Cast: Imelda Staunton, Elizabeth Debicki, Dominic West, Jonathan Pryce, Khalid Abdalla, Salim Daw, Olivia Williams
Writers: Peter Morgan, Meriel Baistow-Clare, Daniel Marc Janes
Directors: Alex Gabassi, Erik Richter Strand, May el-Toukhy, Christian Schwochow
Available on: Netflix
Brace yourselves: The second part of the latest season of The Crown has one of the dullest romantic arcs in its six-season history. The Boy approaches the University librarian to inquire for his art history-related course books, whereupon a meet-cute happens with the Girl when she has beaten him to them. The romantic conflict that follows is dry as dust: His sort-of-girlfriend walks in and is piqued by his supposed philandering. He is flummoxed at the accusation, and overwhelmed when someone reaches out for an autograph, due to which he snaps. This appals his future girlfriend (and future wife, since we know how the events will unfold). He defensively rises up to the bait and states that his fling and her don’t know what it’s like to be scrutinised and measured up all the time. They scoff, and he is told: “Don’t we? What, being ogled? Try being a girl.” As far as manufacturing squabbles goes — one that would lead to months of difficult awkwardness where the Girl dates a different boy, and the Boy mopes Devdas-style, and contemplates quitting the university — this one cuts deep with its defeatist impulse to conjure something that is so bafflingly colourless.
The second part of season six of The Crown focuses on William (Ed McVey) and Kate Middleton’s (Meg Bellamy) courtship at St. Andrews College, Queen Elizabeth II’s (Imelda Staunton) existential rumination over her role, Princess Margaret’s (Lesley Manville) death and Prince Charles (Dominic West) and Camilla Parker Bowles’s (Olivia Williams) marital union. Peter Morgan’s series has now successfully taken the shape of a Hallmark-style, tepid saas-bahu drama that revels in its platitudes. It peddles the kind of sentimentality that does not reach out of the confines of the opulent palace walls and stir you into reconciling with humanness that can float above wicked hierarchical structures. This was true for both season 5 and the first four episodes of this latest season, which focused on Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) till the point of her death. But in the latter half of its final chapter, the show disconsolately cowers beneath the acidic castigations of its previous arcs. It has moved over from playing it “safe” to becoming a full-fledged proponent of the institution, and the woman who was at the centre of it for most of modern British history.
Any critiques of the monarchy that emerge from non-royal quarters are bludgeoned into oblivion by The Crown with a puritanical focus on the interiority of the family, to which the show is aggressively sympathetic. In episode 6, Tony Blair’s (Bertie Carvel) incandescent popularity is explored, and his celebrity chafes at the queen who is at the cusp of commemorating her 50th year on the throne. She is sore due to an existential dread, fostered both by her age, and a flailing confidence in a waning institution that has a poor pulse on its relevance since Diana’s demise. She asks Blair’s assistance in construing the public mood, even though Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce) is against subjecting the monarchy to the “whims of marketing men”.
The survey conveys a large-level contempt and bleak prospects if reforms were not considered. After taking cues from Blair, the queen speaks to several members of the staff, with her chief advisor on tow, about the nature of their craft to see where she can cut down on superfluous expenses. In her next meeting with Blair, she retorts that modernising is not always the answer, and it is due to traditionalism that such rare craftsmanship have been generationally able to thrive. She is also seen smirking from her moral high ground when the Women’s Institute in the United Kingdom claps Tony Blair off the stage because he starts discoursing on politics.
But this occasionally-lukewarm and generally adoring portrayal feels awkward not just due to the bland flattery of the queen as a representative of the institution of the monarchy, but also because of how we are acutely aware of the succeeding events. William and Kate will get married; Harry will exit the institution with his future wife; Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip will succumb to their age. It was, in any case, going to be an onerous task to portray all this with any original insight, given the exhaustive documentation of the monarchy, particularly since the 1950s at organised, journalistic and personal levels.
The newer crop of actors which includes Ed Mcvey, Meg Bellamy and Luther Ford (Prince Harry), barely register for their interiority, despite there being plenty of it, due to how stereotyped and vapid their allotted inner lives are. Ford is roguishly charming and is a good contrast to the softer McVey, but is given inadequate screen time. The other two are part of a love story that the writers are clearly more infatuated with, but could have benefited from taking out a leaf from rom-com traditions to show how believable antagonism is constructed. We will not be privy to what the actual conversations around Kate being assimilated into monarchy were because of how strenuously the show is veering off of controversial provinces.
There is a persisting adulatory overtone in The Crown for Elizabeth II as the woman who was the forebearer of the institution. Anyone who has different sentiments for the monarchical institution can search for ways in which the creator tries to undercut this lionising, but the portrayal is scant of any critique. The earlier seasons, especially the first four, undertook distance from the family, and rendered their fidelity towards a clinical curiosity, albeit one which was not bashful about indulging in soapy gossip. The queen was neither shown as malicious, nor necessarily exceptional, but as a clueless and obliging figurehead who was navigating the impositions and impunities of the institution she is a part of. The last two seasons visibly flout this approach, with the congenial viewpoint towards the characters being more visible.
Queen Elizabeth II died last September. Though there were several who assumed a critical stance towards her legacy, London was also thronged with mourners who had come to pay homage to the late monarch. It is possible that the event coloured how she would be characterised within the last season. But that doesn’t mean something doesn’t feel missing in this reverential cup of tea. Maybe a spoonful of multitudinal readings that the show was capable of offering up at one point, rather than the singular veneration to which it has succumbed. To have the creators be so thoroughly shy of their original preoccupation to probe, is as its own esteemed subject would say, a “tawdry spectacle”.