What Was ‘The Crown’ All About, Anyway?

 

Ross Douthat

OPINION

What Was ‘The Crown’ All About, Anyway?

Jan. 5, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/05/opinion/the-crown.html

Ross Douthat

By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

 

Over the Christmas season, my household completed watching the sixth and final season of Netflix’s “The Crown,” finishing up a multiyear relationship with Peter Morgan’s lightly fictionalized version of the House of Windsor.

 

In recent years, there’s been enough quality television, and few enough hours in the day, that I rarely find myself sticking with a show across several seasons unless I feel like I have a strong relationship to whatever purpose the series is trying to achieve — even if that purpose is just being loose and entertaining, as with the late lamented “Winning Time.”

 

With “The Crown,” though, the experience was more like taking a mild and mildly addictive narcotic. The show was always just handsome enough, just well-acted enough, just surprising enough in its historical arcana to keep you gliding onward to the next episode, and the next, until before you knew it, you’d reached the almost-present, the familiar figures of Charles and Diana, Dodi and Camilla, and it felt like poor form to give up. So you went onward to the end, through Diana’s death and Tony Blair and Wills and Kate, only to sit up after the finale thinking, What was it all for?

 

If I’d given up sooner, ideally when they introduced the roguishly handsome Dominic West as the neither handsome nor roguish Charles for Season 5, maybe I would have been less befuddled at the end. In its earlier seasons, “The Crown” could be watched primarily as a period piece — a portrait of the dissolution of the British Empire from the unique vantage point of its youthful sovereign, an introduction to aspects of 20th-century British history (the Aberfan disaster, the entire phenomenon of Princess Margaret) with which I was only glancingly familiar, a showcase for plummy accents and famous actors and Highlands hunting scenes.

 

As it approached the present, though, the show both declined a bit in surface quality (the West miscasting, the bizarre appearance of Diana’s ghost, the struggle to make Prince William’s college life seem interesting) and found itself confronted with the challenge of saying something about what its story means for us today. “The Crown” was always effectively pro-monarchy in the same way that “Downton Abbey” is pro-aristocracy, but “Downton” and its movie sequels haven’t (yet) followed the Crawley family beyond the late 1920s. Whereas “The Crown” had to say something, to round its story out, about what Queen Elizabeth II’s reign signifies for the 2020s, what she actually achieved with her longevity and sense of duty, what kind of legacy she left.

 

And what it came up with was pretty limp indeed. The show’s last word on its Elizabethan age was offered by Jonathan Pryce’s version of Prince Philip, praising his wife in the show’s finale for declining to abdicate, not on the grounds she offered (because sticking it out to the end is in the job description) but “because those that come after you are not remotely ready to take over.” And then, this elaboration:

 

You were always ready. You were born ready. You are one of a kind. By contrast, this lot — hmm? The good thing is, it’s not our problem. This is where we will be, you and I. Right under this stone! We’ll never hear the screams from inside there … You know I’m right. The system makes no sense anymore to those outside it, nor to those of us inside it. “All human things are subject to decay, and when fate summons, even monarchs must obey.” We’re a dying breed, you and I. Oh, I’m sure everyone will carry on, pretending all is well, but the party’s over. The good news is that while Rome burns and the temple falls, we will sleep, dearie, sleep.

 

I don’t want to read too much into a rambling, not-especially-well-written monologue (the John Dryden quotation excepted). But after six seasons of following Elizabeth’s every gesture, the show’s final send-off basically implied that her life story was a pointless one. Monarchy is antiquated and irrational, it survived only because of the accident of having a long-lived queen who was uniquely suited to an impossible job, and we were entertained for six seasons by a pure anachronism, fated to evanesce like imperial Britain once Her Majesty exited the stage.

 

Of course, this implication is inherently self-undermining given that we (the modern, disenchanted, democratic public) did watch the show through so many episodes, in the same way that we followed the real-life drama of the royal family throughout Elizabeth’s life, notwithstanding the arguable irrationality of their existence. But it would have been undermined further, I think, if “The Crown” had not ended when it did — with the Charles-Camilla nuptials, long before William’s royal wedding, the Meghan Markle era, the actual death of Elizabeth and the ascension of King Charles III.

 

A final season that covered that territory might have suggested a different send-off for its subject. Because in 2024, at least, the claim that the monarchy “makes no sense” feels itself a bit out of date, a holdover from the End of History and the days of “Cool Britannia” liberalism. In a world characterized by diminished faith in both meritocracy and democracy, in a West facing several identity crises, in a Britain struggling through a period of stagnation and disappointment, the resilient legitimacy of the throne feels like a more notable fact than its obvious antiquarianism. Elizabeth did not, in the end, preserve her institution only to have it dissolve like a dream upon her departure; she preserved something that still contains a real potency, however uncertain its future purposes and final destiny.

 

Obviously, the monarchy may yet hit the rocks and perish if British politics is destabilized in radical ways by economic turmoil or demographic change. But in the Wills-and-Harry era, and with the successful accession of Charles, you can see various models of 21st-century adaptation that were less obvious 20 years ago.

 

On the one hand, as the last great pomp-and-circumstance European monarchy operating in a conveniently English-speaking global culture, the Windsors can aspire to play the part of ceremonial kings and queens of the entire world. Think of this as the model that Diana pioneered and Harry and Meghan tried (unsuccessfully, so far) to bring to fruition, a casting-in with the global aristocracy and an attempt to leverage and even dominate celebrity culture rather than resisting it.

 

On the other hand, in a Europe increasingly conscious of its own mortality, fearful for its future and turning rightward in some uncertain way, the Crown stands as a genuinely preservationist institution in a way that no form of elected officialdom can match. Think of this as the model that Charles III has been groping toward with his architectural and agrarian traditionalism, his model towns and green Toryism — though whether it’s possible for this project to offer something more dynamic than merely the tending of a museum culture will have to be answered by his heirs.

 

The last seasons of “The Crown” had occasional intimations of these different possibilities for the royal future — the preservationist one, especially, in the episode where the queen resists Prime Minister Blair’s suggestion that she purge all sorts of ancient offices like the Warden of the Swans. But ultimately the show ended up being too invested in the distinctiveness of its protagonist to acknowledge that the monarchy might actually have a more interesting and relevant life after her departure than it had in her waning years — including, as long as I’m being truly speculative, a life that in some future crisis might involve wielding real power once again.

 

Even setting aside such fancies, the current reality of the British monarchy just seems more interesting than its serialized portrayal. And if “The Crown” ended with a whimper because it didn’t know what it wanted to say about its subject, history may be writing a more interesting last word.