The Crown, the latest big-budget historical miniseries from Netflix's ambitious creative team, is not a timely and relevant work by accident. This finely calibrated character drama has a lot to say about monarchy, but also about power - not only how it changes people, but also how it brings out the deep and secret facets of people's true nature. While another show made by less capable hands might have taken this premise to expectable limits by turning it's characters from historical figures with complicated motives and needs into stock caricatures of themselves, The Crown grits its teeth in a display of English sensibility and keeps its facts straight.
The story takes place over 10 episodes, between 1947 and 1955. It follows the early reign of Queen Elizabeth II, the current ruling monarch of Great Britain. Prominent in this season (which has been confirmed as only the first of six (!) planned out to extend the timeline to the present day), are a mix of some characters who were prominent in decades past and in the recently concluded Second World War, such as Prime Minister Winston Churchill, as well as characters like Elizabeth's own sister Margaret who struggle to live a normal, free life while trapped within an institution who's limitations seem increasingly archaic in the modern world.
The Crown deserves to be lauded as a case study in critical art - Not only, for American audiences, does this miniseries transform the institution of British monarchy from a distant and quaintly powerless spectacle to a strikingly humanized one, but it also says so much about despotic systems of power. Not only does it depict the easy racism and classism which an imperial throne necessitate in those surrounding it, but it also shows the ways in which our own obsession with 'royal celebrities' overlooks the ways in which they are denied basic freedoms by the ancient position they occupy. The Crown does not enter this story with the intent to promote or vilify the British throne - instead, it spends 10 hours carefully testing it, throwing all manner of human conflicts against this fancy form of warlord rule and allows the viewers to draw their own conclusions.
The Crown is currently streaming on Netflix, and I highly recommend it!
