Well, now the Trojan horse is well and truly open, and the Greeks are storming out. There's no more room for doubt: The Crown has outed itself as anti-Monarchist.
I can say this much for myself: I did call it in season three, so I wasn't as surprised as some reviewers. But that is still embarrassingly late to cotton on to what Peter Morgan was up to. Even so, I wasn't alone in thinking The Crown gave a largely positive picture of the Queen and her family in season one, was I? Even season two didn't seem like a hatchet job, with the exception of the episode where Prince Philip sent Prince Charles to that awful school. Then there was Morgan's track record: he had shown himself sympathetic with the Queen both in the film The Queen and in the play The Audience. So has The Crown really been a con, lulling viewers largely favourably disposed towards the royals into a feeling of false security, only to finally denounce the whole pack of 'em? Or has there really been a change of perspective on Morgan's part over the seasons? To be sure I'd need to rewatch the series from the beginning, which I'm not that eager to do, as I have always found it rather slow.
Because here's the shame confession: the most ethically questionable episodes, about the short pre-wedding romance and unhappy marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, have been the ones I most enjoyed watching throughout the series. All in all, this season feels a little pacier than the others: there are few scenes so slow that you can hear steps echoing and the grandfather clocks ticking in the palace. Also, it can't be denied that an unhappy relationship between two mismatched people (Charles and Diana) makes for better drama than a few spats in a happy relationship between two well-matched ones (the Queen and Philip). Is it fair to the real Prince Charles and his sons to make his failed marriage with their mother into a TV entertainment which probably contains a fair amount of horrendous falsehoods? Probably not. Does it work as TV entertainment? I'm afraid so.
Morgan could argue that the Charles-Diana breakup has been televised before, and that he gives a more nuanced picture than those soapy dramas did (yep, I saw them too, so I'm not in a position to morally judge anyone). This is true, as far as it goes. There's been a lot of talk about how different the two spouses were, but in The Crown a convincing argument is made for the possibility that there were similarities too, and that these similarities created their own problems. In the TV series, both Charles and Diana admit to each other that they crave affection and approval, which is why Charles, who already feels rejected by his parents, cuts up rough when he's rejected by the public too in favour of his wife. The performances from Josh O'Connor and Emma Corrin as the miserable couple are brilliant, and for a while you can see both sides of the argument. At the end of the series, however, Diana, though not depicted as a saint - she shows both self-centredness and errors of judgment - is clearly seen as a victim of her emotionally cold in-laws and the nastiness of her emotionally all-too-hot husband. The perspective feels more than a little skewed, though I thought Camilla came out of it surprisingly well, perhaps due to a likeable performance from Emerald Fennell.
Enough with the gossip: what about the rest of the season? Well... I'm sorry to say, the gossip was the best bit. Something that's bothered me with The Crown for some time, though I've never been able to put my finger on it until this season, is that it's so manipulative. The events are very clearly presented in a certain way to make us feel something specific. Though I'm happy to be manipulated into sadness over Lord Mountbatten's death and satisfaction over Michael Shea's successful career as writer of political thrillers (I don't know if he was really made the fall guy over a palace leak he disapproved of, but I want to give his books a try now!), there were other instances where I wasn't so ready to play ball. The worst duds of the season, in my view, were the episodes Fagan - about a man who broke into Buckingham Palace twice, who is here made into a symbol of Everything That Was Wrong With Thatcherite Britain - and The Hereditary Principle, where Princess Margaret learns of a couple of severely mentally disabled cousins hidden away in a mental institution. "It is cold and cruel", rails Margaret, who isn't normally given to moral indignation. But the establishment was well-run and the cousins were obviously in need of care: I didn't quite see what made her so upset, apart from the secrecy. It's not every day you feel less empathic than The Crown's version of Princess Margaret.
What of the other Margaret then, Margaret Thatcher? I'm a little torn over Gillian Anderson's performance: it wasn't terrible, but it didn't really convince me, either. It felt more like an impersonation than acting in the "getting inside a character" sense. Also, the script is rather clunky: Thatcher's conversations with the Queen feel more like interviews with a Guardian journalist, where Thatcher makes public statements and the Queen quietly criticises. I thought Thatcher's crack in an interview about the Good Samaritan was rather neat, but I doubt she was so pleased with it that she bothered to rehash it with Her Majesty. Not until the very last scene between the two do we actually get a feeling of there being a meeting "woman to woman". However, there's a marked improvement of the treatment of this relationship compared to the Thatcher scene in Morgan's The Audience. Overall, could have been worse.
To circle back to the beginning, I think there has been a shift in perspective in The Crown, and that it coincided more or less with the changing of the cast in season three. Olivia Colman doesn't really convince us the way Claire Foy did that this version of the Queen is worth caring about. In this season, you have a feeling that both the Queen and Thatcher are played by actresses who don't quite get them. The spouses do better: Denis Thatcher (Stephen Boxer) is allowed to be an absolute sweetie, and Tobias Menzies as Prince Philip still has great chemistry with Colman's Queen. Even when he criticizes her, he is affectionate and humorous about it rather than needling as Matt Smith's Philip often was.
I used to feel guilty for preferring TV series such as Once Upon A Time to the prestigious-seeming The Crown. The latter is still good drama, and I'll continue watching it, but I no longer feel guilty about preferring pacier - and less defamatory - fare.
