|
CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
|
Positive:
143
Mixed:
34
Negative:
4
|
Critic Reviews
Dec 6, 2017
Season 2 Review:
Cautiousness, propriety, and dowdiness have never seemed more soothing. Elizabeth remains the commonsense counterpoint to the flibbertigibbets around her, but she is now comfortable in her authority. Each episode is not a lesson in personal abnegation; instead, the new season mixes episodes about contained political events--an encounter with the Kennedys, a crisis caused by a vocal critic, the Duke of Windsor’s Nazi affiliations--with the really good gossip
Read full review
Nov 7, 2016
Season 1 Review:
The Crown struggles at times, but there’s something within it — a slumbering beast, deep beneath its waves, just waiting to surface. You catch glimpses of it here and there--when Elizabeth betrays someone in the name of the crown, especially--and those glimpses are enough to animate this first season.
Read full review
Nov 4, 2016
Season 1 Review:
The Crown is sometimes too somber, and slow-moving to a fault (it intends to cover Elizabeth’s entire reign over six seasons). But if you’re looking for an immersive history lesson with all the royal trimmings (ermine and purple velvet among them), it’s an extremely engrossing watch.
Read full review
Nov 8, 2022
Season 5 Review:
The twin specters of grief and dread loom over the entire season. I felt my breath catch with emotion when I caught the first glimpse of Elizabeth Debicki as a still-hopeful, still-married Diana in the season five premiere. ... At times, I caught myself feeling empathy for the show’s progressively frustrated Prince Charles — or rather, the dramatized character that a brilliant Dominic West brought to life with surprising effect, even if he is far too handsome for the role.
Read full review
The PlaylistNov 6, 2022
Nov 15, 2019
Season 3 Review:
Elizabeth is no longer the most interesting figure in her own story. Colman is conspicuously absent through much of the season, which focuses more heavily on Phillip, Margaret and Charles, and her role in her family members' stories is nominal at best. Despite the marquee position of Colman in the opening credits, "Crown" doesn't feel like her show. ... The series remains fully capable of making the family a little less mysterious and a little more entertaining.
Read full review
Nov 12, 2019
Season 3 Review:
Stiff of spine and thin of voice, this Elizabeth (played by Oscar winner Olivia Colman) may make you long for the incandescent Claire Foy ... The history lessons check some necessary boxes — Churchill (John Lithgow) goes to his eternal reward in Episode 1 — but also resurrect delicious bits that may have been forgotten. ... With an ever-present cigarette holder and air of hangover chic, Margaret is a free spirit trapped by the rules of the palace, and her contrast with Elizabeth is something Morgan returns to again and again with striking results.
Read full review
Nov 5, 2019
Season 3 Review:
At its heart, The Crown is a catalogue of the myriad ways Elizabeth must deny her true self out of duty to her country. It’s a theme that’s at once tragic and predictable, which makes the emergence of Prince Charles and Princess Anne as more prominent players all the more welcome.
Read full review
IndieWireNov 4, 2019
Season 3 Review:
What is on the screen in “The Crown” is a gorgeous display of some of the age’s best actors performing at the peak of their craft. ... And yet, Colman is relegated to reacting more than acting because of how her role is written. ... [Queen Elizabeth is] a complex sovereign in a complex time, the defender of the faith. Morgan should show some more faith in her himself.
Read full review
Dec 7, 2017
Season 2 Review:
The season leans into the melodrama, filling every episode to the brim with plot and snappy dialogue, encouraging a binge-watch. And it may be even more tantalizing to viewers put in a royal mood by the recent announcement of Prince Harry's engagement to American actress Meghan Markle. It may be a fairy tale with the cracks showing, but it's still a fairy tale.
Read full review
Nov 2, 2016
Season 1 Review:
The Crown is gorgeously produced, impeccably cast and deals with a tantalizing period in British history. It is also grindingly slow, and occasionally feels like it's recycling material previously covered in other movies and miniseries...The good outweighs the disclaimers, in a project that oozes class from every pore.
Read full review
Nov 16, 2023
Season 6 Review:
While the first half of the season may make an excellent Diana miniseries, it’s not entirely clear that it works as a concluding installment of The Crown, a show that once had a much more sweeping scope and grander ambitions than what often comes across as simple stenography. (Or propaganda, depending on how you feel about the wildly friendly edit this season gives Charles, who is, after all, now King of England.)
Read full review
SlashfilmNov 16, 2023
Season 6 Review:
As it nears its endgame, the show has become more serialized, particularly with these four episodes that make up the first half of the final season, all of which run into each other. I'm not quite sure that's a good thing, as it robs the series of much of its previous strength. Still, there's enough high drama packed into these four episodes to satisfy those of us who have stuck with the show over all these years.
Read full review
Nov 5, 2022
Season 5 Review:
The Crown has always been both a pleasure to watch, thanks to its lush production design and soapy undertones, and a more mixed success from an artistic standpoint. Season 5 is the same, but for different reasons. While the acting is no longer stellar across the board, and a vividly evoked Queen Elizabeth no longer dominates the story, the narrative itself becomes richer than ever.
Read full review
The Daily BeastNov 11, 2020
Season 4 Review:
Elizabeth and Diana's stories are parallel, though distinct, narrative threads that are duly and richly explored in the 10 episodes. In practice, they exacerbate what’s always been a nagging problem with the series’ hopscotching through history, a distracting incoherence. ... It’s not a catastrophic misstep. ... When it comes to the Diana plot, one of the sharpest moves the show makes is to drive home just how young she was when she entered the melee. ... Anderson’s disappearance into the role is so all-encompassing it’s nearly a distraction—which is mostly praise.
Read full review
Nov 20, 2019Nov 15, 2019
Season 3 Review:
Colman intuits that Elizabeth, at the height of her powers and in the middle of a calm stretch, is content. The performance is both believable and emotionally astute: Elizabeth would be settled and comfortable. But this, along with the equilibrium in her marriage, snuffs out some of the little tension there used to be. ... That the show remains appealing through this relatively slow going is largely thanks to the more high-strung characters surrounding Elizabeth.
Read full review
Nov 12, 2019
Season 3 Review:
At this phase of the story, Elizabeth is more uptight and controlling than ever, especially now that some of her children are old enough to cause her problems in the way only her sister once did. But the job and the many ugly things she has to do in it weigh on her more than ever, which Colman portrays beautifully. It’s not a thrilling time for Elizabeth, or The Crown, but it’s a complicated transition handled quite deftly.
Read full review
Nov 4, 2019
Season 3 Review:
In terms of performances, The Crown 2.0, which arrives on Nov. 17, marks an improvement over its fine predecessor. The versatile Colman makes a more complex Elizabeth, one who isn’t brittle so much as ill at ease in her own exalted skin. ... The same aura of mystery that Elizabeth defends in the documentary episode also limits the mostly reverent Morgan’s insight into his characters, to the extent that their conflicts get repetitive.
Read full review
Dec 11, 2017
Season 2 Review:
Despite the roiling tensions of the imminent ’60s and the various revolutions it holds, the Royal Family’s domestic politics are still what The Crown does best. And for every moment that falls apart under the weight of leaden metaphors, there are still several that shine. Royals may not be just like you or me, but they are, The Crown insists, prone to indulging the same trifling nonsense as the rest of us.
Read full review
The PlaylistNov 16, 2023
Season 6 Review:
The four episodes don’t drag, and knowing what will happen builds dread before giving way to sorrow. In its final stretch, it tips further into overly symbolic dialogue, but thanks to Debicki’s stirring performance, “The Crown” still reigns when depicting this sprawling family soap opera.
Read full review
ColliderNov 5, 2022
Season 5 Review:
Season 5 boasts yet another cast change-up, with varying levels of success — some actors are clearly trying to immerse themselves into the real-life people they've been tasked with playing, while others toss out the occasional word in the royals' received pronunciation accent and strive for little beyond that.
Read full review
IndieWireNov 21, 2017
Season 2 Review:
Some viewers may look for exactly this in their television: a beautiful recreation of historical events, connected by safe assumptions about the people who lived through them. But television is capable of so much more, and whether you like The Crown or not, its medium evokes stronger, richer feelings elsewhere.
Read full review
Nov 13, 2019
Season 3 Review:
The series itself struggled between finding its own balance — with some episodes striking resonant chords ("Bubbikins," "Margretology") and others falling painfully flat ("Coup," "Moondust"). But as Elizabeth herself states during one of her meetings with PM Wilson, sometimes it's better to simply look the other way, to wait for this to pass. Season 3 is a time of transition — for the royal family, for the United Kingdom, for The Crown itself.
Read full review
Nov 16, 2023
Season 6 Review:
If Season 5 was a bit boring and uneventful, Season 6 attempts to give every moment the taut tension of a violin string. Sometimes it makes for powerful television, but at other times it's exhausting, particularly in the third episode, which chronicles the night Diana and Dodi died.
Read full review
Nov 6, 2019
Season 3 Review:
Season three of The Crown lacks the urgency that previously made the Netflix series so engaging. This is partly due to the more subdued relationships between the older members of the House of Windsor, now settled into their various roles as sovereign, husband, sister, and wife.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Nov 16, 2023Nov 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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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…”
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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).
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Nov 9, 2022
Season 5 Review:
None of it builds to a larger thesis about these people or the institution itself. The impressively lavish settings can’t make up for the emptiness of the script. Scenes — and emotional arcs — don’t get a chance to play out, but flit from one location and set of characters to another.
Read full review
Nov 16, 2023
Season 6 Review:
Seemingly determined to both avoid the kind of rubbernecking that caused it and do justice to its enormous impact, creator Peter Morgan stretches the princess’ brief dalliance with Dodi, and the Crown’s harumphing response to same, across three slow, sparse, portentous episodes. Yet when it’s not simply boring, the season can be weirdly audacious, milking the mystery of Diana’s last days—as well as, unfortunately, her imagined afterlife—for manufactured poignancy.
Read full review
Current TV Shows
By MetascoreBy User Score