Alex Jennings – CULTURAL CONVERSATION

The Crown Season 2: The Price of Marriage

December 12, 2017 March 20, 2018 / By A J. Black / 1 Comment

The second season of The Crown has something of a difficult act to follow. The first season, despite having a wealth of recognised talent in front of and behind the camera, and being the most expensive TV series ever commissioned by Netflix at a whopping £100 million, nonetheless was a gamble nobody expected the streaming giant to falter with. The Royal family can entice both loyalists and those who find the monarchy an outdated institution, so the fact it almost certainly garnered strong ratings alongside plenty of critical buzz, meant The Crown got off to a romping start, making an instantaneous star out of Claire Foy as a young Queen Elizabeth II, and receiving plaudits and awards all over the place. Season 2, therefore, needed to keep up the pace.

Peter Morgan, writer of all ten scripts, plays the second season—set roughly between the years 1957 and up to the assassination of JFK roughly in 1963—as very much the second act of an opening two-part, aka two-season story. The Crown of course, famously, is planned to have six seasons which will replace the entire cast with age appropriate actors every two seasons. Season 3, therefore, won’t have Foy as Elizabeth, or Matt Smith as Prince Philip etc… should it happen (as of yet Netflix haven’t greenlit a third run but the chances are very high). These first two seasons of The Crown, consequently, are the first chapter in the life of Elizabeth and Philip, and if Morgan’s second run makes anything abundantly clear, this is very much the story of them both. The story of a Royal marriage around which everything else pivots.

Many critics in reviewing Season 2 of The Crown have suggested there is too much Philip. It’s a double-edged complaint, in truth. Yes, Philip is given a *lot* of material this season, more than in the first, but given how Smith—previously best known, bear in mind, as a scatty incarnation of The Doctor in Doctor Who—breaks out in the first season as an irascible, arrogant and often difficult partner to the Queen, you can hardly blame Morgan for throwing him more to do. Equally, the very arc of the entire second season is concerned with the price of marriage, the cost of attempting to have a traditional relationship while being bound by honour, faith and duty. While the story may heavily develop Philip, there’s a sense developing Elizabeth would have been much harder without doing so.

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The Crown Season 1: The Efficient and the Dignified

November 26, 2017 March 20, 2018 / By A J. Black / Leave a Comment

The Crown could well end up being one of the most ambitious, grandiose television projects of the modern age. Created by Peter Morgan off the back of his successful stage play The Audience, itself inspired by Morgan’s earlier script for Stephen Frears’ The Queen, it intends to depict the entire reign of Queen Elizabeth II from her marriage to Prince Philip in 1947, all the way through to the modern age, across six seasons. Budgeted at £100 million for the first season, already it’s one of the most expensive seasons of television ever produced, with Netflix investing significant capital into a project they’re very confident is going to go all the way. With a second season about to premiere and a third season in the planning stages, The Crown certainly looks as though it’s here to stay, and given how well put together its first ten episodes are, that can only be a good thing.

Morgan has become one of the pre-eminent screenwriters, if not *the* pre-eminent screenwriter, working in Britain today. He has also been consistently fascinated by the concept of monarchy, particularly Elizabeth II’s still ongoing reign. A decade ago, The Queen entered the public consciousness not just thanks to a stellar performance from Helen Mirren as the ageing monarch, but for depicting the Royal Family’s response to the death of Princess Diana, arguably as signature to the end of the 20th century for British subjects in terms of the Royals as Edward VIII’s abdication was in the early part of the century. Morgan zeroed in on an aspect which played a key role in The Queen, and indeed does in The Crown, for The Audience: Her Majesty’s audiences with successive Prime Minister’s across the decades.

This makes sense. Morgan is equally fascinated by the workings of government, particularly those of British Prime Ministers and the relationship with the United States across the last half century. His scripts have extensively featured Tony Blair in TV dramas such as The Deal and The Special Relationship, not to mention The Queen (played on all occasions by Michael Sheen). This fascination, this welding of government to monarchy and how the two are constructed in tandem, is a central function of The Crown and, indeed, to why the Netflix drama works so well. Morgan delights in making Winston Churchill a fully-fledged, fleshed out regular character (sublimely played by John Lithgow), with his own relationship with the young Elizabeth an important dynamic across the entire season, from a character and thematic perspective.

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