Does The Crown Season 4 Go Too Far?

There are few subgenres I find as entertaining as what I’ll dub the “mean biopic” -- a biopic whose main function is to portray the subject of its biographical history as an utterly terrible person. Personally, I think for every exalting Bohemian Rhapsody, there should be a condemning The Social Network; we’re doing life stories of magnificent people to death, which is a downright shame when there are so many nasty people we could tear into instead. I’m at a point in my life where in the battle for my attention, stories about heroic individuals are losing laughably to stories about unequivocally bad individuals. Hence my newest obsession, Netflix’s mean Elizabeth II biopic series, The Crown, which has been under fire from those in support of the persisting but obsolete British monarchy and the Royal Family itself, which The Crown in equal parts inspects under a microscope and burns under a magnifying glass. The show is ruthless in its portrayal of the Queen, Prince Philip, Prince Charles and the like as morally and emotionally bankrupt people in a disastrously dysfunctional family. Controversy has followed The Crown throughout its previous three seasons, of course, but none so much as its most recent one.

Now, I will concede that a decent percentage of The Crown is exaggerated or imagined for the purpose of dramatic storytelling. Lord Mountbatten, for example, did not send Prince Charles a letter scolding him for his inability to find a queen shortly before his death at the hands of the IRA -- that was purely fiction. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (whom the fourth season also digs into), wouldn’t dare be rude to the Queen as she does on several occasions in the show, and the two actually notably got along in real life. The incident of Michael Fagan breaking into the palace to speak to Elizabeth about the state of the country as it’s portrayed in The Crown is, according to Fagan himself, wrought with a few mistakes. But these are minutiae compared to the truth of it all: that the series is mostly accurate in its harsh portrayal of both Buckingham and Downing Street. And the criticism surrounding The Crown does not merely stem from the inaccuracies present in the show as some critics claim, but the bigger picture: what does a mean biopic mean for the Royal Family’s reputation?

Well, obviously, it’s bound to have a negative effect. It undoes decades of good PR for the Windsors — but is that really uncalled for? At this point in history, between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s departure from royal life, to Republicanism (in Britain meaning denouncement of the monarchy and support of Britain as a purely democratic republic) in the UK at an all-time high, to the family’s long history of imperialism, the Royal Family holds massive power only because they hold massive wealth. Besides, biopics bend and dramatize real life all the time. Unlike his fictional counterpart in Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln, though he abolished slavery in the United States, was still an outspoken white supremacist for most of his life. While the beautiful marriage between John and Alicia Nash was the centerpiece of A Beautiful Mind, in real life, Nash was actually noted to be a physically abusive husband. While Alexander Hamilton himself did not own slaves, he wasn’t nearly as anti-slavery as the musical Hamilton suggests, and actively participated in the slave trade. Do we demand that these biopics, which laud these figures as heroes, have a warning before them that alerts audiences that not everything being said about them is entirely true? Of course not: these are nice biopics. But if we can get behind the fact that these figures were flawed human beings, can we not delve into and portray their worst vices with conviction?

The Crown sounds a clear, resounding message: the royals are a messy little family that’s not to be revered. And with the introduction of Princess Diana into the show, that message has never been clearer, and the show has never been stronger or more interesting.