The Crown review: Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher fuel a stronger season four

After disappointing fans with a patchy season three, can Netflix’s signature drama deliver on the promise it made all those years ago?

For fans disappointed with The Crown’s uneven third season, the latest instalment is a return to form.

With Netflix finally delivering the long awaited arrival of Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher, the pricey royal drama is back in gear with high drama and political intrigue, anchored by two era-defining women.

For better or worse, one drove celebrity culture and the other global politics – and their impact are still being felt four decades on. With that narrative richness, it would be hard to not make a compelling fourth season, which debuts on Sunday, November 15.

The 10 episodes are bookended by Thatcher’s election in 1979 and her eventual downfall in 1990, which coincides with the start of Charles and Diana’s courtship and its descent into bitter disintegration.

This series’ pacing is punchier, the production still lavish, and there are few flat episodes.

And the addition of Gillian Anderson in the cast as Thatcher gives the series a political through-line and consistency it hasn’t had since John Lithgow’s Winston Churchill. That’s not necessarily the show’s fault given, you know, that was the history, but it’s something the show has been missing.

Gillian Anderson is a phenomenal addition to The Crown

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Anderson is uncannily like Thatcher, not just impressionistic in breathy cadence and distinct physicality, but in that steely determination and unbending ideology that earned her the Iron Lady nickname.

She’s a heavyweight presence in the series, one that dwarfs most of the royal characters, and that supposedly tense relationship between Thatcher and the Queen is mined for bountiful dramatic purposes.

Thatcher is ill-at-ease among the royals, and she doesn’t have much patience for their protocols and traditions. Her peacock blue power suit standing out starkly among their brown plaids in the Scottish Highlands when she’s invited to stay at Balmoral.

The season smartly explores the complexity of the divisive leader. She was Britain’s first female PM, and one who faced the patronising machinations of an army of like-faced old white men. But the series also reminds us that Thatcher was never interested in bringing other women along with her, and even felt them temperamentally unsuited to lead.

So, while there are moments when Thatcher is sympathetic, and certainly having someone like Anderson in that role goes a long way to humanising her, The Crown also highlights the social destruction wrought by her hardline economic policies.

When Anderson as Thatcher waxes lyrical about loyalty to individualism over social and community duty, it stings that the hangover from that particular bout of Thatcherism remains. It’s also at odds with the Queen’s ethos (or so we’ve been told).

The sight of two hard-coiffured, middle-aged women with their small handbags playing power games at the highest level is quite the tableau. Even The Crown fans who prefer the personal over the political won’t be disappointed in the interpersonal dynamics in these scenes.

Especially as it gives Olivia Colman (who, while brimming with talent, hasn’t fallen into the role as easily as her predecessor Claire Foy) her meatiest scenes in the two seasons she’s played Elizabeth II.

Olivia Colman and Josh O’Connor as the Queen and Prince Charles

But if it is personal scandals that you crave, the Charles and Diana saga provides plenty of fodder, with many dramatisations of the revelations that came from Diana’s 1995 Panorama interview.

The series and writer Peter Morgan take pains to parse the two sides to Charles and Diana’s deeply unhappy marriage, a feat made much easier after the groundwork did by season three standout Josh O’Connor to de-villain the heir apparent.

Emma Corrin captures Diana’s youth and naivete in the early episodes as well as the decade-long journey to breaking point, as her despair grows in a family she feels is cold and uncaring.

Diana’s bulimia flashes up at several points throughout the series, but it’s balanced by lighter moments of her dancing, or the way she is energised and rejuvenated, even momentarily, by the adulation from strangers in the crowd. The Crown remembers Diana as not always a tragic figure.

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Emma Corrin as a young Princess Diana

The phenomenon of people falling in love with the “People’s Princess” is encapsulated in an episode that primarily revolves around the 1983 royal tour in Australia, and it fuels resentment among the rest of the royals.

The Crown is sympathetic to and critical of both Diana and Charles, and that’s probably as it should be, but it did find the rigidity of the royal family as culpable for the damage – and there’s an obvious stag hunting metaphor in case you think The Crown might be subtle about such things.

Corrin, a relative newcomer, carries the emotional demands of that role well, and it’s a shame that we won’t get to see more of her Diana (Elizabeth Debicki will take over the role for season five as part of the wholesale cast change).

Season four takes us to the brink of Charles and Diana’s disintegrating marriage

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The Crown loves the drama of the people it’s portraying, more than it loves delving into the socio-economic-political ramifications of how this family sits within modern Britain.

For sure, it tips its hat into those spaces – an episode centred on Michael Fagan, the man who broke into the Queen’s bedroom, recasts the intruder as a Ken Loach-type working class hero – but it never goes deep enough to really satisfy political or historical junkies.

That’s probably not why its fans love it anyway. Because when it comes to opening those doors into the inner lives of the royals, The Crown takes you there, even if maybe none of it happened.

But it’s fun to imagine it might have. That behind the brocade curtains and the priceless jewels, those souls are as lost as the rest of us.

At least we know that in Diana’s case, it was true.

The Crown season four premieres on Netflix on Sunday, November 15 at 6pm AEDT

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Originally published as The Crown review: Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher fuel a stronger season four