Season 4 of The Crown is here. This is arguably the most anticipated season of the Netflix hit yet, by virtue of the ground it has to cover: anyone old enough to remember that fateful Paris car crash knows this season begins the public unraveling of one of the most private famous families in the world.
Given The Crown’s occasional soap operatic tendencies, it was also potentially the season of the show that seemed most destined to fail. Fortunately, Season 4 avoids that fate, nailing some of its more treacherous territory by adhering to a simple rule: The Crown has always been about The Crown. While it’ll always feature vast amounts of interpersonal conflict, it’s not really about Thatcher vs. Queen Elizabeth, Princess Diana vs. Prince Charles, or any one feud. It’s about The Monarchy’s iron grip onto relevance, its need to survive in the name of order and stability in spite of how pointless or cruel it is for anyone in its orbit.
So what sets Season 4 apart isn’t Emma Corrin’s absolutely pitch-perfect portrayal of a wide-eyed Princess Diana or Gillian Anderson’s bizarre and engrossing, can’t-stop-watching performance of Margaret Thatcher. What sets it apart is the positioning of The Monarchy itself. In Season 1, The Monarchy was front and center as both concept and villain. Queen Elizabeth spends the first portion of the season as an unwilling participant coming to terms with the new expectations set for her as heir to the throne. It is the closest this character will ever come to being a relatable person. Seasons 2 and 3 depict her caught somewhere between the crown and her personal life, conflicted by a desire to show her family love and a need to play by the rules.
But by Season 4, The Monarchy has finally subsumed Queen Elizabeth: they are one and the same. This is purely a shift in alignment, not a change of her integrity or character a la Breaking Bad. Although that doesn’t make The Queen any less thoughtless or cold. She spends an entire episode trying to remember which of her children, if any, she likes spending time with.
The Crown doesn’t shy away from the fact that nearly everyone in this story, Queens and Princesses alike, is self-centered, privileged, and arrogant. The spotlight and extravagance of the royal family attracts and inflates those egos, but paradoxically, also seeks to extinguish them. Instead of seeing characters rail against that concept, we now see them face squarely against the living embodiment of it: Queen Elizabeth. Her family are her only subjects over whom she holds real power, and she lords it mightily, attempting to control their words, mannerisms, jobs, and marriages.
It’s nice to see Olivia Colman dig into the role of Elizabeth a little more this season, particularly after Season 3 felt like it lacked a consistent through-line for her character. Here, we see her not only as a foil for members of her own family, but also how desperately she fights for her role and defends its symbolic importance. This is made clearest in her rocky relationship with Thatcher, who like Churchill in Season 1, becomes a marker of the changing political era throughout the season.
These two women find themselves in similar positions of relevance and wealth through very different paths. Thatcher proclaims herself as self-made and from a working class family, contrasted against Elizabeth’s inherited role. As Thatcher pushes for Britain to become more “self-reliant” and self-centered, Elizabeth sees the potential for her position on the global stage as Head of Commonwealth to diminish. It is in this relationship most of all that the cracks in Elizabeth’s fragile crown begin to spider as she struggles to find the tipping point between neutrality and obsolescence.
For these shiny new characters and plots, The Crown makes sacrifices. The primary one is dimming the spotlight on some of the more engaging Season 3 performers. Season 4 has more ongoing plot than just about any season so far, but the series stays devoted to having episodes that tell one self-contained story rather than treating it as a 10 hour drama. There is unfortunately no room for an episode devoted solely to Philip (Tobias Menzes) or Princess Anne (Erin Doherty), though both characters are churning out their best performances yet, complete with that unique dry mixture of snobbery and groundedness. We do at least get a Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) episode, but she’s about the only character outside of the Elizabeth/Diana/Charles orbit we spend a significant amount of time with.
Thatcher’s rise to and loss of power are some of the most fascinating aspects of Season 4, but they also feel a little undercooked, particularly in the back half of the season. Her position and her party’s division over attitudes towards Europe are essentially omitted, which feels like a missed opportunity given the parallels to current politics. There’s just so much to do here with both Thatcher and Diana, especially compared to the relative patchiness of Season 3, that you start to wish they’d started laying the groundwork a little sooner.
Still, Season 4 manages to perfectly capture everything we love to hate about this fictitious version of the royal family and is only elevated by Anderson and Corrin’s introductions of Thatcher and Diana. I can’t wait to see where Elizabeth Debicki takes this role in Season 5.
The 4th season of The Crown releases Sunday, Nov. 15 on Netflix.