The last season of this series on the British royal family recently dropped on Netflix. The show’s cleverness lies in its appearance of objectivity while humanising Queen Elizabeth 2, her son – now King Charles 3 – and other family members, making it far more useful to the institution it chronicles than a hagiography.
‘I’m not the one with an image problem,’ a teenaged Prince William snaps at his father Charles, when asked to join a PR drill. Elsewhere, when Charles eulogises his long-time lover Camilla for her dignity despite being vilified in the press, Elizabeth sternly reminds him of their infidelity to their respective spouses.
In several such scenes, The Crown has likeable characters airing opinions that could be expected from cynics among viewers. Simultaneously, it steadily evokes compassion for those under the scanner. In Charles’ case, it achieves this with carefully calibrated emphases on well-chosen aspects of his life. Note how The Crown introduces him as a painfully shy child who suffered his father’s tyranny, how he charms a staunchly republican Welsh family who draw our attention to the cold formality in his upbringing, and the depiction of his determination to update the monarchy.
Charles’ popularity hit an all-time low after the death of his first wife, the much-loved Diana. But the ultimate takeaway from The Crown is not this or his cheating. The writers are smart enough not to gloss over either, but they sidestep a lesser-known allegation of an affair with his sons’ nanny.
Whether or not it’s true, they thus avoid even a hint of doubt over his enduring commitment to Camilla. If viewers, hence, come away feeling ‘he’s not so bad after all’, that’s a win for a man who was previously so disliked that many subjects wanted William to succeed Elizabeth.Some of Charles’ progressive stances are a matter of public record. The point here is what The Crown stresses, with regard to him, the monarchy and Britain. For example, the writers erase Britain’s history of colonisation and plunder, instead presenting a hard-working Elizabeth who seems to deserve the massive pay that anti-monarchists decry, a benevolent matriarch who treasures the Commonwealth and opposed apartheid.Further, by concluding The Crown with Charles and Camilla’s marriage in 2005 rather than Elizabeth’s death in 2022, the show avoids her family’s foulest reported transgressions that vastly outweigh marital infidelity: her other son Andrew’s association with a convicted sex offender, the racism faced by Charles’ biracial American daughter-in-law, Meghan Markle even, by her account, from within the family.
The Crown’s most egregious feature is the villainisation of the Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed. Mohamed is portrayed as a callous social climber who pressures his son Dodi to woo Diana. All three are dead, so there’s no way to verify the private conversations The Crown imagines them having.
One episode seems provably false though. In The Crown, Mohamed appears to hire a paparazzo to surreptitiously photograph the couple. The real-life photographer in question has rubbished this claim to The New York Times. The US website Deadline quotes journalist Tina Brown’s book stating that, in fact Diana, tipped him off, her goal being to taunt an ex.
Those photos of Diana and Dodi earned millions from publications worldwide, triggering a paparazzi frenzy around them, which finally prompted the car chase leading to their deaths. Identifying her as the source of the tip-off would mean holding her responsible for events that eventually took her life. In a racist society and an increasingly Islamophobic world, apparently The Crown found it easier to tarnish an Arab Muslim foreigner than risk enraging Diana’s admirers. In its characterisation of Mohamed, The Crown is not mere PR. It’s propaganda.
(The writer is author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic)
