Sometimes popular culture becomes so popular that the culture disappears. Intelligent analysis is engulfed by conversation that often has little to do with the project itself. This happens often, with Barbie and pop stars and Hollywood’s bright young things, and it has happened to The Crown. What is unusual about the conversation around Peter Morgan and Netflix’s drama is that it has been so cumbersome for so long: about the show’s accuracy, or its fairness, about whether it helps or hinders the royal family. Heavy is the discourse that plagues The Crown.
As we trudge through the show’s final season – the first four episodes dropped last week, the final six are coming mid-December – nuance has flatlined. Its legacy has been decided by one-star reviews, and it goes like this: the first two seasons were sophisticated prestige drama, season 3 and 4 veered into (sophisticated) soap opera, seasons 5 and 6 are some of the worst television ever broadcast. Like many discussions about the show’s subjects, this is broadly true but wildly oversimplified. Those first seasons were excellent but not without soapy tendencies. Yes, you still see TikToks of Diana roller-skating through Buckingham Palace, but that middle stretch is not as good as you remember. No getting around it, last season sucked. But this final run is absolutely fine, thank you very much.
At the centre of the very loud criticism is Diana’s ghost (played by Elizabeth Debicki, who also plays non-ghost Diana), gleefully ridiculed by tabloids and television critics alike. This leap into the supernatural apparently seems to sum up what is wrong with The Crown in 2023: it’s ridiculous, it’s silly, it’s so-bad-it’s-just-bad. By giving us a ghost, the show has apparently given up its own. There are problems with these episodes, all written by show creator Peter Morgan, which depict the final days of Diana’s life and the immediate aftermath. It can be repetitive and on-the-nose and dreary. Diana’s ghost is not one of them.
After Prince Charles (Dominic West) visits Diana’s body in Paris, he has a stiff drink with his ex-wife’s ghost on the jet back (he drinks anyway, I don’t think ghosts can). She appears with a “ta-da” and a twinkle in her eye (Debicki’s performance has, correctly, received widespread praise). They discuss her legacy and his regret. It is moving and strange: somehow, West and Debicki are both playful and mournful. And then, poof, two minutes later, she is gone. I would not recommend anyone directly related to Diana watch it, and a second conversation with the late Queen is less effective, but the ghost sure does jolt the rest of us back to life. And, really, is the creative decision that unhinged? We hear a lot about Diana’s ghost from psychics and actresses playing the princess: Morgan simply took one step further and put her in front of the camera. In a Diana-saturated landscape, the choice to show something new rather than retread the old pays off.
Perhaps the writer was so tired of the misplaced criticism that The Crown makes things up that he decided to give us a conversation that could only have been made up – apologies to the aforementioned psychics and actresses – to see if we actually liked it. In an interview with Variety, Morgan said that it wasn’t really a ghost “in the traditional sense”: “It was her continuing to live vividly in the minds of those she has left behind.” He’s talking about the royals, of course, but he’s also talking about all of us: we live in a country haunted by this woman’s ghost, more than two decades since her death. Pointing that out to us is the most thrilling choice The Crown has made in years.
‘The Crown’ Season 6 is available to watch on Netflix now
Henry Wong is a senior culture writer at Esquire, working across digital and print. He covers film, television, books, and art for the magazine, and also writes profiles.
