TV: The Crown, Season 6 Part I – Episodes 1-4 (2023)

The shocking 1997 death of Princess Diana pushes the British royal family into a new era

The distressed Queen (Imelda Staunton) and the princess (Elizabeth Debicki) who confounded her

The Crown, Season 6 Part I – Episodes 1-4 (2023)

Streaming on Netflix

We knew it was coming.  In the tumultuous televised saga of the Windsors, that fateful night in 1997 has arrived on our screens.  In a car speeding through a Paris tunnel, the family’s brightest light was snuffed out in a hideous, maddeningly avoidable accident.

The Crown, now entering its sixth and final season chronicling the royal family’s reckoning with history, had to come to grips with the night that changed everything for the bejeweled dynasty.

The family, hovering just above the heads of its increasingly skeptical “subjects”, was forced to confront a stark reality.

Diana, Princess of Wales, dead at age 36, mattered more to the British people than the stiff-necked lineage she’d married into.

Who in the family, as well as in hidebound portions of the British public, was ready to accept that?

I’ve been intrigued by the series’ five earlier seasons because I wondered whether monarchy still had its uses.  And however ambiguous the answers were, watching a barnacled institution struggle for “relevance” made for lucid, gorgeous television.

Impeccable sets, finely spun costumes, luminous cinematography, fervent but appropriately restrained acting all rendered the series a feast for the eye and the imagination.

And it required daring.  Nearly every word of the scripts had to be concocted.

Emotionally gripping moments had to be refined from a sprawling public record.  It wasn’t easy to feel for Elizabeth II because in real life she didn’t invite – or ask for – sympathy.

Steadily staring out from those cool calm eyes, even bursting into a warm smile, she seemed to say, You couldn’t possibly understand what I represent.

Indeed, who could?  The British Empire was already breathing its last back in 1952 when she’d ascended the throne, which she surely understood.

But even those who in the following years danced on the grave of Empire couldn’t diminish her unfluctuating hold on the public imagination.

The Crown when worn by the stately Elizabeth II wasn’t to be counted out.  Or so The Crown has labored to convince us.  Interestingly, and correctly I think, these four initial episodes in Season 6 are titled Part I.  Part II, Episodes 5-10, will be released on December 14.

Fortunately, in Seasons 5 and 6 the series has found a grounded, often aloof, sometimes surprisingly sympathetic queen in Imelda Staunton, who, though only intermittently glimpsed in Part I, slyly ups her sense of command in the role.

That’s impressive given Part I’s obsessive focus on Diana.  But with the untimely death of this mother of two young princes, the Windsors faced a turbulence they couldn’t have foreseen.  

Part I rightly stands alone because Diana threw the question of what it meant to be royal into a new kind of doubt.

Harry (Fflyn Edwards), Diana and William (Rufas Kampa) at ease in the bond they cherished

I hadn’t given the matter much thought until in 1997 I saw televised from London members of vast crowds, including bikers in black leather, sobbing uncontrollably, literally shaking with grief.

What was going on?  Here we learn that the time up to 1997 had been troubled.  Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) and Charles, Prince of Wales (Dominic West), had been divorced the year before (after four years of separation), and remained bitter.

His enduring liaison with Camilla Parker Bowles (Olivia Williams) seemed to be on the verge of winning British public acceptance and approval from the Queen.

Yet by 1997 the glamorous Diana is still grabbing headlines and sympathy.  She’s a much-photographed beauty and fashion icon.  Paparazzi follow her like hornets.

Her activism in the banning of landmines and her support of its victims earns her worldwide respect.  She’s also remained a dedicated supporter of AIDS victims and those working to vanquish the disease.

Her lifestyle remains fabulous – and in constant flux.  We see the smiling princess and her laughing young sons William (Rufas Kampa) and Harry (Fflyn Edwards) board a helicopter to ferry them from one grand manse to another.

As they’re borne aloft, on the soundtrack George Michael (from his 1996 hit “Fastlove”) croons to a sensuous beat Gotta get up to get down, gotta get up to get down.  The singer as oracle.  Diana is moving in two directions at once.

Dizziness ensues.  Her uprootedness – where does she belong? – festers and, adrift, she’s prey to the wiles of Mohamad Fayed (Salim Dau), known affectionately as Mou-mou, and his endless scheming to make his son Dodi (Khalid Abdalla) Diana’s next husband.

Owning the Ritz in Paris and Harrods in London aren’t enough to satisfy this calculating Egyptian patriarch.  He wants Dodi to enrapture and marry Diana, and, not incidentally, win Mou-mou the British citizenship he covets.

Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla) works fervently to woo Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) into marriage

Obediently, Dodi woos Diana on yachts, in lavish restaurants and hotel rooms, going so far as to purchase a diamond-encrusted engagement ring called Dis-Moi Oui (“Say yes to me”).

The paparazzi pounce.  They swarm like an army, in packs of dozens, their camera clicks as nerve-rattling as gunshots.  The couple’s ardent spooning is captured in photos splashed across front pages around the world.

Meanwhile Charles fumes.  He’s trying to win over the British public to Camilla as his beloved, and future wife.  

But when celebrated photographer Mario Brenna (Enzo Cilenti) snaps an unmistakably “romantic” photo of Diana and Dodi kissing aboard his father’s yacht, the Diana phenomenon reaches a new level of frenzy.

Charles hastily counters with a photo of himself happily vacationing with his sons in Scotland.

Charles (Dominic West) with William and Harry in a photo arranged to checkmate Diana and Dodi

Charles throws Camilla a lavish 50^th birthday party, but Diana and Dodi’s embrace captivates the world.

The Queen, her mouth pursed in distaste, is unyielding.

She insists that a person is either “in” or “out” of the royal family, and while Diana has not been cast out, in divorcing Charles and so publicly seeking other relationships she’s irreversibly made herself persona non grata.

Camilla therefore gains ground, winning the sine qua non favor of the monarch.

But how, then, are the Windsors to “handle” Diana’s shocking, cataclysmic death?  When they learn the tragic news on vacation in Scotland at Balmoral castle (on the 50,000-acre Balmoral estate), they’re divided.

Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce) remains adamant in refusing Diana succor.  He believes the public display of grief will subside.

But as the crowds in London continue to swell, a grief-torn Charles – who’s flown to Paris to tearfully view Diana’s body and return it to England – senses a tidal shift in the national mood.

Britain as never before needs its Queen to pilot the ship of state through loss.

Elizabeth finally caved, of course.  The family returned to London, and she delivered a public speech mourning Diana’s passing.

Broadcast around the world, Philip, Charles, William, Harry and Diana’s brother Lord Spencer marched solemnly behind the coffin passing throngs of mourners.

In death Diana won a recognition she’d been denied in life, that she’d affected – shaken – the country as no royal before her had done.

To many watching Part I, including some reviewers, this weepy pageantry sounds like soap opera, not a recounting of a genuine historical transformation.

I think that even now it’s still too soon to close the book on what the royals mean and how Diana made caring about them an unavoidable question, even as many have continued to roar that the bloody institution should be abolished.

I feel a plummy luxury in waiting for Part II.  Diana understandably dominates Part I, and it’s a spectacular standoff between beauty and beastliness, with plenty of both traits to go around.

Diana is no saint.  Even she acknowledges that she’s not being the mother she should be to her boys, and her relationships with men, wherever they might lead, aren’t offering her children enough stability.

At the same time, the Queen isn’t ready to face the fact that Diana has made those who support the monarchy ask more from it.  It needs her kind of heart if it’s going to endure.

The look of the series remains meltingly immersive.  From the sunny Mediterranean to the frosty mists of Scotland, the scenes are shot with a sparkling, inquisitive camera gaze.

Both the panoramic sea and the luxe interiors never feel like ornament.  You want to know who lives like this, from royalty to arrivistes like Mou-mou, and whether they’re worth spending time with.

Maybe they don’t deserve any claim on us.  Still, I give the producers credit for nicely judging the human quandaries. Everyone here feels approachable.  No one feels too grand.

As you may know by now, there are “ghost” moments where Diana appears after death to speak to those who tried to love and understand her.  And Dodi appears after death to a weeping Mohamed Fayed pleading for an understanding he couldn’t get in life.

Do some of these moments feel bathetic?  Yes, I found them a little too drenched in “empathy”.  But every word of dialogue in the entire script is conjured, and erring on the side of too much compassion rather than too little seems to me a forgivable lapse.

The actors all do fine, subtle work.  Rising above everyone is Debicki, whose uncanny portrayal of Diana wrings forth a vulnerability that mere mimicry couldn’t have brought off.

It’s a witchy evocation.  The angle at which she holds her head, the tentative yet sensuous movements of her body, the wide open yet guileful eyes, form a picture of a woman not entirely on to herself, racing, as she puts it, away from herself, unable to outrun the roles she’s called on to play.

What does Diana want?  What’s saddest in this story is that at age 36 she still didn’t feel fully equipped to ask, much less answer, that question.

Which is one reason I think the British monarchy can still bedevil an onlooker, especially in the way Diana is shown here to haunt those who outlived her.

Part II now has a clear path to explore the further evolution of the Queen.  The very title “The Crown” is itself a question still unanswered.

Crowning who and what exactly, and fairly overseeing which human strivings and struggles?  You don’t have to wear or respect a crown to be drawn into that puzzle.