64 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020
THE CRITICS
ONTELEVISION
PLAYING GAMES
Royal competition in Season 4 of “The Crown.”BY HILTONALSY
ou don’t have to be a royal watch
er—I’m not—to find the fourth
season of “The Crown” (on Net
flix) compelling. It’s not that it isn’t fun
to watch royal infidelity, sibling rivalry,
emotional breakdowns, political fric
tion, misbegotten romances, and dog
mania play out against backgrounds
that include Buckingham Palace and
various grand country estates. But the
point here is that, just as you begin to
luxuriate in the lurid gossip behind the
façade of tradition, wealth, and fading
glory, Peter Morgan, the show’s creator
and writer, pulls back the brocade cur
tain and introduces a reality that feels
more like yours than not. These wrin
kles of truth—a mouse trotting unno
ticed across the Queen Mother’s floor
while she waits for a call, guards fuck
ing around and ignoring the security
cameras during shift changes, a prin
cess vomiting into a toilet again and
again—are blemishes on a vast and de
caying body; Morgan wants to show
not only how the Empire has crumbled
but its descent into a kind of domestic
crumminess.
In an episode based on an incident
that took place in 1982—the season cov
ers the years 1979 to 1990—a young
man named Michael Fagan (exception
ally well played by Tom Brooke) breaks
into Buckingham Palace and holds
the Queen (Olivia Colman) hostage in
her bedchamber for about ten minutes.
Unhinged, lonely, poor, and desperate
for an audience, Fagan wants someone
to hear his side of things: Margaret
Thatcher (Gillian Anderson) has made
life worse for men like him—outof
work blokes who can’t get a leg up, can’t
get a decent wage, let alone mental
health care. Added to all that frustra
tion, there is his disappointment with
the palace itself. How could a world
we associate with power and glamour
be so worn and chipped, so frowsy?
“The Crown” is replete with letdowns.
Longheld beliefs and hopes crash and
burn, then crash and burn again, as re
ality intrudes.
The tenepisode season opens with
welledited shots of the Queen in full
military regalia, sitting straightbacked
on a horse, saluting her troops. It’s an
official occasion, and members of her
immediate family are present. The scene
is crosscut with period documentary
footage of crowds in Northern Ireland
protesting British rule—which makes
clear Morgan’s interest in what hap
pens when you juxtapose an interpre
tation of fact with the facts themselves,
when you plop your imagination down
into the middle of the real. It’s rare that
this sort of juxtaposing is as good as it
is in “The Crown”—I’m thinking of
recent disappointments such as Hulu’s
“The Great,” about Catherine the
Great, and Netflix’s “SelfMade,” about
the Black American businesswoman
Madam C. J. Walker. While “The
Great” and “SelfMade” play with his
tory, or make a play of history, their
conceits are postmodern and glib (es
pecially when it comes to character),
allergic to both sentiment and depth.
Morgan’s characters, by contrast, live
with history, and it’s a shock some
times, while watching “The Crown,”
to realize the extent to which we are
all history’s subjects, as vulnerable to
its whims as we are to those of family.Still, the Troubles seem far away, in
another place altogether, when we find
the aging Lord Louis Mountbatten
(Charles Dance) in his summer resi
dence, Classiebawn Castle, in north
west Ireland. It’s 1979. A cousin of the
Queen’s, Mountbatten (nicknamed
Dickie) was also something of a surro
gate father to Prince Philip (Tobias
Menzies), who was essentially orphaned
as a child, and whose background
Morgan featured in Seasons 2 and 3.
Now Mountbatten—a military strate
gist who was much admired by Win
ston Churchill, and who served as In
dia’s pre independence viceroy—is
turning his attention to Prince Charles
( Josh O’Connor). Dickie is pissed off.
Charles, instead of finding a wife who
will supply him with an heir, has fallen
in love with a married woman, Camilla
Parker Bowles (the wonderfully sug
gestive Emerald Fennell). Charles and
Camilla first met around 1971, and some
time after that began their onagain,
offagain relationship, which, by the
dawn of the gogo eighties, made up
Charles’s entire erotic and emotional
universe. The royal heart wants what it
wants, but none of this sits well with
Mountbatten, and he writes Charles a
note to say so: Doesn’t the Prince real
ize the grave moral responsibility of
being the future King? He must grow
up and assume the duty he was born
into—upholding and preserving the
monarchy. These directives, of course,
don’t acknowledge how society has pro
gressed or how a young man like Charles
has progressed with it. He’s caught be
tween Empire Dying and Empire Dead.
No sooner does Mountbatten fire off ABOVE: TAMARA SHOPSIN