The Crown

Chronicling Diana and Dodi’s brief romance and shocking death in a Paris car chase, Peter Morgan’s historical drama takes a wistful, careful, and restrained approach to one of the modern-day royal family’s most momentous tragedies. .... Chronicling Diana and Dodi’s brief romance and shocking death in a Paris car chase, Peter Morgan’s historical drama takes a wistful, careful, and restrained approach to one of the modern-day royal family’s most momentous tragedies.

It’s in the private chambers just on the outskirts of the well-known story — settings where the public record had no business being or going at the time — where this four-episode arc of “The Crown” does its most interesting work.

Debicki’s work — and I hesitate to use that word, since her performance is so natural and effortless — anchors the set of four episodes streaming Thursday (the last six arrive Dec. 14), so that the tragedy that ensues has all the emotional weight it deserves.

Some may baulk at a few stylistic choices made towards the end of this penultimate batch of episodes, but for the most part The Crown’s final season portrays Diana's death with admirable restraint.

While some “imaginings” are gauche, most performances here are excellent. The question is, is it a compelling piece of television with very high production values that makes you want to see more? The answer is yes.

In humanizing the two [Princess Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed] in life and in death (there are no “ghosts” here), juxtaposed against the reigning monarch’s stoicism and commitment to grating tradition, the show invites the audience to consider the choices made by the British royal family, which have contributed to its relic-like state.

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.)

This is a perhaps soapy recounting of events, overly forgiving and flattering of some, too condemning of others. But that tendency toward reverent melodrama is what makes The Crown such a semiguilty pleasure.

This is actually the strongest string of episodes The Crown has produced in a while, and then—BOO!—Ghost Diana shows up.

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.

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.

he father-son dynamic is engrossingly fraught, and Abdalla is especially good as a spineless ne’er-do-well at the mercy of a controlling father. .... The movie [2006's "The Queen"] got its jabs in. Morgan doesn’t seem up for that anymore.

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.

While you sense the cast trying to proceed with dignity, they’re powerless against the script’s ever-excitable reimaginings.

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.

They aren’t awful — if nothing else, Elizabeth Debicki‘s take on Diana is so excellent it’s a pleasure to see her get such a full, and tall, spotlight — but the third and fourth episodes especially represented my least favorite stretch of The Crown to date.

It's not a misfire, it's just not an overwhelming success either. But what it has given us is an emotionally tender goodbye to Debicki's Diana – and her performance is for the ages.

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.

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.

Blame it on the subject matter, or perhaps merely the difference between more recent events and decades-old ones, but The Crown has saved the worst for last, following its disjointed fifth season with a sixth that feels more tabloid-y and less stately.

Granted, with only half the season to work with, Season Six of “The Crown” is more assured than the season prior, if only by fits and starts. It helps that this first stretch holds a singular focus on Diana in her last days.

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.

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.

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.

The Crown, similarly, has taught the world what it meant to be British, in the 20th century. But it has also run out of road – run out of history to retread – and, on its last legs, has less to say than ever, about what it means to be British now.

It’s hard to escape the suspicion that the writer has real contempt for this family. The sixth series is at its best when it moves away from the royals themselves.

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.

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.