The Crown, Season 5 (2022)
Streaming on Netflix
Impasse: Diana (Elizabeth Debicki), the Queen (Imelda Staunton) and Charles (Dominic West)
This is a welcome return for The Crown. Season 5 was for a time rumored to be the production’s last. But not only is the show back in impressive form with a new cast, the current season’s end suggests a tantalizing Season 6. Appropriately, then, it leaves us at the end of these 10 episodes wanting more.
Season 5, focusing on the years 1991-1997, gives us an inside look at a tumultuous period in The Windsors’ ongoing story. We have it owing to the unflagging craft and taste of Peter Morgan, The Crown’s creator and chief writer, and his fellow producers.
No matter how jaded one’s view of the British monarchy, in 2022 we saw the institution react with a cool public steadiness to an inevitable, yet still somehow unimaginable, transition. The Queen was dead, long live the King. For that pivotal moment, the royals behaved with grace and aplomb.
None of this was guaranteed in the 1990s, when the whole panorama could look perilously out of date. Charles, Prince of Wales (Dominic West), heir to the throne, solemnly predicts to his mother Queen Elizabeth II (lmelda Staunton) that the world is passing the royal family by and in the end “we’ll be left with nothing.”
The Queen responds to Charles’ fulminations with a composed dignity, and clearly isn’t persuaded that monarchy has outlived its usefulness. Though Staunton bears little physical resemblance to the real Elizabeth, she strikes riveting regal poses and stays immovably monarchical despite anyone else’s misgivings. The actress, not just the Queen, remains assuredly at the center of every scene she’s in.
What’s most striking, and invigorating, about Season 5 is how it leaves hurled denunciations not just from Charles but from the press and at least part of the public hovering in the air all season long. These attacks surely rock family members, but never quite knock them off their game.
And game it is, they all understand. Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce) describes it with both resentment and respect as “a system”. The Windsors aren’t merely a family, but an enterprise bent on ensuring its own preservation. His sister-in-law, Princess Margaret (Lesley Manville), aging, embittered yet still loyal to the family, also speaks of “the system” with pain but a grudging admiration.
Enter the Commanders: Elizabeth (Imelda Staunton) and Philip (Jonathan Pryce)
Pryce is stalwart, canny and intensely prickly as Philip, who’s overshadowed by the Queen, but in Pryce’s hands not effaced by her. Manville, especially in an interlude when her long lost lover from decades ago, Peter Townsend (Timothy Dalton), briefly returns to her life, is both glamorous and defiant in venting her love-hate for the Crown, indeed, for her own sister.
The program’s artistic standards are once again beautifully upheld. Season 5 looks both splendid and bleak. At the same time, its principals are more splenetic and careworn than ever. They’re immaculately dressed, but we never stop sensing this family’s fear of erasure.
And its gravest threat rises up from within. They hadn’t, couldn’t have, reckoned on the coming of the witchily “innocent” Diana, Princess of Wales (Elizabeth Debicki). Season 4 left the marriage of the Prince and Princess in tatters, with Charles vowing to shed his harrying wife no matter the cost.
In Season 5 we learn how high that cost came to be. Much of this period in the family’s history is denounced even by family members as a “war” between Charles and Diana. And what a pitched battle it turns into.
By the mid-1990s it’s become well known, including to the public, that Charles has returned to, and sometimes nestles in the arms of, the woman he’d loved and wanted to marry in the first place, Camilla Parker Bowles (Olivia Williams).
The press, publishing transcripts of a sexually graphic phone chat (legally captured) between the lovers, gleefully whacks away at palace hypocrisy. (Church of England worshipers indeed!)
It’s here where Season 5 most sizzles. Diana lives in isolation from a man she claims she once actually loved. Estranged from Charles, she has only her two sons for comfort. She launches her first assault by supporting an Andrew Morton book detailing her mistreatment and pain.
Debicki gets the fluttery spirit of Diana down cold: the pronounced downcast tilt of the head, the blue eyes taking in distress yet beaming back defiance, the glamor manicured to win and keep her public following.
West works carefully to catch the tenor of Charles’ fastidious speaking voice. He imparts a gravity to the heir’s predicaments, too. But his acting, especially when Charles rages, can grate. The overcooked “rebelliousness” in the writing is partly to blame (at one point Charles tells his mother that her misdeeds might have deservedly gotten her “jailed”!).
The show’s directors should have made West tone down his screeds. In fairness, West nicely underplays a scene where he aligns himself with diverse young people with his founding of the Prince’s Fund, a program designed to help the disadvantaged. The break-dancing Charles enthusiastically enters into with them happened in real life.
Debicki, though she’s taller than the real-life Diana, captures the caged Princess’ demeanor with subtle accuracy. She keeps the desperate damsel and the steely seeker of revenge in polished, almost premeditated, balance. She looks pretty and pained in equal measure.
In one of the season’s better written roles, Debicki gets the fluttery spirit of Diana down cold: the pronounced downcast tilt of the head, the blue eyes taking in distress yet beaming back defiance, the glamor manicured to win and keep her public following.
Bearing up under not only familial but national turmoil, losing influence but never losing public respect, Elizabeth remains resplendent. Helping to steady her hand is Prime Minister John Major (Jonny Lee Miller), thought of as a rather colorless man given to providing the “appropriate” but rarely the heartfelt response to any crisis.
But here when Elizabeth presses him to referee Diana and Charles’ rancor and wring a quiet settlement out of both parties, the PM proves an adept go-between. Miller makes Major both charming and compelling.
Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) coyly enchants Mohamed Fayed (Salim Daw)
It’s somewhat surprising to be shown the rise of Mohamed Fayed (Salim Daw). But since we know the tragic result of Charles and Diana’s bitter parting, it comes to seem fitting to include this vital, vulgar man in the Windsors’ story.
A desperately ambitious Egyptian upstart, and would be arriviste in Britain’s highest social order, Fayed makes his way to the doorstep of the royal family. He uses his motley millions to buy and lavishly refurbish the Ritz hotel in Paris, then crosses the Channel to purchase Harrods, London’s gold-plated department store. When he sponsors a high-toned sporting event, entrée seems to be his.
Of course, we know more than any of the participants do. Mohamed’s restless playboy son Dodi (Khalid Abdallah) will play a calamitous role in the future of the Windsors. That’s for Season 6, but the set-up here is juicily provocative.
First wooed, in avuncular not romantic fashion, by the wily Mohamed, Diana will slowly turn her attention to the reticent Dodi, frantic to please his demanding father. Fate will set them on a course no one can foresee.
These years seem to test even Elizabeth’s outwardly irreproachable marriage. The ever busy, globe-trotting Prince Philip, now that his aging bones no longer allow him to play polo, takes up a hobby of carriage driving, reining horses into obedience and giving him a gratification his marriage no longer quite provides. His by all accounts Platonic friendship with Lady Romsey (Natascha McElhkone) lingers in the background.
The most devastating material calamity comes in the annus horribilis (“terrible year”) of 1992, when beloved Windsor castle burns, destroying priceless works of art and wiping out a fondly remembered haven for Elizabeth.
Elizabeth (Imelda Staunton) is comforted by Philip (Jonathan Pryce) after the fire at Windsor Castle
This is followed by embarrassing revelations of the royal family’s failure in 1917 to prevent the assassination of the Romanovs, when Tsar Nicholas and his family were slaughtered in a basement by the Bolsheviks.
Still more royal eminence is surrendered when Charles travels to Hong Kong to pass British rule of Hong Kong over to China. The Empire clearly is no more.
Without it, can a “modern” monarchy thrive? At season’s end we and the royals are left very much in doubt.
Which is why I salute this season of The Crown. It artfully leaves the Windsors “at sea”. Where is the family bound now? And how will it get there? Let the dissolution and disillusion continue. I eagerly await Season 6.