The Crown: Fiction Not Fact
Why you should not take the upcoming season of the Netflix show seriously or as fact.
With Season 5 of The Crown premiering this week, I wanted to compile a newseltter that explains why the show has become so problematic recently. Grab your tea (or coffee), and sit back because this one is a doozy.
Background
“The Crown” is a Netflix original drama that follows the life and rule of Queen Elizabeth II. The show begins shortly before the marriage between Princess Elizabeth and The Duke of Edinburgh, with each season covering a decade of Her Majesty’s reign.
I can’t lie and say I didn’t enjoy the show in the beginning. The first two seasons were great to watch, and I loved seeing a depiction of Queen Elizabeth II as a young princess enjoying her early family life. (The scene of Queen Mary bowing to her granddaughter, who had just returned to the U.K., where she left as a princess and returned The Queen, is one of those scenes that never fails to give me chills)
It is important to note that I never took the show seriously. I know a thing or two about fact-checking and avidly did that. However, the same can not be said for most consumers of the show.
Where It All Went Wrong
Things started going downhill once The Crown began portraying The Royal Family in the 80s and 90s, specifically, the recounting of Charles and Diana’s drama-filled marriage. Diana’s death and life (well … the parts people choose to remember) were still very fresh in the public’s minds.
So what followed was people taking the show as a documentary rather than a drama and reigniting hate towards Charles and Camilla, threatening their carefully rebuilt reputations.
I’m not simply saying this as an admirer of The Royal Family, but many people in their midst have denounced the show. Earl Spencer, Diana’s younger brother, rejected producers’ request to film at the Spencer family’s ancestral home and said in 2020:
“The worry for me is that people see a programme like that and they forget that it is fiction. They assume. Especially foreigners – I find Americans tell me they watch The Crown as if they’ve taken a history lesson. Well, they haven’t. It is very hard. There is a lot of conjecture and a lot of invention, isn’t there? You can hang it on fact but the bits in between are not fact.”
He’s not the only one to make such comments. A few weeks ago, former Prime Minister John Major called the show a “barrel-load of nonsense” after it was revealed that there are allegedly scenes in the upcoming season that portray Prince Charles having “imagined conversations in which he lobbies Major in an effort to force his mother’s abdication.”
Reality Spoiler Alert: that never happened. Subsequently, the great Dame Judi Dench wrote a letter published in The Times where she said:
“The closer the drama comes to our present times, the more freely it seems willing to blur the lines between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism.”
I firmly believe that The Crown could’ve protected the integrity and reputation of their show if they had simply stopped at Season Two or Three. But as the penultimate season premieres, here are two specific aspects I’m apprehensive about.
The Diana That Did Not Exist
I did a Q+A recently on my Instagram story, and one of the questions basically asked if I didn’t like the late Diana, Princess of Wales. My answer has remained the same for years. I think a lot of her humanitarian work, particularly her work with AIDS and landmines, was incredible. Additionally, she clearly loved her boys, and I do believe her (and Charles’) parenting style, which was different from how King Charles III was raised, has been beneficial in the long run.
All of that can be true while recognizing that her early and tragic death has led to the sanctification of Diana and the creation of a narrative about her that did not exist. The story of “Princess Diana” (which was never her title) that is retold goes something like this: Diana was the sole victim of this story who was a ten times better parent than Charles and a super progressive woman who wanted to see the end of the monarchy. Oh, and don’t forget that the royal family orchestrated her death! (I hope you can sense my eyes rolling through the screen).
Let’s start with no, Diana was not the only “victim.” I’ll begin by saying I think that the age difference between Charles and Diana and the fact that she was very young when he began pursuing her was weird. However, I am looking at that from a 2022 view. Nevertheless, Diana grew up in a very tumultuous household, and Charles also had neither a normal nor stable childhood. So, when they got married, they were two people with deep emotional scars.
We all know the story about how Charles loved Camilla, but when they first started seeing each other, they were both young, and he was not ready for marriage. He went off to serve in the Royal Navy, and during this time, Camilla got engaged and then married.
It did not take long for Charles and Diana’s marriage to break down, essentially due to those emotional scars I mentioned, as Diana was very emotionally volatile because of what she went through as a child, and Charles did not know how to handle her. They both started their affairs, Charles with Camilla and Diana with James Hewitt, in 1986.
So no, Charles was not cheating their entire marriage. That is another thing about Diana. People don’t realize that she chose her words carefully and knew how to use the media. From her (allegedly) occasionally calling the paparazzi when she was with the boys to her infamous “there were three of us in the marriage” comment, which is very ironic because if you include all the men she had affairs with plus their wives, there was far more than three.
Moving on, the idea that Diana wanted to see the end of the Monarchy and looked down upon the institution is highly laughable. This is the woman who was raised on the Sandringham Estate and whose earliest playmates were Princes Andrew and Edward. She wanted to see William become king and told Sir Max Hastings, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph and the Evening Standard, three months before her Panorama interview that she wanted Charles to stand aside for William.
People have created this version of Diana who wanted to see the Monarchy go because they feel they are too progressive to support anyone in the Monarchy; hence they project a narrative onto Diana to justify their support for her.
Contributing to Their Pain
Most of all, I imagine how difficult this may be for the two actual victims of this whole thing: William and Harry. They had to watch their parents’ marriage breakdown along with the whole world and then have their mother die in such a tragic way. On top of that, the public took ownership of their mother’s death, and they had to grieve in front of billions of people.
Never forget that people forced The Queen to return to London when all she wanted to do was stay with her grieving grandsons surrounded by the protection of the highlands. Had the public been more sympathetic, the private funeral would have gone as planned, and the boys wouldn’t have had to do that traumatic walk.
I’ve seen many paparazzi photos of the actress portraying Diana while filming the last two seasons of the show and I am almost always taken aback at the similarities. I get a weird feeling when I see them, and I hope neither of her sons have seen those photos. The picture that made me the angriest for some reason was the one below of the cast recreating William and Harry’s walk behind the coffin. I just feel there is a lack of sympathy and thoughtfulness for those two boys who are very much still alive.
Also, the show will be portraying Diana’s infamous Panorama interview with Martin Bashir, which Diana later regretted doing. This will particularly be a low blow to Prince William. After Lord Dyson’s report*, which revealed the deceitful ways Bashir secured the bombshell interview with Diana, William released a rare video statement where he expressed his desire for the interview never to be aired again.
P.s. If you look at the comments of the video I linked, you will see that people still feel they know Diana more than her own son. The son whose shoulder she used to cry on and who she would go to advise for (which was very wrong, but that’s a whole other conversation).
*For those who don’t know, Lord Dyson’s report revealed that: 1) Bashir showed forged bank statements to Earl Spencer that falsely showed that a former employee was being paid for information on Diana, 2) he told Diana that even William was spying on her, and 3) Bashir made her believe Charles was having an affair with the boys’ nanny, Tiggy, and impregnated her leading her to get an abortion. Diana was so convinced that she went up to Tiggy at a staff party and said, “So sorry to hear about the baby.” In July of this year, Tiggy was given an apology at the High Court and won damages from the BBC.
Ultimately…
I saw a comment say something along the lines of “Oh, if it isn’t true, why is The Royal Family so worried.” It is not that they are scared of it being the truth, it’s the fact they know that far too many people will take it as fact. That is the issue. I can’t even think about how many people I’ve seen use The Crown as a source because it makes me cringe.
Netflix actually gave in a bit and added a disclaimer that the show is inspired by real events but a fictionalized dramatization to their promotion and trailer. Now, if only they would cave and put the disclaimer at the beginning of each episode, perhaps I could enjoy the new seasons more.
Thankfully, the show will end next year with the sixth and final season. The show will allegedly “end on a high note” for King Charles, with the last episode portraying his wedding to Camilla in 2005. It will also show William meeting Catherine at the University of St. Andrews for the first time (if they in any way try to go with the “she planned it narrative,”… you all will once again hear from me).
I, for one, can’t wait for it all to be over!
The show premieres on Wednesday, November 9th. Make sure to follow me on Instagram because I will be sharing all my thoughts!