Kerry Parnell: Why I sobbed over The Crown and I’m not ashamed

The final season of The Crown chronicling the last few weeks of Princess Diana’s life has already prompted controversy and criticism. Is it Schmaltzy? Yes. Should you watch it? Absolutely, says Kerry Parnell.

Well, I cried watching The Crown and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

No, not because it is so badly done, if you believe the British press, but because the final episode of part one, is intensely moving.

“All one wants is for that girl to find peace,” says Imelda Staunton as the Queen. All you want, as you watch the final season play out, is to shout, “Don’t go to Paris.”

The first four episodes of Season 6 of The Crown dropped on Netflix on Thursday. They show the last few weeks of Diana’s life, in the summer of 1997.

And cheesy dialogue aside – when Dominic West as Prince Charles thanks Diana for how well they are co-parenting, Elizabeth Debicki as Diana replies, “She didn’t get to keep the man of her dreams, but the friend of her dreams” - on the whole, it’s very poignant.

Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana in season 6 of The Crown. Picture: Daniel Escale/Netflix

The American press has praised the show for its restraint, but the British press wasn’t as generous, with The Guardian dubbing it, “so bad it’s basically an out-of-body experience” and the UK Telegraph, “a grim intrusion into Diana’s final hours”.

Depicting the death of Diana over four episodes means it inevitably turns into a soap opera. It takes way too long to get to the horror we all know is coming and so the space is filled with shoe-horned-in self-reflective dialogue, as though all the characters were having therapy or making a Netflix documentary about themselves a la Robbie Williams.

“That’s been the story of my whole life – dashing around and losing sight of myself in the process,” says Diana.

Debicki portraying Princess Diana and Dominic West as Prince Charles in the latest season of The Crown.

The Princess of Wales with Prince Harry, then 7, and Prince William, then 9 in 1991. Picture: AP

But the aftermath of the crash is treated sensitively and episode four had me sobbing. I think you’d have to be very cynical not to be moved.

This is where creator Peter Morgan – who was nominated for an Oscar for his work on 2006’s The Queen, starring Helen Mirren, comes into his own.

The only thing he should have exorcised was Diana as a ghost. I wouldn’t go as far as calling it “a crass, by-numbers piece of film-making, with a script that barely aspires to craft, let alone art,” like The Guardian, but the final episode would have been better without any haunting-chat. Ghost-Dodi says, “Wounds will only heal with the truth,” to his grieving dad, which is particularly ironic.

Diana in St Tropez with Dodi Al Fayed in 1997. Picture: AP

Diana at the Hotel Ritz in Paris shortly before she was killed in a car crash.

I just about survived the scene with ghost-Diana and Charles, only to be horrified when she returned for a final time to give the Queen a pep talk: “It’s time to show you are ready to learn.” I almost wanted Imelda to snap, “Oh, sod off”.

But the biggest surprise was Morgan making Charles the saviour of the Royal Family, as opposed to PM Tony Blair.

Declaring, “I let her down in life, I won’t let her down in death,” he urges the Queen to go to London and stop hiding away. In The Queen, Morgan made Blair the agent of change for the royals, but in this series he’s reduced the PM to a bit-part.

Is it a bit schmaltzy? Yes. Should you watch it? Absolutely. And as we sang in that anthem of the ’90s, things can only get better.