The Crown Has Inexplicably Made Queen Elizabeth a Supporting Character In Her Own Story

By Lacy Baugher Milas  |  November 30, 2023 | 11:15am
Photo Courtesy of Netflix
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The Crown Has Inexplicably Made Queen Elizabeth a Supporting Character In Her Own Story
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Netflix’s The Crown has always been an ambitious experiment. A lavish, expensive series about England’s Royal Family that spans the majority of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, it’s like nothing else that’s ever been attempted in this genre space, swapping out its main cast twice and dedicating entire seasons to the events of specific decades. Not everything is perfect, and the show is rarely subtle about its narrative goals. But when it works, it really works, thoughtfully wrestling with questions about the ways that public persona and personal identity—particularly for royals—are often set at odds with one another. It’s a story about the inevitable conflict between tradition and progress, duty and sacrifice, told in a way that renders moments of broad historical importance in intimate, humanized ways. 

And at the center of that story has always been one woman: Elizabeth Windsor. A girl who wasn’t supposed to be queen, a woman defined by her duty, in the world of The Crown she is a monarch forever torn between her personal desires and the institution she has been called to lead, repeatedly asked to give up pieces of herself in the name of something greater than she is. (One of the best parts about this show is that it doesn’t mock Elizabeth’s genuine belief that she has been called to the role that she finds herself in and that the act of being queen is not only a duty, but a kind of service too.)  Unfortunately, however, as The Crown has gone on, it has drifted further and further away from that central conceit, steadily becoming less focused on Elizabeth as a character, and displaying decreased interest in her interior life. 

While the steady expansion of the show’s canvas has offered The Crown a chance to tell broader stories, it has also often had the side effect of leaving the woman who was initially meant to hold everything together behind. From the high drama of Charles and Diana’s tumultuous marriage to the tragedy of the Princess of Wales’s death, with multiple family scandals, disasters, and missteps shoved in between, the steadily widening scope of the show—and the increasing number of Windsors on its canvas—has meant there is less of a place for any stories about Elizabeth herself within it.

In truth, the queen has been growing increasingly isolated as a character for several years now. Placed against the broader ambitions and celebrity of women like Margaret Thatcher and Princess Diana back in Season 4, Elizabeth’s determined stoicism begins to seem stodgy and old-fashioned, and the show is less interested than ever in exploring the uncertainty and pain that so clearly exists behind the monarch’s firmly built emotional walls. She’s often left sitting on the sidelines, watching as various Windsor interpersonal dramas play out in front of her, only occasionally managing to escape from or ignore them altogether. Elizabeth is a woman who is essentially becoming an object in front of us, and it’s depressing as hell. 

Things have only gotten worse since Imelda Staunton took over the role of the queen, which is a shame for many reasons, not the least of which is that Staunton is a powerhouse of an actress. Yet, as we enter the darkest, most morally complex decades of Elizabeth’s reign, she has become more and more an island unto herself, the character whose inner life and conflicts we know the least about. Staunton’s quiet steel helps cover a multitude of sins, but her version of the queen is solidly relegated to the background, a witness to the lives of everyone around her who occasionally passes judgment with a raised eyebrow or a steely glare, but is rarely given the chance to do much more. 

Her Elizabeth has almost no arc to speak of, a fact that’s made all the more frustrating because virtually every other character in Season 5—Staunton’s inaugural year in the role—does. (Even the Al-Fayed family gets an entire episode devoted to their backstory, for goodness sake. Who asked for that!) And things don’t seem to get any better in Season 6. In the first four episodes of the final season, the show’s ostensible main character barely even appears. (Diana’s bodyguard Trevor may get more lines than the queen does.) The Crown, which once made such a strident case not only for the necessity of the crown as an institution but for the specificity of Elizabeth herself as its representative, has seemingly decided that the best way to kick off its final set of episodes is to essentially erase the woman at the center of the story. 

On some level, it’s at least kind of an understandable move—after all, the first four episodes of The Crown Season 6 deal almost exclusively with the weeks leading up to Diana’s death. But if you were thinking that Staunton’s Elizabeth might finally get her big moment in the wake of that tragedy, you’re going to be disappointed. The queen is more narratively adrift than ever in these episodes, left to exist on the margins of the story—save when she needs to seem out of touch next to her (suddenly, surprisingly) forward-thinking son, who insists he understands what the British people want from a modern monarchy. And although the season’s fourth episode is essentially a remake of The Crown creator Peter Morgan’s 2006 film The Queen, it pays precious little attention to Elizabeth’s perspective and shows no interest in interrogating her actions or feelings.

In “Aftermath,” Elizabeth is generally a non-factor. She is occasionally allowed to appear imperious or awkward, but where The Queen thoughtfully finds humanity in the tension between the woman and the sovereign, showing us an Elizabeth endlessly shaped by the unspoken rules of a job she was never supposed to have and a post-war society that valued restraint, The Crown isn’t terribly interested in why she reacts to Diana’s death the way she does. Instead, the queen eventually agrees to go to London for Diana’s funeral and speak to the public, not because of her ongoing conversations with Prime Minister Tony Blair or her growing understanding that she’s misread the public’s expectations of and connection to her as their sovereign, but because she literally sees a ghost. Yes, the specter of the former Princess of Wales pops up just in time to remind Elizabeth of her duty to the same people she’s dedicated her life to serving.  It’s such an incredibly insulting narrative choice, particularly if you happen to have seen The Queen recently, which so deliberately centers the resentment Elizabeth feels at having yet another aspect of her private life opened up for a public inspection she’s never asked for. 

Perhaps Morgan and the other folks behind The Crown were concerned about stepping on Helen Mirren’s toes—the woman did win an Oscar for portraying the same events, after all—but the idea that the best way to avoid direct comparisons with The Queen is to essentially make Elizabeth invisible during one of the monarchy’s darkest hours is insulting to the character and to the viewers that have been watching her story through these many episodes. The most sympathetic read of these choices is that Elizabeth’s increasing isolation is meant to reflect the crown’s struggle as an institution to connect with the very people that Diana reached so easily. But the end result still leaves the show’s ostensible central character looking more like a caricature than the complex, three-dimensional figure of earlier seasons. With five episodes to go in the series, one can only hope The Crown finds a way to end its story that harkens back to its beginning, and that allows Elizabeth to end her story at the center of it once more. 

The Crown Season 6 Part 1 is currently streaming on Netflix.

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB.

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