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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
143
Mixed:
34
Negative:
4
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Critic Reviews
Nov 16, 2023
Season 6 Review:
If the writing on The Crown Season 6 Part 1 falls a bit short where it counts the most, the cast at least delivers the goods. Imelda Staunton is still the most ineffectual Queen Elizabeth II the show’s produced, but she’s no longer in the spotlight, so it’s fine. Instead, The Crown Season 6 Part 1 belongs to Princess Diana and Elizabeth Debicki.
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Nov 16, 2023
Nov 11, 2022
Season 5 Review:
Even with an impressive and capable new cast anchoring the proceedings, Morgan’s approach to the personal lives of the royals is too sympathetic to ever be damning. The new season of The Crown never risks challenging anyone’s reputation. Instead, it merely risks its own as a compelling show.
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Nov 9, 2022
Season 5 Review:
Absorbing but choppy fifth go-round. While it depicts tumultuous and unpredictable times for the royal family, it also presents some of the members of that family in ways that seem inconsistent with what we’ve come to expect from them, both within the context of this series and in the real world.
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The Daily BeastNov 9, 2022
Season 5 Review:
There’s a sense this time around of, “Get to the good stuff!” The frustrating thing, I’m sure, is that there is no blame to be assigned to the series for that. The Crown is as engrossing (and endlessly watchable) as ever. The subject matter is the culprit. That said, the show does seem to be leaning into that obviousness in a way it never did before.
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The IndependentJan 3, 2020
Season 3 Review:
Colman, by contrast, brilliantly inhabits the Elizabeth we all know and take for granted. There’s something dazzlingly banal about her. ... Tobias Menzies is less convincing. ... Three seasons in, the formula to which The Crown bends the knee is as plain as a huge gem-encrusted headpiece.
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UPROXXDec 6, 2017
Season 2 Review:
The drama’s second season (it debuts Friday; I’ve seen all 10 episodes) unfortunately isn’t at that level [of season one]. It’s peppered with moments, and even whole episodes, that evoke the quality of season one, but overall there are enough decisions to bring it down into “If you like this sort of thing, you’ll probably like this sort of thing” territory, where once it was the sort of show where I always had to preface my remarks with, “I know this doesn’t sound like it’s for you, but…”
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Nov 16, 2023
Season 6 Review:
Interesting choices are almost completely absent in the first part of season six, with the exception of two different photographers serving as a framing device for episode two (not coincidentally the standout). In the brief moments that attention isn’t on Diana, we’re rehashing the same old stuff.
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ColliderNov 16, 2023
Season 6 Review:
In hindsight, the previous installment may have been even more of a herald for where the series would end up by its finale. Although there's still the last half of Season 6 left to weigh in on, it's more than safe to declare that The Crown has lost much of what initially made it shine.
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IndieWireNov 5, 2022
Season 5 Review:
Despite scripts that toil through the pulpy details of a very public divorce, strong design work on every level, and enlivening portrayals from the fresh ensemble (Lesley Manville is so good in her criminally truncated time as Princess Margaret), “The Crown” Season 5 suffers from a narrowed point of view.
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Nov 16, 2023
Season 6 Review:
The Crown limits Elizabeth Debicki to a carefully outlined, inoffensive portrait. As they pass the children between each other, she and Dominic West invest a rueful, grown-up sadness into a failed relationship, but separately they tend to fall into predictable choices.
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Nov 16, 2023
Season 6 Review:
There was perhaps no way to gracefully cover this part of the story, not even in the earlier days when Morgan was able to view the whole complicated picture from 30,000 feet up. But now that he’s emotionally embedded himself so deeply into this world, it feels like an impossible task, and one where The Crown, like its queen, is not entirely sure how to address.
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Nov 9, 2022
Season 5 Review:
[Imelda Staunton] is splendid. ... [Peter Morgan] writes episodes as self-contained morality tales, emphasizing the construction of complicated metaphors over the mundane business of building characters. So Staunton fades away at times, to the show’s detriment. ... Season 5 doesn’t have the life, the hard snap, of “The Crown” at its best. And that’s where Charles and Diana come in. West and Debicki are, in different ways, both fine in the roles. ... But the two characters at the center remain opaque.
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Nov 6, 2022
Season 5 Review:
It’s an uneven, uninspiring season of television that fails to live up to the high standard of past seasons. ... It’s not all disastrous, though; there are some excellent things about this season, too. Namely, Lesley Manville’s Princess Margaret. ... Key members of the new ensemble cast feel like downgrades from the Emmy-winning stars of seasons past.
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ColliderNov 9, 2020
Nov 4, 2016
Season 1 Review:
The show will be compared to Downton Abbey, but that late soap opera was able to invent ahistorical or at least unexpected notes of benevolence and wisdom among its upper-crust characters. Foy struggles mightily, but she’s given little: Avoiding her children, her husband, and her subjects in favor of meetings at which she either acquiesces to her advisors or puts off acquiescing until fifteen minutes later, The Crown’s Elizabeth is more than unknowable. She’s a bore.
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Nov 3, 2016
Season 1 Review:
The Crown never entirely figures out how to make the political and domestic drama genuinely dramatic, much less bestow complexity on characters outside England’s innermost circle (the scenes of Philip and Elizabeth in Kenya, in particularly, are face-palm condescending).
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IndieWireNov 16, 2023
Season 6 Review:
Yes, the audience knows it’s coming, but with each ominous reference and blatant tease, it becomes harder and harder to believe her final days were anything like this. Forgetting verisimilitude, it also makes for vapid drama. “The Crown” is so preoccupied with one of the Royal family’s most infamous tragedies, it does little to develop anyone else.
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The IndependentNov 16, 2023
iNov 16, 2023
Season 6 Review:
Perhaps the romance of William and Kate will feel like an injection of hope. But for now the whole exercise feels a bit pointless and sad, focused more on impersonations than entertainment. When The Crown finally comes to an end, I suspect we will feel not grief, but relief.
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Nov 15, 2022
Season 5 Review:
Startling letdown. ... The season lacks narrative deftness and historic scale. ... Season 5 takes a more he-said, she-said approach to her [Diana's] marriage. The depiction rings true, though it lacks the camp and chaos that enlivened the previous version. ... Season 5 shies away from the inevitable; Dodi is smitten with a different spotlight-seeking blonde by its end. Because of that timidity (and the compressed time frame), the larger arc feels incomplete, structurally unsound.
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The IndependentNov 5, 2022
Season 5 Review:
The reality is that The Crown ran out of steam a while ago. ... The longer it has gone on, the more it has assumed an exhaustive and soap operatic quality – not to mention that, in dedicating now two seasons to doomed lovers Charles and Diana, it has become increasingly tawdry. ... This penultimate season feels more insular, more gossipy, than ever.
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