Does The Crown Take a Conservative or a Liberal Stance on the Monarchy?

The Crown. Image courtesy of Netflix.

Netflix’s The Crown has so far given us four seasons of a terrifically acted, beautifully staged and filmed fake birds eye view of the British monarchy. I like to watch it purely because of the production quality and attention to detail. It looks amazing. But when you dig beneath the surface, the question that really jumps out at you is whether the show is a sympathetic depiction of its subjects or a critical one? Is it taking a fundamentally conservative or a liberal stance on the British monarchy? Are these people rich spoiled jerks or are they human beings on whom a great deal of perhaps unwanted responsibility has been foisted?

Now, the Coward’s Way Out would be to simply say well, it’s complicated and the show is trying to go for some nuance here in depicting these human beings dealing with the complexities of life and politics and history. But I think it’s clear the show’s viewpoint has changed and evolved over time. The first season of The Crown was fairly straightforward hagiography. Part of that, I think, is just a function of the show trying to find its feet and figure out how it was going to portray the Royal Family. Given that it necessarily involved exquisite period recreations, and given the caliber of the acting involved, there was a kind of seductive allure of that first season.

Of course, the monarchy was different back in the 1940s and 50s. And perhaps that veil of elegance and the polished sheen was intentional. But during much of the first two seasons I spent a lot of time watching and thinking that The Crown was going to great lengths to show how the Queen played some part or other in these great big historical events, when really she had only been a minor part. The Crown often tries to show that she was not merely a figurehead or important social symbol, but was actually instrumental to some critical bits of political deal-making and the like and I kept watching that thinking, well this seems like a pretty monarchist point of view.

But in seasons three and four, the gloves came off so to speak and it seemed like The Crown started to actively try and dig into the flaws, especially with Everyone’s Favorite Villain Charles. It tried to show just what an unhappy, privileged, pointless life a lot of these royals were living and it did so by contrasting them with Margaret Thatcher and drawing a line under other big social changes underway in the country from which the royal family were totally disconnected.

The Crown is interesting in that way. In the first few seasons, it was fairly obvious to me that they were these relics of a bygone era becoming increasingly irrelevant to the actual power centers of politics and society but the way the characters were written, acted and filmed and the setting itself was so engrossing that you kind of loved it anyway, the way you admire an ancient vase in a museum. By season four most of that pretense had been dropped, and The Crown was coming right out and saying that the royal family are just a bunch of isolated priveleged weirdos wedded to their meaningless traditions and totally unmoored from the reality of life in Britain.

It actually gave me something to think about the other day while watching a David Attenborough documentary about climate change which featured a segment with the Queen meeting with some Commonwealth leaders and going on about these non-binding commitments she was championing to have them plant more trees and how maybe, one day, this could turn back climate change and it seemed to me that she genuinely believed she could make a difference with what was essentially a public relations campaign. I mean, I admire the sentiment but it struck me she may genuinely not be aware that her efforts to get Fiji to plant more trees are not going to solve climate change. And that kind of makes more sense after you watch The Crown.

Anyway, I like this show. I think biopics are usually quite terrible, and especially so when they are about people who are still alive and active in public life. It’s a difficult needle to thread, and I think The Crown gets it right more often than it gets it wrong. So is the show’s depiction of its subjects conservative or liberal? Well, maybe a bit of both and perhaps the show’s perspective changes as it moves through time and the perception of the Royal Family itself began to shift and slither as the currents of history are known to do.