The Crown review: Kate Middleton and Prince William bore you to tears
The Crown season 6 part 2 review and star rating: ★★
The Crown had settled into a rhythm, an unspoken agreement that fans had silently gone along with. The first three seasons promised intrigue, feeding us delicious gossip from the pre Queen Elizabeth II era. If the final three seasons couldn’t offer that, they could at least offer a rollickingly good night on the sofa. The formula had worked: until now.
The Crown season 6 part 2 is the royal juggernaut pulling into Exasperation Station. Part 1 detailed Diana’s death in horrifying, tantalising detail, but part 2’s examination of…checks notes… Wills and Kate at university are almost exclusively dull. That’s possibly because Wills and Kate’s actual time at university was dull – at least, you wouldn’t write this pair for fiction. If you did, one of them would be a more vivacious, bigger character. But The Crown’s lead writer Peter Morgan has always insisted that the show is rooted in reality. So, here you are: Wills and Kate at university. Suddenly I was feeling very, very tired.
Morgan has thrown in some flatly ridiculous storylines to try to juice up the plot. Kate first meets Willis when she buys a Big Issue from him; Wills says “If I thought I could not be with you I’d sooner not be here at all,” about Kate, which is hilariously melodramatic but also – amid Britain’s suicide crisis – a horrendously tone deaf way to draw in shocks, regardless of whether Morgan intended to imply anything dark or not.
Ed McVey takes a while to warm into the role but gets Wills’ pragmatism eventually, and Meg Bellamy’s Kate is fine with the rather thin role she is given. (Again, perhaps that’s just Kate.) There is no particularly driving story, as such: the characters are all plodding their depressing way towards, erm, Charles and Camilla’s wedding, which even for diehard royalists has by now become a culture moment of middling significance.
There’s a whole episode dedicated to the Mother’s Union, which is as twee and lacking as it sounds, with Bertie Carvel’s Tony Blair talking about Slobodan Milošević and The Kosovo War without enough specificity or context to make it interesting for younger viewers. Thank goodness for one outgoing troublemaker, Princess Margaret, and one incoming one, a grown-up Prince Harry, who slap the show back into charming waters, albeit too briefly. Harry is mostly ignored until the final episode when he gets to cavort around in his Nazi uniform, mirroring actual Harry’s similar party outfit. It’s one of the only crowning moments in the feature-length finale and Luther Ford gives the role sass and grit.
Sentimental and saccharine towards the royals, it closes feeling like an overly neat homage
Leslie Manville puts in the turn of her career as the ailing Margaret; we feel the princesses’ vulnerability acutely as her hedonism leads to a series of devastating strokes before her death. It could have felt crude, but Manville’s performance feels pillared by rods of empathy.
Read more: The Crown season 5 review: Subtle and sensitive, the outrage has got this show all wrong
In a throwback episode, we meet the fourth actor to play Queen Elizabeth II, Viola Prettejohn, who has fun imagining the Queen’s taste of freedom on V.E. Day, detailing the true story of when a teenage Elizabeth snuck out of the palace to dance the night away at The Ritz. In City PM’s exclusive interview with Viola Prettejohn, she said the mood on set was “solemn” after the real Queen’s passing and described how show creatives took into consideration her death when they scripted the finale. You can feel how much the creative team respected the late monarch by the end, but the feature-length final episode already feels burdened by being a product of its time: sentimental and saccharine towards the royals by the final scenes, it closes feeling like an overly neat homage.
I don’t know when The Crown should have ended, or how it should have ended, but this royally underwhelming set-up doesn’t throw out the right questions or ruminations on the monarchy or its key figures, or its (arguably ailing) role in society. Anyway, RIP to another royal legend, as the Netflix smash hit bows out.
The Crown season 6 part 2 is on Netflix from 14 December