The Crown Season 2 Review: A Stately Soap Opera We Just Can’t Resist

The Crown Season 2 Review: A Stately Soap Opera We Just Can’t Resist

There’s a part of me that wants to dislike The Crown, this slavish devotional to an outmoded institu..

There’s a part of me that wants to dislike The Crown, this slavish devotional to an outmoded institution increasingly unpopular in its own country, if still an object of some fascination in ours. Why should we be venerating these leeches and layabouts, this vestigial symbol of arrogant empire? There’s something annoying about the show, its almost meta obliviousness. It’s quite like Queen Elizabeth II herself imperiously, ruthlessly dedicated to the preservation of the old ways.

Yet despite all that, I find the show pretty bloody compelling. I’m not rooting for Elizabeth (Claire Foy), exactly. And I certainly don’t care for her husband, Prince Philip (Matt Smith). I’m intrigued by Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby), but mostly because I’ve heard that she was a sort of glorious mess in real life, and some men of my, ahem, persuasion are just drawn to that sort of thing. I wouldn’t call the finely drawn characters on The Crown heroes, but they’re not antiheroes either. They’re just wealthy house cats, batting around expensive balls, bumping up against the roiling mid-century before drowsily retiring to the palace. It sounds dull, maybe, but it isn’t. It’s often fascinating, watching how creator and royals obsessive Peter Morgan reconciles the facts of the real world with his fantasy.

The first season had the benefit of a cracking good arc, with Elizabeth’s father dying years before the family assumed he would, leaving Elizabeth entirely unprepared to be monarch. Winston Churchill was involved; there was a grand coronation, and even a tense little bit of action with an elephant in Africa. It all made linear sense, lavishly wrought and keenly acted, especially by Foy and Kirby. But the second season—which will be most of the cast’s last, as the roles are being aged up—has far less form to follow, as the queen drifts into her middle thirties and Britons turn away from Buckingham Palace and toward the wave of social change and upheaval the 1960s would bring.

So instead of following a single arc, The Crown kind of just wanders, peering in on Elizabeth and Philip’s marriage in the first couple episodes, then spending some time with Margaret and her new beau, a dashing bisexual photographer played by Matthew Goode. (Christmas came early, kids.) The Kennedys even pop over for a visit in one cheesy but wholly satisfying episode. It’s fun, how the show bops around, offering a surveying look at the royals as they were in the years after one global sea change and just before another one.

To its credit, this season does spend some time actually reckoning with the imperfections of the family. For one, they bring up the whole Edward VIII-Nazi connection, which had to be addressed at some point. We see Elizabeth, once again played in sharply observed clucks and pursings of lip by Foy, become ever more hardened by her title, willfully ossifying herself into a personality-less extension of the crown, at the expense of pretty much everyone around her. She’s totemic, monomaniacal—in a stiff, measured way. It’s why the Jackie Kennedy episode is such a kick, watching Lilibet squirm in the face of this glamorous, new-era New Worlder. (Of course, in The Crown’s perverse and primly sociopathic logic, Elizabeth wins in the end when Jackie’s husband has his head blown off.)

The first few episodes spend a bit too much time focusing on Philip, who’s not very pleasant company. The show has yet to get into Philip’s, uh, let’s say colorful use of language when it comes to races different from his own, but this season it does at least investigate his toxic arrogance, and his potentially wandering eye. (The show remains polite about what, or who, he may actually have done.) If the stuff dealing with Philip alone isn’t the most interesting, an argument between him and Elizabeth is, where we see more of her maddeningly opaque resolve stonewalling him into submission. It’s a chilling, and credible, imagining of their interior relationship.

Still, this show really should belong to Margaret. Brought to sad, sloshed life by Kirby, you kind of pity this lovelorn hothouse flower—until you realize that most of her problems could maybe be fixed if she’d just give up this royals nonsense. But she won’t. She’s too invested, too enamored of and reliant on the whole rotten enterprise. (This is pointed out to her, rather bluntly, by her sister in one of their many bruising, terrific scenes together.) So Margaret stumbles around in a fog of smoke and self-pity. Meeting Antony Armstrong-Jones, Goode’s satyr of a suitor, provides some happiness, but it’s all drenched in unease. Nothing’s ever going to be great for Margaret, and the series doesn’t shy away from showing us that. Spending so much time with pinched Elizabeth, it’s refreshing to change gears and get loose with Margaret, so angry and hurt, oozing humanity.

Sure, Margaret was perhaps a less sympathetic figure in real life; it’s been said she could be a bit of a monster. But I still quite like the way she’s characterized here. It gives the series some actual heat, though it turns out that there is a limit to how much heat should be applied to this show. Last year, I complained about the lack of sex on The Crown; as ever, be careful what you wish for. In this darker, edgier season, there is, well, a kind of a sex scene involving Goode, and it is thoroughly jarring. Perhaps The Crown is not a sexy show because it is not good at doing sex. This awkward sequence would seem to heavily suggest that, anyway. So, forgive me. I was wrong. Everyone put your clothes back on, and don’t worry about it. I’ll get my vicarious royals sex elsewhere, thank you. (I beg you all to read my Prince Harry slashfic.)

All this mellow palace intrigue once again looks rather splendid. The Crown is a grand production, elegant and ornate but stopping just shy of gaudy. Sometimes when Lorne Balfe’s score is really going for it, playing at full blare over scenes of some mundane plot development, all that opulence can seem a little silly. But, a bit like the monarchy itself, something about the show’s sheer belief in its grandeur—in the righteousness and necessity of it all—sells me on the enterprise. The Crown is a royalist soap opera that may be kind of irresponsible, here in fraught, fractious late 2017. But as a new real-world royalist soap opera kicks into high gear, what further harm could a lowly Netflix show really do? Long live The Crown, I guess.

Get Vanity Fair’s HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Full ScreenPhotos:Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon’s 18 Stylish Years of Marriage, in Photos

1960

Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones, a fashion photographer who rode a motorbike, announced their engagement on the grounds of the Royal Lodge on February 27, 1960.Photo: From Getty Images.1960

1960

The Queen had her corgis, but Princess Margaret had her King Charles Spaniel, Rowley.Photo: From Central Press/Getty Images.1960

1960

The two were married in Westminster Abbey on May 6. Princess Margaret wore Norman Hartnell, couturier to the royals, and the Poltimore Tiara.Photo: From Bettmann Collection.1960

1960

Princess Margaret and Armstrong-Jones, now referred to as Lord Snowdon, return from their honeymoon in the Caribbean.Photo: From Daily Mail/REX/Shutterstock.1970

1970

Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon once again at the Badminton Horse Trials.Photo: From Fox Photos/Getty Images.1971

1971

Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon head out from the airport on their way to Canada. They opened the Winnipeg Art Gallery, which is still open today.Photo: From Popperfoto/Getty Images.1967

1967

The couple took a trip to the Bahamas, one of Margaret’s favorite places.Photo: From Dalmas/AFP/Getty Images.PreviousNext

1960

1960

Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones, a fashion photographer who rode a motorbike, announced their engagement on the grounds of the Royal Lodge on February 27, 1960.From Getty Images.

1960

1960

The Queen had her corgis, but Princess Margaret had her King Charles Spaniel, Rowley.From Central Press/Getty Images.

1960

1960

The two were married in Westminster Abbey on May 6. Princess Margaret wore Norman Hartnell, couturier to the royals, and the Poltimore Tiara.From Bettmann Collection.

1960

1960

Princess Margaret and Armstrong-Jones, now referred to as Lord Snowdon, return from their honeymoon in the Caribbean.From Daily Mail/REX/Shutterstock.

1960

1960

The pair made a splash at London’s Royal Opera House in March, shortly after they were engaged.From Sampson/Daily Mail/REX/Shutterstock.

1961

1961

Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon announced the birth of their son, David, outside of Clarence House with the Queen Mother.From AFP/Getty Images.

1962

1962

Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon watch the Badminton Horse Trials along with her nephew Prince Charles and her sister, Queen Elizabeth II.By Reginald Davis/REX/Shutterstock.

1962

1962

The couple on their way to Bath for a quiet weekend away from royal work.By Edwin Sampson/Daily Mail/REX/Shutterstock.

1964

1964

Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon leave Kensington Palace to take their daughter, Sarah, to her christening ceremony.From Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

1965

1965

The Beatles meet the royal couple at the world premiere of their film Help! at the London Pavilion in July.From Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images.

1962

1962

The couple dances at the Canadian Universities Ball at Quaglino’s, a favorite Italian restaurant in London. Rumors of affairs on either side had begun to swirl around them.From Popperfoto/Getty Images.

1965

1965

The pair makes a stop at the Lincoln Memorial on a tour of the U.S.From Keystone/Getty Images.

1965

1965

The couple visited Lewis Douglas, former U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, in Tucson, Arizona.From Getty Images.

1965

1965

Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon attend a lunch at the Amstel Hotel in Amsterdam. It was held in their honor by Queen Juliana.From Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images.

1965

1965

The couple pose with President Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson in the Queen’s room at the White House. The dinner-dance was given in honor of the princess and Lord Snowdon.From Bettmann Collection.

1967

1967

Dancing at the Canadian Women’s Club Centenary Ball at Grosvenor House in London.By Len Trievnor/Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

1968

1968

The two recline in a plastic ball at something called a cybernetic exhibition in London.From Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images.

1968

1968

Lord Snowdon and Margaret tour Italy in the summer.From Getty Images.

1968

1968

The two tour a hovercraft named after Princess Margaret. The Princess Margaret would appear in the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever three years later.From Fox Photos/Getty Images.

1969

1969

David and Sarah play with their parents on the lawns of Kensington Palace in August.From Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images.

1970

1970

Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon once again at the Badminton Horse Trials.From Fox Photos/Getty Images.

1971

1971

Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon head out from the airport on their way to Canada. They opened the Winnipeg Art Gallery, which is still open today.From Popperfoto/Getty Images.

1967

1967

The couple took a trip to the Bahamas, one of Margaret’s favorite places.From Dalmas/AFP/Getty Images.

Richard LawsonRichard Lawson is a columnist for Vanity Fair's Hollywood, reviewing film and television and covering entertainment news and gossip. He lives in New York City.

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