The Crown Season Five Review: An Unsteady Portrait of a Flailing Monarchy

The institution of the British monarchy, or the “crown,” has always been obsessed with its own history. So it’s fitting that The Crown, Netflix’s retelling of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, opens its fifth season with a callback to the 1954 launch of the Royal Yacht Britannia. “I hope that this brand-new vessel will prove to be dependable and constant,” says the young Queen (Claire Foy), in flashback, “capable of weathering any storm.”

Once we enter this season’s ’90s-era timeline, we learn that the yacht has since fallen into disrepair and may be decommissioned (it was in service until 1997). Such is the type of unsubtle metaphor on offer this season of The Crown for the monarchy, which was, by the ’90s, flailing in self-generated turmoil and flagging in relevance for many Brits.

Queen Elizabeth’s recent passing has ensured plenty of hand-wringing from those protective of the monarchy. At the same time, many in Britain continue to feel acrimony toward the royal family, or don’t care about them at all. The series is exceedingly aware of this tension. The ’90s were an inflection point for the monarchy in a rapidly changing Britain, and many of the plots this season rightly center on the clash of modernity with obsolescence.

Technology is a major player, from the introduction of satellite TV to the phone taps, tabloid leaks, and paparazzi that bring scandal after scandal upon House Windsor. Traditional values—marriages that don’t end in divorce, deep loyalty to institution, respect for the private lives of public figures—are eroding. Polling indicates that Brits need a royal family less and less each year. The crown is in slow but certain disintegration, and the royals themselves are becoming, in Prince Charles’s (Dominic West) estimation, “ornament[s]…gathering dust.”

Netflix has once again spared no expense on a production that looks as lavish as royal life must be, and the new cast—including Jonathan Pryce as Prince Phillip and Lesley Manville as Princess Margaret—steps up to the plate admirably. Imelda Staunton inhabits the Queen in a moment of genuine crisis with a rigid jaw and a control that’s still tender and melancholic.

The younger Elizabeth, as portrayed by Foy in seasons one and two, was a deeply feeling, energetic person who cultivated restraint to effectively lead; Staunton’s Elizabeth, though stalwart in her values and loyalty to country, is affectingly adrift in an unfamiliar moment. She looks in the mirror, grappling with the bodily realities of aging. She understands her children less than ever, and at one point she asks her grandson to help her find the horseracing channel.

The real trouble comes with the junior royals. Charles is loudly declaring himself a freer-thinking, more in-touch option for Britain, one who dreams of a “welfare monarchy” and sets up a rival court with his own advisors. He also begins his effort to divorce Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) and marry Camilla Parker-Bowles (Olivia Williams), a protracted process that grows quickly tiring to watch. The exception is episode nine, the unusually structured “Couple 31,” which offers glimpses into the lives of everyday suffering Brits, arriving in pairs at divorce court. The “War of the Waleses” is suddenly placed in context, softened around the edges.

For her part, Diana spends much of this season on a crusade of her own: to have her side of the story understood, and to regain control of the media narrative. Enter here the Andrew Morton biography, the controversial BBC interview, and the hyper-public consumption of her grief that will ultimately prove disastrous. Debicki is an impressively studied Diana, though what’s been written for the actor fails to expand enough beyond the princess’s misery. Diana is almost never on screen without tears—an overly precious choice that doesn’t add much to our understanding of the princess as a historical figure or as a person. We do get glimpses of Diana giggling with her children on vacation, or at the movies in disguise to see Apollo 13, but in this critical period for “the people’s princess,” we need more of a sense of the totality of her.

The Crown’s past triumphs lived in that totality—its ability to let characters err and fall apart while still centering their humanity and sensing the unyielding machinery they’re caught within. In the years when the queen’s endeavors provided most of the central drama, the show thrived on such complexity (Creator Peter Morgan clearly feels most at home with Elizabeth).

This season of The Crown is both more simplistic and less coherent than its earlier ones, notably its depiction of Charles. When he meets with Prime Minister John Major (Jonny Lee Miller) without his mother’s consent, he’s utterly villainous. In the fifth episode, “The Way Ahead,” scenes of him connecting with inner-city kids via his charity are so generous as to feel disconnected from the rest of the narrative, not to mention bizarrely tone deaf. Charles and Diana’s marital dissolution ultimately falls short of the bar the series has previously set for itself.

Perhaps the most important question about The Crown is whether it has something interesting to say about what a modern monarchy means for both monarchs and subjects. Where the series continues to succeed is in its big-picture study of the crown’s relationship to national tides. In her uncharacteristically candid “Annus Horribilis” speech, given on the 40th anniversary of her ascension to the throne, Elizabeth concedes that “no institution is beyond reproach, and no member of it either.” In the real-life version of that speech, the queen went further: “This sort of questioning can also act…as an effective engine for change.” As such, what exactly the next chapter looks like—for a country in the midst of a soul transformation and for a beloved series entering on unsteady legs into its final season—remains to be seen.