Restraint is probably the mark of the true artist, but still it seems odd that Peter Morgan has chosen to end The Crown, which returns this week, in the mid-00s, thereby missing out a bonanza of royal plot points. He has, after all, spent five seasons spinning gold out of the familiar and the tangential, and at times you felt the material strain ever so slightly: an entire episode on Mohamed Al-Fayed, Dodi Fayed’s father; stretches that are just deer drinking from streams or Anne showjumping; and an appearance, coming up soon, of the ghost of Diana.
But how rich in drama the past two decades have been! The show will end, for example, before Meghan and Harry emerge, a duo that could quite easily sustain an entire season alone. It will miss two royal weddings, phone hacking and the succession, as supervised by Liz Truss. And think what Morgan could have done with Prince Andrew’s fateful Newsnight interview (I would like to watch the scene in which he decides to accept the invitation, encouraged – or not – by his aides).
But then again I am not a screenwriter, and perhaps this is the view of an amateur. There’s another argument here, which is that it was simply not possible to make another season of The Crown, because the royals have jumped the shark. The plotlines would be just too ridiculous, the shift in tone too extreme. The family is now, in a way, post drama.
For example, any sense of jeopardy has now been thoroughly exploded. The Crown, like all dramas about the monarchy, relies heavily on the premise that what this family does has high-stakes consequences. This is what drives the drama: the idea that a monarch saying the wrong or right thing could change the course of history; or that divorce, or misbehaviour, or bad headlines might just mean that the whole edifice comes tumbling down.
But now we know the truth: it does not matter what the royals do. They can go on Oprah and make accusations of racism, they can write tell-all memoirs, they can make friends with Jeffrey Epstein, they can be accused of sex offences themselves and go on TV to deny them. And … nothing happens. The country stays exactly where it was. The institution marches on. A small section of the public turns out to wave flags for the royals on public holidays, and a much smaller one grumbles about them online. There was never any jeopardy.
Dramatic tensions have meanwhile slackened and dissolved. The Crown’s salient themes – again, like all royal dramas – are the tension between duty and desire; the weight of history and the march of modernity. But in recent years these have become more like comic relationships – dukes and duchesses battling it out on Instagram. In fact, although in its pomp the monarchy served as the perfect vehicle for tragedy and drama, it now fits one genre only: comedy.
This is the story of a dysfunctional family trapped in a house together, struggling to accept that its place in the world has changed. This is Arrested Development, this is Schitt’s Creek. There is, as Larry David stipulated on Seinfeld, no hugging and no learning. These are people obliged to go through the motions of commanding vast armies and millions of subjects – at times almost persuaded, perhaps, that they really do – but who are at every turn undermined by the stark fact they actually have no power at all. Think of Charles’s “black spider memos”, furiously lobbying ministers about badger culls, alternative therapy and the war in Iraq, all deferentially ignored. This, essentially, is the premise that gave us Veep, Armando Iannucci’s show about a vice-president who to her eternal rage can’t get anything done. The current crop of royals has liberal leanings – Charles is green, Will cares about mental health, Harry tackles his unconscious bias – but they have somehow found themselves representing everything they stand against. Again, a great tragi-comic premise. When Charles the ecowarrior was forced ignominiously to spend his first king’s speech announcing new oil and gas licences, there were echoes of The Thick of It.
The Wales’s trips to former colonies to “improve relations”, when they are, inescapably, living symbols of the problem, is a setup worthy of Succession. Then there is the “simmering rivalry, the intense competition” between heir and spare, as detailed in Harry’s memoir. A rivalry that plays delightfully against the fact that the winner was determined at birth.
Yes, it is time for a great comedy about the royals; they are the perfect premise. There has been the odd monarchy-flavoured sitcom – The Windsors, The Royals – but these don’t quite do it justice. Drama elevates its subjects, comedy can point out what drama can’t quite say: the absurdity of a man in a gold crown talking about a cost of living crisis. We need a Jesse Armstrong, a Iannucci, a Phoebe Waller-Bridge or a Lucy Prebble to give this institution the royal treatment.
