On Thursday, Netflix dropped the eagerly anticipated trailer to the fifth season of The Crown.
Debuting on the streaming service November 9, the latest chapter shows “The Royal Family is in genuine crisis,” according to a TV personality.
Set to Oasis’ “Bittersweet Symphony,” the trailer shows the marriage of Elizabeth Debicki’s Princess Diana to Dominic West’s Prince Charles unraveling before relentless paparazzi coverage.
While Charles and Di head for a divorce, Imelda Staunton’s Queen Elizabeth II and others protest.
Jonny Lee Miller’s PM John Major advises the Queen and her husband, Jonathan Pryce’s Prince Phillip, “The House of Windsor should be binding the nation together, building an example of idealized family life…”
Major says the fracturing marriage, “can’t help but affect the stability of the country.”
Meanwhile, Diana is cracking under the pressure. “People will never understand how it’s been for me,” she laments. “I never stood a chance.”
Another character notes of Di, “They see her as a threat.”
Prince Phillip advises Diana, “Remember the one…rule: You remain loyal to this family,” to which Diana protests, “You mean silent?”
Phillip replies, “Yes. It’s a system, for better or for worse. We’re all stuck in it.”
While the establishment warns Diana is going to “tear down the temple,” she readies to sit before cameras in her famous 1995 tell-all interview. “I won’t go quietly,” she insists. “I’ll battle to the end.”
The trailer closes with Queen Elizabeth wondering aloud, “How did it come to this?”
Meanwhile, Dame Judi Dench adds to the chorus of critics speaking out about how Netflix’s The Crown portrays the British royal family.
In a piece for The Times published Wednesday, the English actress — who’s portrayed two past British queens in three different films — criticized the hit drama, writing, “The closer the drama comes to our present times, the more freely it seems willing to blur the lines between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism.”
Noting some of the suggested storylines for the show’s upcoming fifth season — “that King Charles plotted for his mother to abdicate, for example, or once suggested his mother’s parenting was so deficient that she might have deserved a jail sentence” — Dench continued, “This is both cruelly unjust to the individuals and damaging to the institution they represent.”
“No one is a greater believer in artistic freedom than I, but this cannot go unchallenged,” Dench added. “Despite this week stating publicly that The Crown has always been a ‘fictionalized drama’, the program makers have resisted all calls for them to carry a disclaimer at the start of each episode.”
“The time has come for Netflix to reconsider — for the sake of a family and a nation so recently bereaved, as a mark of respect to a sovereign who served her people so dutifully for 70 years, and to preserve their own reputation in the eyes of their British subscribers,” Dench concluded.
The Crown is based on the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, who died September 8 at age 96 after a U.K.-record 70-year reign. Netflix has received broader criticism for its decision to debut the drama’s fifth season on November 9, coming as it does just two months after the late monarch’s death.
Source-ABC
