Transcript: Culture Chat — Netflix’s ‘The Crown’

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Culture Chat — Netflix’s ‘The Crown’’

Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and this is our Friday chat show. Today we are talking about The Crown, which is in its sixth and final season. The first four episodes are already out on Netflix and the last four it will be out on December 15th. For a bit of background The Crown first came out in 2016 and over the past nine years it has spanned 50 years of the Queen’s life. It’s created by Peter Morgan, it’s won 22 Emmys and it is one of the most expensive TV shows ever made.

The Crown Netflix trailer clip
You’ve seen the images on the television . . . Diana gave people what they needed . . . All over the world in their thousands . . . They adored her for it . . . This is going to be the biggest thing that any of us has ever seen.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And surprisingly, people have very strong opinions about this final season, which depicts the end of Princess Diana’s life and her death. It got mixed to positive reviews in the US and very negative reviews in the UK. So today we’re going to talk about it, talk about the show, its reception and where it fits into TV history. Joining me from London is UK chief political commentator, his royal highness, Robert Shrimsley. Welcome, Robin.

Robert Shrimsley
I hope you were bowing when you said that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
(Laughter) It was a deep bow. Also in London is the people’s prince, The Financial Times’ deputy news editor India Ross.

India Ross
Hello.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’m so happy to have you both.

India Ross
Thanks for having us.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. Why don’t we jump in first with what we thought of these first four episodes of Season 6. Robert, big picture, what did you think of this season so far?

Robert Shrimsley
Well, as someone who has really enjoyed The Crown most of the way through, I haven’t loved this first half of this series. I found it a little bit too close to soap opera and maybe it’s just because these things are so strong in my own memory. Whereas the early seasons were things that happened that I don’t remember or wasn’t even alive for in some instances. But it didn’t really fly for me. It just felt below par.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Hmm. Interesting. India, what about you?

India Ross
I think I enjoyed it more than Robert did and also more than I expected to. I’ve also watched The Crown from the start and largely enjoyed it. I came into this season having read some extremely negative reviews, which I will get into the slightly hysterical critical response to this season shortly. But so I had very low expectations and I thought it was fine. I didn’t think it was amazing. I didn’t think it was as good as the early seasons, but I thought it was not nearly the kind of ham-fisted sort of butchering of Diana’s . . . the story of Diana’s death that the critics were saying it was. It passed the ‘did I want to look at my phone all the time test’, which I didn’t. I got through the first four episodes in, you know, binged them in a row. I cried. I was totally glued to it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Robert, did you cry?

Robert Shrimsley
Not in the way that you might imagine. No, I just thought it was dull and actually, I was checking my phone a lot. And I said, if I compare it to the two-hour film The Queen with Helen Mirren as the queen, which I thought was really emotionally packed and really portrayed what people might have been going through. I just felt like this was Oh God the writing. I’ve got to do this again.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, interesting. I kind of liked it, too. I also, I feel less of it, I might have less of an emotional attachment to the story and to The Crown. But I really liked Elizabeth Debicki as tall Diana. I thought she was really good. I felt that her like, just the way that she was interacting with the press, I don’t know. I felt it and I don’t know. It feels like it’s this is well-worn territory. So it’s kind of like a lose-lose for anyone who has to cover it. And Peter Morgan had to cover Diana’s death. And so I sort of respected that there were a few places where they took a leap and I did cry as well. I think the last episode was pretty emotional.

Robert Shrimsley
I think what I found problematic, it seemed to me that one of the things that’s made The Crown effective throughout is that there’s been an overarching story, a particular story they’re telling out of duty vs love all the way through three generations, at least of the royal family. And that’s been a very powerful and interesting story and the emotional consequences of that has been very interesting. And obviously, that was true of the start of the Charles and Diana relationship. But by the end, I just sort of felt we’re just doing the action and the drama. So for me, it didn’t actually have that emotional narrative and punch that the others had.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Let’s get into the details of the show. Robert, I agree with you that the show had this clear tension of duty vs desire through all the seasons and that tension has been a little muddled in this one. So as we’ve touched on, the season follows the final weeks of Princess Diana’s life. It had been a year since she and Charles officially divorced. And in the first episode, we see her in the throes of her own kind of hot-girl summer. She goes on vacation with her kids. She meets this new boyfriend, the wealthy businessman, Dodi Al-Fayed. And then the next four episodes follow their relationship and the events that lead to their eventual death in a car crash in Paris. Robert, you lived through this as an adult and you reported on it. Maybe you can walk us through the sort of highlights of this season and also tell us whether the depiction kind of rang true to you based on your experience covering it.

Robert Shrimsley
I mean, obviously, it was an absolutely staggering shock when she died. There was no, you know, not like someone being ill. This is like one day she’s there and one day she’s not. It was a most extraordinary, shocking event. And I don’t think the series captured that scale of shock in the country. It captured this a little bit in the family. But again, to be boring, not as well as the Queen. I found also that aspects of, for example, we have, you know, Dodi Al-Fayed’s father Mohamed. He plays this sort of Bond villain character, and he’s an oh, he’s an absolutely awful foreigner and a real caricature of a figure which certainly diminished this for me. I just found the portrayal of him ridiculous.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Just to follow up on that detail, so Dodi Al-Fayed’s father, who was a major businessman, had a lot of business in London, owned Harrods. Yeah, he’s depicted as this man who’s just trying to get Dodi into Diana’s life just to kind of like get more power. Was that not how you experienced it when you were reporting?

Robert Shrimsley
I’m not saying it’s exactly wrong because I’m certain that he was thrilled at the idea of this tie-up. And he was still trying to get a British passport, which had been denied to him. So I’m certain that he was using it in that way. But he’s just portrayed in this terribly, terribly cardboard way. And that for me was part of the problem with the whole series, that I found the characters very one dimensional.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. India what do you think?

India Ross
I do. I do agree with that. You’re making me slightly question my view on this. You’re right. All these things. Yeah. I think what you said about the failure to capture the kind of global impact of these events is a real oversight. And it definitely does get too kind of zoomed in on the drama at the centre of this and the couple of characters involved. But it’s so difficult, like the amount of scrutiny this show has had from day one. You know, it touches such an incredible nerve in the British psyche that it feels like he’s so kind of doomed to fail. Like it’s just so difficult to imagine how . . .

Robert Shrimsley
He could have stopped.

India Ross
Well, so this is the big question is, you know, I think that The Crown, in an ideal world, should have stopped when it entered the modern era for this reason. Because it just was, it’s an impossibly close subject. The problem is, of course, that, you know, it’s a Netflix show. The Diana story arc is so impossibly irresistible. I mean, you just couldn’t write a better Hollywood story like than this. It’s just unbelievable. And I just don’t think they were ever going to have the restraint to call it a day, you know, at the end of Claire Foy or whatever.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Can I ask a follow-up question India? You were . . . I was seven when Princess Diana died, you were about that age?

India Ross
I was also seven. I mean, honestly it was my kind of 9/11. Like, I remember it like it was yesterday. I happened to be . . . I grew up in the countryside, but I happened to be in London that day with my parents and we were staying in a hotel and I was awake before my parents, as one often is at that age. I turned on the TV and I went running up to them and was like, mom! Dad! Princess Diana’s dead! And they were like, no, she’s not, Like, don’t be stupid. And then, of course, you know, and then we went to Buckingham Palace and saw the flowers and everything. And it’s a real kind of like core memory for me. I’m not a royalist by any means but I think like many British people, I think we have a tendency to underestimate our emotional connection to the royal family. And we like to think that we’re not bothered by it. But I think it’s very baked into our sense of self and our relationship with the country.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Did this show, did you feel like the show represented . . . reflected the feelings that you had as a kid in a way that worked or didn’t?

India Ross
I think perhaps this is why I’m so looking at this show so generously, is that I think it almost didn’t matter how they handled it as long as they handled it with, you know, decent amounts of sort of accuracy and faithfulness. Because it’s such a kind of like emotionally resonant topic for me that just seeing any rendering of it on screen is like a really kind of like powerful experience for me. And anyone who was going to take a decent stab at it was going to, I was going to watch it and enjoy it, you know?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. So I’d love to broach the scene that the internet is obsessed with, which is like the one scene that I think a lot of British critics and British viewers found somewhat disrespectful, which is people keep calling it Ghost Diana. The scene where Diana as a ghost sort of comes back. Can someone explain it? Maybe Robert, you wrote about it. Can you tell us what happens?

Robert Shrimsley
Yeah. So considering that it probably takes up about three and a half minutes of screen time, it’s got a lot of attention. Basically after her death, Diana seems to appear both to the then-Prince Charles and later to the Queen when they’re sitting alone reflecting on what has happened. And it’s never completely clear whether the series is actually saying the ghost of Diana appeared or whether this is in their imaginations as they having those kind of internal conversations you do with the dead. And it’s actually really quite low-key. As a thing to get wound up about, it probably wasn’t up there. I mean, from my point of view, given some of the rows about the degrees of accuracy in this series, I thought that having the ghost of Diana appear did at least nail that issue once and for all as to how factually accurate we think this is.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

India Ross
I felt that the way this scene was received is very much, it’s kind of the TV equivalent of, you remember in Prince Harry’s memoir where people jumped on that story about how he lost his virginity in a pub garden and they like wielded it as this example, as evidence of why this entire enterprise was terrible and we shouldn’t read this book. It’s like the thing that people are seizing upon to kind of like back up their preordained narrative that this show is terrible. Which I think speaks to the way people are kind of emotionally inflamed by this show and why the reviews are so negative in Britain. You know, for instance, The Guardian gave this season a one-star review and seems like an out of body experience, which to me is just insane. Like, there is no way that this is like one of the worst seasons of TV. It’s just, it’s delusional. I thought the scene with the ghost was totally fine. I didn’t think it was amazing. You know, it’s not like a great feat of auteurist TV, but it’s a totally legit, like, narrative device.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Why don’t we zoom out here and talk about The Crown more broadly as a show, which we’re starting to get into. You know, as I remember it, in 2016 when the show started and when it showed up, it was unique because it was slightly irreverent to the monarchy, like it was an intimate sort of critical lens on their interpersonal dynamics. But now that we’ve gotten closer to the present, that feels a little different, too. And I’m wondering why. Obviously, we’re closer. So it’s hard to see history that’s closer. But also, you know, in any timeline, the end is more detailed than the beginning, just because we know more. So maybe it’s just less titillating now because we have to imagine less. I’m curious what you guys think.

Robert Shrimsley
Well, you’re right. And obviously a lot less was known about the royal family even in those days. And you know, things that we now know, pretty much everything that’s going on, every burp is recorded in some newspaper or another. They’ve all got their own briefing machines who tell, they’ve all got their own free pet journalists they brief their side of the story to. Almost everything’s out there. That wasn’t true in 1950 and 1960. So there’s an awful lot that people don’t know unless they’ve made a real effort to discover it. So I think that’s an important part of this. And it was more detached, more removed. There was more deference.

India Ross
One thing I think that’s slightly kind of illusory about the show is that as it’s progressed, it’s become more apparently trashy. And I think that’s because the subject matter has become trashier by our kind of current understanding of what that means. So, like . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
What do you mean?

India Ross
Well, as in like, I think the sort of tabloidification of the story as it’s entered the tabloid era makes the show seem of a lesser quality, even though presumably the shenanigans that were going on, you know, in season one and two at the time were very squalid and whatever. But to us, from this removed, they seem quite kind of rarefied even if they weren’t. And so even though I think the quality of the show, I mean I think we agree the quality of the show has declined somewhat over the seasons. But I think that the decline in sort of real terms, as it were, of the quality of the show is not as great as it looks.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

[MUSIC]

OK. So for the remainder of the show, I want to talk about how The Crown fits into prestige TV in general. Like, this show is so ambitious. It’s been running for so long, it’s so expensive and grand. And over these nine years, the way we watch TV has changed a lot. I was looking up some of the big budget epic shows that everyone watched for a decade, and they really were on for a long time. Game of Thrones was on for eight years. Mad Men and The Sopranos were on for nine years. The Wire was on for six years now Succession was on for five, and it felt kind of like an exception to the rule. Do you feel like this is a relic of the past or no?

India Ross
I think the early seasons feel like a relic of the past. I mean, I think the early seasons had a legitimate claim to be a sort of golden age-ish TV show. I don’t think it has that anymore. But I also don’t think the golden age of TV exists anymore. I think it’s the best show Netflix has ever made. Yeah, I guess. I mean, I guess the kind of arc of the show kind of mirrors the arc of TV generally, which is this sort of sudden steady decline into not being as good as it was.

Robert Shrimsley
I mean, I think it’s interesting sort of the way we watch how that keeps changing. So if I recall rightly, when The Crown first came out, it was out in one block I think, and you could you could whizz through it in a weekend. And over time Netflix realised that wasn’t the optimum use of its model. And so increasingly the long-running shows now, they’re coming out episode by episode. And Succession we had to wait for each episode, didn’t we, in the final series? And so ironically, the streaming services have gone back to appointment TV as a way of bolstering their business model and creating more of a buzz around what they do. I’m certainly conscious that there seem to be a lot more mini-series around a lot of things that I’m watching at the moment. This was a six-part series and they’re over an eight-part series and it’s done, which actually I think is great. I mean, my wife is a terrible completer. And say once we get in past series one of a series however many there’ll be, there’ll be nine series, ten series. We’ll have to watch them all. So I’m actually quite pleased if we’re moving towards mini series instead.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, It’s funny though, you know, I’m, you know, TV’s trying to define itself right now, and I like the short stuff too, but I really I hope that it’s not the end of these big budget epic shows that everybody’s watching for. I loved Mad Men, I loved The Sopranos.

India Ross
Those were long.

Robert Shrimsley
But why do you think it should be, Lilah? I mean, we’re talking about the absolute cream shows, the absolute best. The Mad Men, The Sopranos. You know, there’s an awful lot of dross that came out at the same time and there’s a handful that we all remember. And I don’t see why that should change.

India Ross
I agree with Robert. I don’t think a show needs to be long in and of itself. You know, I don’t think that’s a requirement of a show to be great. But at the same time, you know, I like . . . you remember getting to the end of The Sopranos, getting to the end of The Wire. And there is a real . . . there’s a satisfaction in having sat with a show for that length of time. I also think that it’s quite an impressive sort of feat for a writer to sustain that kind of like high-wire act for so long. So I think it’s a shame.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I don’t see any other shows doing that. I guess now that The Crown is closed up even though it didn’t really sustain itself . . . 

Robert Shrimsley
I wouldn’t bet that it’s over, by the way. I don’t necessarily believe that The Crown . . . it may be over for a while, but there are you know, there are other chapters. We’ve talked about Harry. There is more, that is, of material available. And, you know, it strikes me that a few years down the line, someone at Netflix will say, oh, you know, maybe we should do the next chapter because people will watch it.

India Ross
Totally.

Robert Shrimsley
I don’t actually believe this is the end.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. OK. Robert, India, your royal highnesses. Thank you both. This has been great. We will be back in just a minute for our segment, More or Less.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Welcome back For More or Less, the part of the show where each of us gives one thing we want more of or less of culturally. India, what’s yours?

India Ross
So mine is on the theme of the conversation we’ve just been having. I would like to see more good TV. I think there is not much of it around. Things that I have thought were good recently were like The White Lotus, Euphoria. I also really enjoyed The Idol. No one else like that, but I thought it was like an interesting failure. But yeah, I would just like to see people trying to do better TV than they’re currently doing.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Amazing. Robert, what about you?

Robert Shrimsley
So I’m actually going to stick on the theme as well. Also talk quintessentially British, because this week sees the latest run of series called Slow Horses, which is on Apple TV, and it’s about a group of deadbeat, useless spies. And it’s based on this series of books by Mick Herron, which are both very good, but also very funny. And it’s a great series which I really enjoy with Gary Oldman in the lead. But what I really want more of are the books upon which it’s based because I’ve read them all now and they’re very, very clever, very funny, and I can’t recommend them enough.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Amazing. OK. I’ll put that in the show notes for listeners. Mine is a little vague, but I think listeners have gotten used to that. I want more of doing the thing. I’ll tell you why. I went to Philadelphia to spend Thanksgiving with my boyfriend Larry’s family. And I watched Rocky 2, which I had never seen before, and the only person in the world probably. But the next day we went to these infamous steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which in Rocky 2 has this iconic scene where he runs up to the top surrounded by kids. He puts his hands in the air. It’s this whole big deal. And Larry said, do you want to run up the steps? And I’m thinking about the two of you right now already cringing because you would never do something so offensively earnest. Is that happening? Would you run the steps?

India Ross
Yeah.

Robert Shrimsley
Yeah, I’m afraid I probably would. Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh, you would? Yes. OK. So we went. Yeah, we ran up the steps. We put our hands up at the top. It was, like, so much fun. But then when I got to the top, I realised that there were all of these people that I could tell wanted to run the steps, but they were not letting themselves because they were too self-conscious. And there were a lot of people who were running to the top, but they weren’t putting their hands in the air. And I felt that these people really just wanted to do it and they weren’t letting themselves. So my advice, my cultural recommendation is do the thing, run the steps. Put your hands up at the top.

India Ross
Love that.

Robert Shrimsley
India and I are now going to run back up to the newsroom. Raise our hands in delight.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Exactly. Well, please do that in my honour. Robert, India, thank you so much. This is so much fun.

Robert Shrimsley
Been a pleasure.

India Ross
Thank you.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. We have a request for you. WWe are having our books editors on to help us choose books as good gifts for this holiday season. And we want your questions. So are you looking for a book for your aunt who loves historical fiction but hates anything about war? Or for your niece who loves interpersonal drama? We’ll be recording this episode very soon, so send us the questions you have this weekend. You can email lifeandart@FT.com or write me on Instagram @LilahRap. Check out the show notes. We have links in there to everything that Robert, India and I talked about. Also, those links will get you past the paywall in FT.com. You can also read Robert’s column on the ghost of Diana there. In the show notes, we have discount codes for a subscription to the FT. It’s a good gift for the holidays and we have ways to keep in touch with me and the show on email, X and Instagram. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco. With original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer. And our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely weekend and we’ll find each other again on Monday.