The Crown: Season 6, Part 2
Netflix, on demand
★★★★

Anyone who knows how the Royal Family operate on a day-to-day basis these days will tell you that the most sensible advice from within invariably comes from Camilla. To her future husband Prince Charles, in the penultimate episodes of The Crown, she offers this advice: “What kind of a man can look himself in the eye if he is a father and know that he’s failed at that.”

It’s a somewhat innocuous line, intended to remind Charles, adrift after the death of Diana, that he needs to refocus his life on his children. But it is also a line which sends a discomforting ripple through the family’s history of fathers and their offspring: Charles’ relationship with Prince Philip, the absence of Prince Andrew from Prince Philip’s life, and the relationship between Queen Elizabeth and her father, King George VI, which underscored her reign.

The six episodes of the second part of the final season of The Crown are pulling double duty. They must close off the show’s sixth and final season, and they must also close the entirety of the history book on a television series which has become a magnum opus for the small screen, and a flourished autograph from Netflix on the declaration of war it made against traditional TV.

The strength of The Crown remains, in the finality of its sixth season, exactly what made it a distinct and stunning addition to the television slate when it began back in 2016: an inexplicable but compelling intertwining of the filmed story and the real-life characters who populate its dramatic inflection points. When it strays from the crown itself, it weakens. When it understands that the crown is the star of the show, it shimmers.

The series, as a whole, sprang from two earlier projects by screenwriter Peter Morgan: the film The Queen (2006) and his stage play The Audience (2013), both of which starred Helen Mirren. In its infancy – during the reign of its first Queen, actress Claire Foy, for the show’s first two seasons – it spread its wings beautifully, unfurling layers of hitherto unexplored story.

Peripheral players like Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby), the Duke of Windsor (Alex Jennings) and Princess Anne (Erin Doherty) were given the centre stage with great dramatic effect. Gillian Anderson’s astonishing Margaret Thatcher, with so much studied detail woven into a near-flawless performance, very nearly stole the show from both Queen and crown.

As The Crown has aged, its focus has narrowed. In its final dramatic convulsions, the supporting cast of Princess Margaret (Lesley Manville) and Princess Anne (Claudia Harrison) claw back some welcome airtime, though they’re always in danger of seeming like the supporting players in a Jane Austen period soap. (Harrison’s Princess Anne, particularly, leans a little too hard on her Miss Bingley-esque sneer. (The real Anne is, by reputation, much funnier.)