Netflix UK TV review: The Crown: Season 6, Part 1
Review Overview
Cast
8Consistency
4Ivan Radford | On 14, Dec 2023
Part 2 premieres on Thursday 14th December 2023.
“Ta-da!” Those are the words with which Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) makes a much-mooted appearance during a crucial episode of The Crown’s first half of Season 6. Splitting the final chapter of the royal drama in two is not a surprise move, as Netflix increasingly looks to sustain conversation around its flagship titles, and it also makes sense from a narrative perspective, as it allows the series to deal with the death of Diana while still ultimately moving past it before its finale. But taken as a four-episode collection, the first half of Season 6 struggles to know how to handle Diana’s tragic departure.
Beginning with an understated flash-forward is a bold and effective move, as it sets the poignant tone and reassures us that the drama isn’t going to go overboard in its retelling of Diana’s final days – but its handling of the story from then on is far less consistent.
The Crown has always been at its best when using the royal family as a lens through which to consider the nation’s social and political history, something that was often lost in Season 5’s intense, soap opera-like focus on the family. Season 6’s zooming in on Diana and Prince Charles (Dominic West) continues that slight misstep, to the point where Diana eclipses anything else going on in the country – and leaves Bertie Carvel’s Tony Blair only appearing briefly.
That off-balance approach is emphasised by the fact that Peter Morgan previously examined the aftermath of Diana’s death in the film The Queen. Although he may have been intentionally trying to avoid retreading similar ground, The Crown pales in comparison by effectively sidelining Queen Elizabeth II (Imelda Staunton) and losing a lot of the dramatic heft as a result – instead, she is portrayed as jealous of Diana, without much nuance at all. Compared to the earlier seasons of The Crown, where Elizabeth’s personal passions and her national duty are the crux of the tension, it’s a notably shallower affair.
The real tragedy, though, is that the show simultaneously fails to delve into Diana in much depth either. Elizabeth Debicki follows Emma Corrin in producing a phenomenal performance, bringing vulnerability and charisma in equal measure to the tragic and intriguing figure. She excels at capturing Diana’s protective streak towards her sons – William (Ed McVay) and Harry (Luther Ford) – in attempting to both be divorced well and trying to keep the press photographers who follow her everywhere both satisfied and kept at a distance.
But Debicki’s doing a lot of heavy lifting with not a lot of material, as the scripts increasingly put the emphasis on Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla) and his relationship with his father, Mohamed al-Fayed (Salim Daw), who pushes Dodi and Diana together to help elevate the family’s standing in Britain through the royal connection. While Abdalla is very good at exploring Dodi’s pained desire to impress his father, it’s a shame to have Diana framed both in reference to Dodi and to Charles, rather than being a protagonist in her own right.
It’s perhaps telling that her best moments are when she’s with the boys away from the men, or that the episodes’ stronger beats are when the Queen and Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce) are navigating how to respond to Charles and Diana’s media coverage – and Charles’ own desire to put Camilla (Olivia Williams) in the spotlight.
There are moments of genuine emotion in the mix, particularly Dominic West’s reaction to Diana’s death in the concluding episode of this first half. But when that segues into imagined interactions with Diana, the scripts descend into overcooked territory, without giving us any new insight.
The result is a frustratingly uneven run of episodes, which suffer from their limited scope and in turn have their limitations exposed by such close-up scrutiny. There’s no room here for the kind of inventive and illuminating episodes that have defined previous seasons, such as Aberfan or Mohamed’s own standalone outing, when a fresh perspective whisks us away for an hour – the sequences in which we do follow photographers racing to get pictures are let down slightly by the heavy-handed metaphors of predator and prey.
Perhaps it’s fitting that, despite strong production values, a sensitive handling of the Paris car crash and a committed cast, Diana ultimately remains an elusive, lost soul and the Queen feels increasingly irrelevant. Hopefully the second half of this final season can round off both their legacies in a more consistent and satisfying manner. Ta-da? Not quite.