The Crown and The Audience
The Crown Seasons 1 and 2 is actually an adaptation of a play by Peter Morgan, called ‘The Audience’ which imagined what the private conversations between the Queen and her Prime Minister would look like. These meetings are informal briefings between PM and Queen in a spirit of complete trust and mutual confidence, and are not recorded in any way.
The Crown Season 1 and 2 were essentially The Queen, Behind the Scenes. It was a charged mix of personal and political, where the Queen and her Prime Minister discussed topics of global import, but also what was going into the pot for dinner that night. It captured a certain intimacy between the Queen and her most trusted subject.
Just as examples, some scenes are direct lifts from the play. In Season 1, the scene of Churchill and the 25-year-old queen in 1952, when they discuss her coronation and her wish to pick Mountbatten over Windsor as a surname. This, in essence, is where the Crown started – a young Queen, unprepared for public office, becomes the head of Government, while also juggling motherhood and being a young wife. The discussion in season 2 between Eden and the Queen, regarding Egypt’s take-over of the Suez Canal, is a direct life from the play. These electric conversations – both on play and on-screen – are the fulcrum around which the story has been built.
But from Season 3 onwards, the format changed. It did this because the show was trying to make space for Prince Charles’s story, and in this process, fell prey to the classic biopic mistakes, which is that imagination and insight has been sacrificed in an attempt to recreate real life as much as possible.
In Season 3, Prince Charles in Wales was the best episode because it gets us into his head. His loneliness, insecurities, and his identification with Wales, who fights for independence.
In Season 4, in the era of Princess Diana, the most interesting moments were the ones behind the façade. The Camilla/Diana/Charles triangulation was well done. The episode in which the Queen sets out to discover her favourites exposes a mother-child relationship.
But in Seasons 5 and 6, these episodes are completely lacking. In these years, Peter Morgan’s The Audience has the Queen speaking with PM Wilson about her irritation regarding Camillagate, and how Diana has far too much influence over the princes. But these are not seen in Seasons 5 and 6 of the Crown. Such a scene would have allowed a frank confession from the subject to the sovereign about the dangers of Diana. But Season 5 and especially Season 6 of The Crown were attempts to replicate as many famous tabloid pictures of Diana as possible.
In Season 5, the revenge dress scene was replicated from real life – the iconic pictures of Diana exiting the car in a black cocktail dress that defies royal protocol. But I wanted to get into Diana’s head for this scene – Diana intentionally picking out of the revenge dress, the pairing of the emerald choker that Prince Charles gifted to her on their anniversary.
In Season 6, the show veered even more off course, obsessed with replicating real life. Diana’s famous swimsuit picture, perched on the springboard of a yacht has been replicated. But in terms of decoding the woman behind the myth, the show has failed. Because Diana really came into her own after her divorce. She brought attention to HIV, to people in Africa, to landmines. This was her Phoenix Rising era, and yet, the story focused only on the love story with Dodi. I can almost imagine a bunch of producers in the background concluding that this was the most interesting thing about the most interesting woman in the world (eye roll)
But the real love story was Diana’s love for the people and the people’s love for her.
In Diana’s 2-part documentary on Netflix, the people are inconsolable at her death. The outrage against the paparazzi who hounded her, literally to her death, is erupting like a volcano. The people laid an ocean of flowers at the gates of Buckingham Palace. They felt it as one would feel the passing away of a close friend. Photographers were denied rides by cabs, and they were being confronted by the public on the roads for their role in Diana’s death. And there was massive outrage against the silence of the palace, to the point that the Queen had to step out and at least put up a semblance of being a mother to the nation.
In Season 5 and 6, the story faltered because with Diana, the story is so vast that the first note has to be correct. And unfortunately, this is a story in which you have to try and try and try several approaches before one strikes right. Because a beginning is a very delicate time.
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