By Devolving Into Free PR for the Monarchy, The Crown Forever Tarnished Its Legacy

"The Crown doesn't ask existential questions of itself."

That's what Queen Elizabeth II's (Imelda Staunton) longtime advisor and private secretary Robert Fellowes (Andrew Havill) cautions when the Queen, confronted with yet another round of dismal polls, suggests her team "find out what seems to have gone wrong" and how she "could do better." For decades, the monarch has been reluctant to respond to negative feedback, preferring to keep her head down and wait for things to blow over, but with the ultra-popular Prime Minister Tony Blair (Bertie Carvel) being hailed as "King Tony," she can no longer afford to ignore criticism from the public. After all these years, she says, "I think, finally, I'm ready to hear it."

In its early seasons, Netflix's The Crown succeeded precisely because it defied Fellowes' advice. Even as he grounded the show in the specifics of the Queen's reign, creator Peter Morgan, who wrote or co-wrote all 60 episodes, placed it in a more global context: What does the monarch owe her family and her subjects? How does this institution affect the people who have been thrust into it? Where does a monarchy fit into a democratic society, and what happens when those interests come into conflict?

The Crown always extended goodwill to the royal family — Morgan was clearly interested enough in their public and private personas to expand his 2006 film The Queen into a six-season series — but the urge to poke at them, to investigate what might be underneath the titles and the livery, prevailed.

Early on, that impulse led to storylines that were outright critical of the Queen, including her dispute with charismatic younger sister Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby) in Season 1, which depicted Elizabeth (Claire Foy) as a callous ruler willing to uphold conservative values at the expense of Margaret's happiness, or Season 3's standout episode "Aberfan," about the Queen's (Olivia Colman) delayed and dispassionate reaction to the 1966 disaster that left 116 children and 28 adults dead. Even Season 4, which began the transition toward the tabloid-heavy drama of later installments, characterized Elizabeth as a woman out of touch with the rapidly changing country and explored how her deference to the institution compounded the existing problems in Prince Charles (Josh O'Connor) and Princess Diana's (Emma Corrin) marriage.

In part, Morgan was able to play with these characters — not people, but characters — because the moments dramatized in the first few seasons were less familiar to viewers, particularly those who didn't live through them. Season 1 paid as much attention to Elizabeth's 1953 coronation, the first to be televised in full, as it did Prince Philip's (Matt Smith) jealousy and animosity toward his powerful wife, which the show suggested nearly destroyed their marriage; Season 2 placed the many political crises of the late 1950s and early 1960s (such as the Profumo affair and John F. Kennedy's assassination) alongside the drama of Margaret's marriage to Tony Armstrong-Jones (Matthew Goode) and Prince Philip's harsh fathering style. Real events were utilized less as drivers of the plot, and more as obstacles that deepened the characters' identities and revealed their strengths or flaws, giving Morgan more freedom in how he presented these fictionalized versions of the royals to his audience.

But by the time The Crown reached the dissolution of Charles (Dominic West) and Diana's (Elizabeth Debicki) marriage, which dominated Season 5, Morgan, armed with a mountain of material to draw from, changed his strategy. Charles and Diana's conflict played out in the media throughout the 1990s, with both taking advantage of their positions and armies of publicists to drag the other through the mud in the tabloids. From a storytelling perspective, the sheer amount of coverage made Morgan's job more straightforward, as the trajectory of Season 5 was practically sketched out for him: Charles' intimate 1989 phone call with longtime lover Camilla Parker Bowles (Olivia Williams), which became known as "Tampongate" when the call was leaked; Diana's "revenge dress" and subsequent Panorama interview; their 1996 divorce and high-profile settlement dispute.

Whereas prior seasons of The Crown would have used these infamous moments as a stepping-stone to a greater point about the monarchy's ability (or inability) to adapt in times of crisis — a theme Morgan glanced at in Episode 4, "Annus Horribilis," only to back away from it — Season 5 took the easy way out. Rather than informing the larger story, Charles and Diana's public separation became the story, and Staunton's Queen Elizabeth faded into the background alongside any further examination of the monarchy's part in what transpired.

Interestingly, as The Crown refashioned itself into a prestige retelling of royal family gossip, it became even more conservative in its approach. The criticism and big-picture commentary that distinguished early seasons were replaced by a near-total deference to its subjects, whose real-world popularity recently reached a historic low. Season 5 was less biography than a hagiography: It depicted Charles as a sympathetic figure who didn't let scandal or controversy (of his own making, it's worth noting) prevent him from laying out a "modern, progressive agenda" for the monarchy.

The most baffling installment of the season, Episode 5, "The Way Ahead," ended with a sequence celebrating the work Charles has done through The Prince's Trust, and even went so far as to cast his embarrassing 1985 breakdancing moment as an endearing attempt to connect with the "disadvantaged young people" whose lives he sought to improve.

Season 6, Part 1, which was released in November, also absolves the Queen and her inner circle of sin with respect to both Diana's death — her ghost returns to tell Charles how "handsome" he looked when he visited her body in the morgue — and their treatment of Mohamed Al-Fayed (Salim Daw).

Morgan characterizes Al-Fayed as a ruthless operator who orchestrated a scheme to get Diana and his son Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla) together in order to climb the social ladder in the U.K. The show declines to interrogate why Al-Fayed was prevented from entering the country's elite social circles (racism) or why the royal family was so concerned about Diana's new relationship with a Muslim man (also racism), instead relying on harmful stereotypes about the dangers of non-white people "infiltrating" traditionally white spaces. (Notably, Carole Middleton, played by Eve Best, pushes Kate into a similar situation with Prince William in Part 2, but her efforts are written off as a mother simply doing what's best for her daughter.)

The final six episodes are similarly kind to the royal family, particularly those members who have acceded to new roles in the wake of Queen Elizabeth II's death in 2022. Episode 5, "Willsmania" follows Prince William (Ed McVey) as he navigates his grief over Diana's death and the public's newfound interest in him, but his legitimate frustrations with his father — "Don't you think there might be a connection between where we all are now and your part in it?" he asks Charles — are waved away by Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce), who suggests that being angry with Charles is "more acceptable than admitting who [he's] really angry with:" his mother. And though William's arc is not without tension, especially where it concerns his budding romance with Kate (Meg Bellamy), his slow embrace of his role as future king is coded as a heroic journey of self-acceptance and sacrifice, similar to the one undertaken by his grandmother 50 years prior.

In addition, Part 2 resolves any lingering conflict between Elizabeth and Margaret (Lesley Manville), who, in her final moments, tells her sister that she "will always be by [her] side." While it's perfectly nice to flash back to young Elizabeth (Viola Prettejohn) and Margaret's (Beau Gadsdon) V-E Day celebration, a memory that sustains Margaret through the many strokes she suffers leading up to her death, this portrayal of Margaret as a dutiful sister devoid of resentment clashes with the prickly, wisecracking woman we've come to know over the past five seasons. Indeed, during Margaret's last meaningful appearance, in Season 5, she excoriated Elizabeth for refusing to allow her to marry Peter Townsend 40 years prior. As Margaret explains, her life fell apart as a result of her sister's decision, yet Morgan declines to follow this storyline to its natural conclusion; in its place, he leaves viewers with a royal who respects "the scale of the sacrifice" Elizabeth was forced to make as Queen, above all else.

Though the finale, which sees the Queen conjure up visions of her past selves (with Foy and Colman on hand for meaningful cameos) as she mulls stepping down, effectively brings The Crown to a close, Part 2, like the show as a whole, is most successful when it directly engages with the "existential questions" Fellowes mentions at the beginning of Episode 6, "Ruritania." When Elizabeth seeks out advice from Tony Blair, he suggests a laundry list of reforms, from removing the monarchy's "anti-Catholic provisions" to limiting the "pomp and splendor" of the entire institution via "a purge of honorifics, a bonfire of sinecures."

The debate over how "ordinary" this extraordinary family should appear to the outside world — and the question of how these centuries-old traditions fit into a modern society, if they do at all — is a welcome return to form for the series. But right when it seems like The Crown will engage with this conflict in a meaningful way, Morgan plays it safe, once again. After meeting with the Warden of the Swans, the Lord High Admiral of the Wash, and various other officers, each of whom has a more ridiculous-sounding title than the last, the Queen becomes even more set in her ways. "The spell that we cast, and have cast for centuries, is our immutability," she tells the Prime Minister. "Modernity is not always the answer. Sometimes antiquity is, too."

In the past, The Crown may have presented the Queen's outright dismissal of any and all reforms as a mistake (as was the case in Season 4); now, though, it's portrayed as a humanist decision, as modernizing would mean firing the hundreds of people whose families have worked in service of the Crown for generations. Blair's proposals aren't mentioned again, and any doubts the Queen may have had about her conservative mindset or her flagging popularity are erased when, on the occasion of her Golden Jubilee, she's met with a sea of adoring fans, all cheering for the preservation of the monarchy.

But the biggest tell that The Crown abandoned its previous interests in service of a glowing, conflict-free portrait of the monarchy comes in the series finale, "Sleep, Dearie Sleep." Morgan's goal has always been to "take [the royals] seriously as complex, emotional human beings" — essentially, to separate the human from the monarch, the personal from the professional. In the finale, the Queen attempts to follow suit: As her office begins planning for her inevitable funeral, she considers stepping down to allow Charles to ascend to the throne, the ultimate act of service "as Queen and as a mother," the middle-aged Elizabeth argues.

The Queen is swayed by the logic, and even writes a speech to that effect, but ultimately, the younger version of herself talks her out of it. As the early-era Queen says, "Monarchy is something you are. Not what you do." There is no separating the human from the monarch; the two are one and the same.

Seven years and three cast changes later, that can also be said for The Crown. Morgan's Netflix series always walked a tightrope between fact and fiction, taking liberties with reality in service of its drama, but over time, that line blurred, to the point that The Crown, the show, and the Crown, the institution, became conflated. That the Emmy-winning drama ended its run as free PR for the British monarchy represents a stain on its legacy, but perhaps that's fitting for a show about a family that's been defined more by their failures than their successes.

The final season of The Crown is now streaming on Netflix. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

Claire Spellberg Lustig is the Senior Editor at Primetimer and a scholar of The View. Follow her on Twitter at @c_spellberg.