If you’re even a casual fan of prestige TV, you’ve likely spent some quality couch time with The Crown. For six seasons now, this lavish Netflix drama has captivated viewers with its peek behind the palace gates at Queen Elizabeth II’s long reign. We’ve seen young Lizzie reluctantly inherit the crown, weather family scandals and constitutional crises, and slowly morph from a naive newlywed into the steely-eyed monarch who helped modernize the monarchy.
In its just-dropped sixth and final season, The Crown ushers in a new guard both behind and in front of the camera. Creator Peter Morgan handed solo writing duties to a new team, while Imelda Staunton of Harry Potter fame inherits the queen’s robes from Claire Foy and Olivia Colman. We also leap forward to the 1990s, as a fortysomething Prince Charles negotiates a post-Princess Di future and a graying Queen Elizabeth confronts new pressures to make the dusty institution of the royals relevant.
But make no mistake – all eyes are still on Lady Di here, as played by Elizabeth Debicki of The Night Manager fame. After surviving the Wars of the Windsors, Diana finds temporary happiness with new beau Dodi Fayed. But we all know the tragic punchline to this fairy tale romance. The Crown revisits those heartbreaking final days in Paris, though it spares viewers the tunnel crash itself. As Di mania explodes across Britain, the stoic Queen struggles to embrace a more modern, empathetic approach to ruling. And in the aftermath of unimaginable loss, Prince Charles inches closer to making his decades-long affair with Camilla official.
Pour yourself a cuppa and settle in, as The Crown’s oft-tumultuous tale of life atop the royal food chain enters its final chapter. We’ve laughed, gasped and shaken our heads through five riveting seasons of palace intrigue. Will the show stick the landing as it heads for home, or has this once-towering prestige powerhouse lost its crown? Let’s unzip our corgis and investigate…
Beauty Is Only Skin-Deep
From the sweeping aerial shots of royal estates to the outrageous hats perched atop ladies’ blowouts at Ascot, no one can deny that The Crown is some seriously top-shelf eye candy. And the show’s final season doesn’t skimp on the glittering visuals we’ve come to expect. Once again, the costume and production design teams earn their weight in Wales gold recreating iconic Diana moments like her solo trip through that minefield and attempt to find love aboard Dodi’s mega-yacht. Whether it’s images burned into our brain from those crazy days of Di mania or more intimate moments imagined by Morgan and co., every frame drips with detail.
But therein lies Season 6’s Achilles heel. It often feels less like vibrant, original storytelling than dutifully colorizing yesterday’s tabloids. The Crown now assumes we’re intimately familiar with every TV news special and People magazine cover from the era. Rather than breathing raw humanity into larger-than-life royals, the show starts to fade into the cluttered background of images it can’t hope to top.
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And as Di, Charles, and Elizabeth inch toward their pre-ordained destinies, the signature sudden left turns of early seasons give way to leaden literalism. Longtime fans will surely appreciate the flawless period trappings and Cindy Crawford cheekbones of its star-studded cast. But below that lustrous royal veneer, the fire burning in The Crown’s belly winds up rather anemic.
A Mixed Bag of Royals
The Crown has always boasted an embarrassment of acting riches, with its cast of British veterans disappearing into their royal roles like a corgi into its master’s purse. Imelda Staunton, best known for embodying the pink nightmare that is Dolores Umbridge, easily shoulders the queenly mantle handed down from Claire Foy and Olivia Colman. With her impossibly pert posture, pursed lips, and eternally arched brows, Staunton nails Elizabeth’s emotionally embargoed aura, leavened by cracks of self-awareness and droll humor. Her chemistry with similarly veteran Jonathan Pryce, succeeding Tobias Menzies as her rascally yet astute better half Philip, electrifies the family drama.
Elsewhere among the aristocratic set, the results are more of a mixed Windsor pudding. While dyed-in-the-wool Brit and former McNulty Dominic West boasts the patrician manner, he never fully wrestles Charles’ bitter temper and twitchy self-absorption under control. Try as he might beneath that floppy Prince Valiant haircut, the character emerges more of a petulant parody than the complex product of stifling privilege and heartbreaking maternal neglect underpinning Josh O’Connor’s portrayal last season.
And as the luminous, doomed Princess of Wales, Elizabeth Debicki too often buckles under the weight of reanimating an icon imprinted on our collective memory. She guzzles down Diana’s breathy cadences and limpid gazelle eyes, but rarely glimpses the spark behind them that captivated the world. Her world-famous bashful smile threatens to become a rictus grin before our eyes. Rather than plumbing psychological depths, she offers a technically proficient wax figure.
Thespian professionals that they are, both Debicki and West tick off all the required plot points on Diana and Charles’ pre-ordained march towards that Paris tunnel. But in a season consumed with the hollow ritual of canonizing Saint Diana for the small screen, we lose sight of the very human needs driving this fairy tale princess and the future king caught in her supernova.
A Meandering Final March
After reigning over Netflix’s streaming kingdom for five gripping seasons, The Crown enters its final chapter in curiously muted fashion. Much of that stems from creator Peter Morgan ceding solo writing duties, as well as the show’s relentless focus on reanimating Diana’s excruciating final days rather than forging resonance from tragedy. It too often feels less like vibrant, original drama than a Wikipedia synopsis in 3D.
We bear exhausted witness again to that miserable love triangle involving Charles, Diana, and Camilla, here reduced to a bad-tempered blur of ugly sweaters and uglier arguments. Overlong scenes rehash Dodi’s cloying romance with a heartsick Diana, capped by a funeral march buildup to a violent end everybody saw coming. This Di-centric storyline offers not so much insights into the flesh-and-blood woman or her lasting impact, but dutiful reenactments of some of the most ravenously consumed tabloid fodder in modern history.
Smartly imagined interludes do poke through the gloom, like Diana thoughtfully discussing unhealthy patterns with her off-screen therapist or enjoying an easy rapport with Dodi over his rhyming love poem. But too often she registers as a casualty of other characters’ machinations or the looming crash we know awaits, rather than an agent moving purposefully through personal pain towards reclaiming her power. And Matt Smith’s temperamental Prince Philip doesn’t do the plot momentum any favors with his perpetual complaining about Diana threatening the crown more in death than life.
Making matters worse, Season 6 gets mired in a slog of story cul-de-sacs Better Call Saul would envy. William meeting a coltish Middleton at university plays like The Crown version of a bad YA romance. The introduction of Tony Blair serves up an extended subplot about the wheels coming off his New Labour honeymoon. While comprehesively staged, his governmental tsoris feel tangential minus meaningful friction with the monarchy. Meanwhile we watch the Windsors debate appropriate funeral attire and Charles stomping around blustering at underlings – an uninspiring waiting game until the real emotional fireworks can begin.
What made The Crown’s best seasons so bingeable were those unexpected glimpses behind the gilded curtain, revealing the royals’ humanity amid lives of cloistered privilege. But too much here unfolds exactly like decades-old news reports, with the most iconic images rolled out for dutiful reenactment rather than revelation. For long stretches, Season 6 mistakes recognizability for meaning, and inevitability for drama. And it leaves these supposedly flesh-and-blood characters trapped in their own tense march through history rather than freed by it.
Searching for Meaning Amidst the Madness
The Crown has always operated best interrogating the paradoxes of an ancient institution struggling to justify itself within the churn of modern life. But the show’s last hurrah too often loses the forest for the Diana, getting bogged down rehashing a single tragic figure at the expense of broader resonance. Bereft of its trademark textual richness, Season 6 leans hard into overfamiliar signposts and one-note emotions rather than spinning them into thematic gold.
We relive the whole world mourning a fairy tale princess, but never truly access the woman herself or the royal family’s grief beyond their cardboard cutout reactions. The show proves too hamstrung by recent history to analyze the monarchy’s role with its trademark knowing half-smile about the absurdities involved. The Queen reacts to unprecedented mass hysteria over Diana’s death with the kind of beer coaster psychologizing Don Draper might have scribbled down over a three-martini lunch: “They’re not crying for her, they’re crying for themselves.”
Rather than compare Elizabeth and Diana’s shared struggles under the microscope of public life or missed opportunities for mutual understanding, The Crown contents itself with scrolling through Wikipedia pages and calling it tragedy. And Charles emerges more as a sneering supervillain consumed by entitlement than a flesh-and-blood product of suffocating privilege and emotional deprivation. His callous treatment of Diana in life and canonization of her in death reek of a convenient rewrite of history.
Still, amidst the choked off emotion and clothing montages, we get glimpses of The Crown firing on all cylinders. Margaret’s declining health prods rare vulnerability from the Queen, with decades of sisterly rapport summoned in telling glances. Blair’s earnest audience with Elizabeth II drips with awkward insight into clashing leadership styles.
We can only mourn so many wasted chances for the show’s swan song to extract hard-won enlightenment from hearts shattered across Britain. Saddled with our familiarity of recent history, The Crown’s final chapter abandons ambitious commentary about an ancient kingdom’s fitful lurch towards modern relevance.
The Once Great Crown Tarnishes
After reigning over the streaming kingdom for five riveting seasons, The Crown’s protracted abdication leaves behind a throne much diminished. There’s no denying the customary excellence pouring from every gorgeous frame, capturing an era through the lens of institutions struggling to prove their continued relevance. We bear awed witness again to Staunton, Pryce and other titans of British stage and screen disappearing into their troubled characters’ skins. But bereft of Peter Morgan’s intricate writing guiding its path, the show’s last march too often loses its way among the many byways of Wikipedia history.
The show flounders in a no-man’s land between intimate, speculative fiction and dutifully checking off major signposts in the long march of history. Diana emerges more as symbol than complex woman, her final months laid out less like revealing drama than pre-ordained procession. Overlong focus on reanimating the most ravenously consumed tabloid bounty in modern memory leaves little room to unearth resonance from it. Amidst the chokehold of familiar images and timelines, The Crown abandons the trenchant cultural analysis sustaining its best seasons.
There are still glimpses of the old magic, mind you – Margaret’s declining health awakening Elizabeth’s smothered humanity, Blair awkwardly grasping for common ground with his queen. But the show too often loses the forest for the Diana, relying on one-note caricatures and inevitability rather than making faded headlines sing across the decades. Drained of its signature ambivalence regarding an ancient kingdom’s fitful lurch toward modernity, The Crown ends its storied run having abdicated much of its vaunted insight into the impossible paradoxes ensnaring the Windsors.
The Review
The Crown Season 6
Bereft of creator Peter Morgan's intricate writing guiding its path, The Crown's final season too often trades insightful drama for obligatory rehashing of familiar headlines from recent history. An abundance of acting and production talent can't redeem a conclusion that abandons layered analysis of the British monarchy's fitful modernization, leaving behind little resonance beyond lavish period spectacle.
PROS
- Strong production values and period detail
- Imelda Staunton's penetrating performance as middle-aged Queen
- Glimpses at the Queen's humanity aroused by family conflicts
- Moments of clever, incisive writing about the royals' paradoxical lives
CONS
- Dominic West miscast as a perpetually petulant Prince Charles
- Elizabeth Debicki limited to superficial mimicry as Princess Diana
- Too heavy a reliance on recreating familiar images and timelines
- Abandons layered thematic analysis of early seasons
- Underdeveloped subplots drag down momentum
- Fails to provide meaningful perspective on Diana's life and death
