The Queen. How can an author who prides himself on his ability to transform speculation into truth, always thanks to documentation, fall into such a trap?
However, The Guardian's texts, the most hurtful of all those published, indicated the status of The Crown in the collective imagination, both due to the prestige of the publication and its television reviews as well as its British condition. It didn't even leave room for the work to recover: its forcefulness indicated that, after Diana, the reputation of the series was impossible. Not even the Emmy awards obtained in 2021, when it swept the dramatic categories taking home best series, script, direction, actor, actress, supporting and secondary, could hide the fall.
Consequently, the last six chapters appear in the Netflix catalog with the heaviness of an epilogue that, rather than finishing the story, leads the viewer to exhaustion. The platform also made a mistake: selling the episodes with an insinuation that we would see the romance blossom between William and Kate Middleton, the current princes of Wales, falling again into the trap of turning The Crown into a very expensive press translation. pink instead of the statesman series of the first four seasons. The promotional value is understandable, but also the wear and tear it represents on the image of the work.
In the first installment of this latest return, the disinterest in the figure of the queen is confirmed. The fiction focuses on William now played by Ed McVey, who becomes the most admired and coveted figure in the crown, with a population that transfers to him the esteem that he felt for Diana. This attention returns The Crown to the question already presented with Diana: are there clearer ways to expose that a fiction has deviated from its essence?
Peter Morgan built a queen for posterity, who clearly showed the sacrifice of dehumanizing herself to represent a nation, and turned her into a grandmother parked in her private residence, a palace, with nothing else to do but wait with a cup of tea for that they pay some attention to him, especially the scriptwriter.
When he finally plays off in the sixth episode against Tony Blair, whom he imagines as a usurper, the scriptwriter returns to the beginnings that crowned the fiction with conversations about tradition, modernity and details that contribute to the understanding of the level of detail of the monarchy. British and the history of the country. Unfortunately, he also remembers that The Crown is no longer that series.
