Trouble is inevitable: Two months after the death of Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022), Netflix will release the fifth season of “The Crown” on November 9th. The fictional series revolves around the life of the Queen, who died on September 8th, and her family. The fact that the ten new episodes caused so many angry reactions in advance is mainly due to the period of time that they retell.
The 1990s have dawned on “The Crown” – and with it years full of drama and scandal in the British royal family. As the 40th anniversary of her accession to the throne approaches, Queen Elizabeth II (Imelda Staunton, 66) reviews her reign. New challenges are already ahead of her. The focus of the new season: the broken marriage between the Prince and Princess of Wales.
Prince Charles (Dominic West, 53) pressures his mother to agree to divorce Diana (Elizabeth Debicki, 32). But that would plunge the monarchy into a deep crisis. The rumor mill is already churning beyond the palace walls. It’s a feast for the media and Diana decides to counter it with her own version.
While previous seasons of The Crown have garnered plenty of praise and accolades, season four has also faced criticism. Historical inaccuracies have been criticized. And the portrayal of the then heir to the throne Charles (73) as an emotionally cold husband who regularly leaves his wife standing in order to be able to be with his lover Camilla Parker Bowles (75) – played by Olivia Williams (54) from season five. Many viewers would take the fictional stories about the royals at face value if they were worried in the palace. These fears now apply even more to the new episodes.
Does the series go too far in imagining what goes on behind the royals’ closed doors? Are too many historical facts being twisted, misconnected, or ignored altogether? Among the voices that loudly criticized before the release of the fifth season, celebrities now also mingled. Former Prime Minister John Major (79), for example, who is played by Jonny Lee Miller (49) in “The Crown”, described a plot line in the new episodes as “a load of nonsense”. In the series, Prince Charles, with Major’s help, wants to urge the Queen, who the heir to the throne thinks is too old-fashioned, to abdicate. Apart from the drama of marriage, tensions between Charles and the Queen are a topic of the new episodes.
Acting icon Judi Dench (87) also wrote an open letter in which she described the series as “cruelly unfair”. In the Times piece, Dench found that as the show draws nearer to the present day, the creators seem more willing to “blur the lines between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism.”
Royal experts also speculated in the British press about Prince William’s (40) emotional state. The heir to the throne is “angry” that the scandalous 1995 interview between his mother, Princess Diana (1961-1997), and BBC journalist Martin Bashir (played by Prasanna Puwanarajah) is the subject of “The Crown”. . At the time, Bashir had persuaded Diana to the interview by presenting forged documents, as was later revealed. Prince Charles’ wife spoke to an audience of millions about her marital problems. Prince William had asked that the BBC interview never be shown again.
In addition to the interview and Diana’s revealing book by Andrew Morton, the new “The Crown” episodes also deal with the infamous “Tampon Gate” scandal from 1993. Leaked telephone recordings at the time revealed how Charles said to his lover Camilla, he wanted to “live” in her pants, with his luck he would be “reborn as her tampon”.
And the marriage between the Queen and Prince Philip (1921-2021), portrayed by Jonathan Pryce (75) in season five, is again the focus of the series makers. Again, things are not at their best on the TV show. Her children Anne (Claudia Harrison, 46) and Andrew (James Murray, 47) and Queen’s sister Princess Margaret (Lesley Manville, 66) also have to learn once again how difficult it is to create a private life in the royal family.
Meanwhile, newcomers to the soap opera game are Dodi Al-Fayed (Khalid Abdalla), Diana’s future partner, and Mohamed Al-Fayed (Salim Daw), Dodi’s father, whose backstory will be explored in a separate episode. At the end of the season, Diana, who has since been divorced from Charles, will go on vacation with Dodi. The accidental death of the two in Paris only becomes an issue in “The Crown” in the final sixth season. It is not yet known when Netflix will release this. But it seems certain that there will be a lot of fuss again.
