The Crown (Season 6: Part One)
Available on Netflix
The gradual decline of Peter Morgan’s once-great dramatisation of the life and times of Queen Elizabeth II is emphasised with this four-part opener to its sixth and final season. Charting the last days of Diana, Princess of Wales, and her companion Dodi Fayed, it is sadly another case of grim voyeurism that pays little respect to its deceased topics, instead exhuming and, at worst, fabricating the closing moments of their life and serving it up as ‘prestige’ drama.
By now, the finer details of Diana’s life have been pored over with such crassly forensic detail that it’s questionable whether The Crown ever needed to chart such contentious waters, especially given how dreary and forgettable its fifth season had been. Nonetheless, one could argue that it is impossible to document the late Queen’s reign without confronting one of its most seismic moments, when the tide of public opinion briefly turned against the otherwise revered monarch.
Even if you subscribe to that viewpoint, or are just one of the many that are morbidly infatuated with Diana’s life, you’d have to be a charitable fellow to commend this asinine soap opera, which clumsily portrays the late Princess as a media-savvy attention seeker, her former husband King Charles II as an irreproachable saint and, most troublingly, the Fayeds as nefarious schemers that were at least partly responsible for the tragic events of 31st August 1997.
The sorry affair is compounded by the now infamous scenes in which the aforementioned Charles (Dominic West) and Queen (Imelda Staunton) are individually paid a visit by Diana’s ghost, a narrative device so distasteful it almost beggars belief. What makes this even more of a shame is that Elizabeth Debicki is genuinely excellent in the role of Diana, with West, Staunton, Salim Daw, and Khalid Abdalla also in fine form.
The good news for Morgan and co. is that they still have six episodes to redeem what has previously been a stellar show, but this opening salvo will leave a sour taste in the mouth for some time.
