2023-11-11 13:50:07
The first five episodes of the sixth and final season have been available since Thursday, November 9 on Netflix. You will have to wait until December 14 to discover the end of this phenomenon series.
Fans of The Crown hold their breath: the phenomenon series devoted to the reign of Elizabeth II concludes with an event which shook the British monarchy like rarely, the death of Princess Diana.
The ten episodes of the sixth and final season are released on Netflix in two stages: five on Thursday, then the other half on December 14, forcing fans in a hurry to be patient.
The last weeks of Princess Diana’s life
Over the 60 hours broadcast since 2016, the sovereign has been successively played by Claire Foy, Olivia Colman then Imelda Staunton. From the young princess’s marriage in post-war Britain to the family crises of the 1990s, the series, with a plethora of stars and a budget estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars, interweaves historical events and intimate scenes, assuming sometimes controversial liberties with the truth.
In the years preceding his death on September 8, 2022, the global success of The Crown helped establish Elizabeth II as a global icon, a sovereign who always managed to keep even the slightest of her opinions secret and rarely let her emotions show in public.
The sixth season chronicles the last weeks of Princess Diana’s life, after her turbulent divorce from the current King Charles III and until her death on August 31, 1997. Chased by paparazzi, the sedan which transported Lady Di was embedded in a pillar of the Alma tunnel in Paris, killing the 36-year-old princess and her new love, wealthy Egyptian heir Dodi Al-Fayed.
“Revolution”
The Queen was then slow to react to the immense popular emotion aroused by the disappearance of the one whom Tony Blair nicknamed the “people’s princess” and the royal family took years to overcome this trauma. “You have finally managed to turn everything around in this house. It is nothing short of a revolution”says the queen to the princess, played by Elizabeth Debicki, in the trailer.
Friend of celebrities and media figure, Diana had forged global popularity by displaying her empathy with the most deprived. She remains the object of immense admiration beyond the United Kingdom, and her memory casts a shadow over the image of the new King Charles III as well as his wife Queen Camilla, who never managed to overcome totally her reputation as a marriage wrecker.
The season is therefore nervously awaited by those close to the royalty – the family has never commented on the series. The first revelations about Lady Di appearing as a ghost have already triggered indignant reactions and accusations of lack of respect.
Controversies
In Variety magazine, the creator of the series Peter Morgan refuted having wanted to show it in “ghost in the traditional sense” : “What we see is that she continues to live on in the minds of those she left behind. Diana was unique, (…) she deserved special treatment on a narrative level.”
This is far from the first time that The Crown is under fire from criticism. Over the seasons, she has been accused of having suggested infidelities of the queen and her husband Philip, of having shown the current king as a fickle husband or even of having attributed to Charles the desire to see his mother abdicate in the 1990s.
Sun photographer Arthur Edwards, who has covered the royal family for 40 years, told the tabloid that he had to stop watching the series after two seasons, too annoyed by the inventions that punctuate the storyline. But apart from the inaccuracies, “What really annoys me is the awful way the show treats Prince Charles, now our king.”
A fiction”
Netflix decided last year to add a warning specifying that it was fiction, without appeasing all the criticism.
For royal historian Ed Owens, the series had a significant influence on the image of the royal family, “especially among young people” who are numerous on Netflix and have not experienced the events recounted themselves.
“They take what they see in The Crown for the truth“, he believes, interviewed by AFP, stressing that the series has reinforced the positive image of devotion of Elizabeth II. On the other hand, according to him, the current king remains not very popular “and that’s partly because Charles isn’t presented in a very positive way.”
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