17 November 2023 - "The Crown" Final Season
‘Royally lost the plot’: how The Crown went from prestige drama to TV disaster
Michael Hogan (The Guardian, 17/11/2023)
Prime ministers have called it “malicious nonsense” and “complete rubbish”. Theatrical dames have criticised it as “crude sensationalism”. And now the notices for the new season are in, they don’t make pretty reading, either. The Guardian’s Lucy Mangan found it so excruciating to watch whilst delivering her one-star verdict that she felt like she was having an “out-of-body experience”. Other critics have called it “clumsy and crass”, “ill-judged and outrageous”, “pointless and sad”, “a disappointing new low”, “a very pretty bore”. Let’s call them “mixed reviews”, shall we?
‘The Crown’ Struggles Mightily With Princess Diana’s Death
Alan Sepinwall (Rolling Stone, 16/11/2023)
The 2006 film The Queen, written by Peter Morgan, dramatizes the immediate aftermath of the death of Princess Diana. Much of the conflict comes from Queen Elizabeth’s reluctance to publicly address the grief of her subjects, with British Prime Minister Tony Blair pleading with her to speak.
The Crown season six: an overly detailed, unimaginative soap opera – I needed a martini to get through it
Giselle Bastin (The Conversation, 16/11/2023)
The opening scene of season six of The Crown sees a man walking his dog under the light of the Eiffel Tower. It’s 1997 and a Mercedes car speeds past and ends in a horrendous crash in a Paris tunnel. The man’s dog is being recalcitrant and refusing to take its evening wee.
“The Crown” Presents the Last Days of Princess Diana
Rebecca Mead (The New Yorker, 15/11/2023)
In the sixth and final season of “The Crown,” Peter Morgan, the show’s writer and creator, returns to where he began. That start is not the first season of Morgan’s epic royal chronicle, which was released in November of 2016 and opened with the then Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to Prince Philip, in 1947. The origins of “The Crown” go back a decade earlier, to 2006, with the movie “The Queen,” written by Morgan and directed by Stephen Frears, which starred Helen Mirren as the monarch, and was set in the immediate aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, after a car crash during a stay in Paris, in late August of 1997.