https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME2umFQ_xBA
Last year, I gave a severe thumb’s down to Netflix’s $100 million (seriously?) ode to Good Queen Bess II, aka The Crown, in a post wittily titled “Hey , Netflix! “The Crown” sucks!” and swore I’d never watch another episode. But then I came up with a head—viz, “Yeah, Queen!”—that was so damn funny—seriously, I was on the floor for hours—that I just had to do a write-up for the second season.
Well, I paid for my levity, in spades, because the second season is significantly worse than the first, devoted very largely to the marital travails and troubles of the three most boring human beings on the planet, Queen Liz herself (Claire Foy), sappy sister Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby), and dopy husband Prince Philip (Matt Smith). Antony (“Tony”) Armstrong-Jones (Matthew Goode), eventual spouse of Margaret, is no prize either, but fortunately logs much less screen time than the first three.1
What is entertaining (a little) about the second season is that the plot points of the individual episodes don’t seem to have anything to do with one another. In the first episode of Season 1, which kicks off with the wedding of then Princess Elizabeth and then Duke Philip, newly married Liz energetically intervenes to ensure that the royal equerry (name not really important) doesn’t get to spend the Christmas holidays with wife and family. It seems he has more important duties—taking Liz for the occasional gallop, don’t you know. Just because she’s married doesn’t mean a girl doesn’t want to have fun. Then in the last several episodes, there’s a bit of a running gag—one that the duke doesn’t find so funny—about a prominent studsman—probably not the equerry mentioned earlier—who it seems rides very tall in the saddle, to the extent that Liz rather wishes she had married him. Embarrassing! Particularly, since it’s made very clear that Phil doesn’t know one end of a horse—and perhaps one end of a woman—from the other.
So, hard cheese for Felipe, eh? But in the first episode of season two, it’s Liz who is the innocent, heart-broken when she finds (vague) evidence of Philip’s infidelity.2 Harder evidence comes in the form of Philip’s best bud, British bad boy Michael Parker (Daniel Ings), who joins the duke in a six-month, round the world carouse (they’re headed for the opening of the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne) and unfortunately relates their adventures in a series of letters to fellow bad boys in London’s notorious “Thursday Club”, pretty much the last word in male chauvinism. When Mike’s wife gets hold of one those letters she remarkably files for divorce, even though divorce among the well-bred in Britain was as rare in those days as infidelity was common. Liz is monstrously put out with Phil, but a royal divorce!—well, fuggedaboutit. So Phil works up this hardship rap about, you know, his manhood and all, so Liz agrees to boost his rank to “prince”—British prince, because he was born a Danish/Grecian prince, more or less—though a revolution made his putative crown worth bupkis. Of course, it’s only the Queen who can make a prince, so Phil has to kneel while Liz symbolically awards him a penis, a penis awarded, basically, for kneeling at her feet.
Unmentioned in the show is the possibility that Phil was given the promotion so that he couldn’t be called as a witness in Mike’s divorce proceedings, an accusation made back in 1956 by the New York News, according to a recent article on Mike’s divorce in Vanity Fair, although neither the News or Vanity Fair seems to be aware that Albert, Prince of Wales, Queen Victoria’s son and the heir to the throne, testified in a divorce trial back in 1870 (Mordaunt v. Mordaunt).
After suffering through Liz n’ Phil’s marital woes, we suffer (a lot!) over the non-marital woes of the beautiful and damned (or at least tediously insufferable) Princess Meg, who can’t marry the dashing wing commander Peter Townsend (because he’s divorced), so she sulks around the palace(s), because she’s so much cooler than anyone else. Finally she finds this really cool guy—he rides a motorcycle!—“Tony” Armstrong-Jones, a poor little rich boy (but very artistic because he’s a photographer). Once Meg wraps her regal thighs around Tony’s throbbin’ machine, she develops the inner strength to become a “modern woman”—that is to say, to steal the spotlight from her stuffy older sister and become a happy brat instead of an unhappy one. If you’re a chick who sort of hated your always got it together older sister—basically, the Jan Bradys of the world—you might enjoy this story line. My personal neuroses don’t run that way, so I was more bored than Meg and Tony put together.3
There are two entertaining episodes (two of ten). In the better of the two, Liz must come to grips with the very messy problems surrounding her uncle, the Duke of Windsor, and his Duchess, the goddamned Baltimore gadabout Wallis Simpson. The Duke actually had been king, as Edward VIII, but was forced to abdicate when he insisted on marrying Wallis, who was once divorced and still married to her second husband when the King proposed to her. In the late fifties, the Duke somehow decides it’s time to make a comeback. He’ll talk Liz into giving him some sort of glamorous job and then, well, somehow, he’ll be in and she’ll be out. Liz unwisely lets him in for a visit, where he attends a variety of discreet (or indiscreet) little dinner parties where people smugly address him as “your majesty”. Fortunately, the palace minions rally round to inform Liz of how close both Eddie and Wallis were to the Nazis—like many rich people they thought Hitler was just the man for stopping the commies—and Liz summons the Duke to inform him that as his sovereign she’s giving him the royal boot from her realm. Hasta la vista, baby!
The second non-dog involves another troublesome pair, Jack and Jackie. Most of the show revolves around Jackie/Liz rivalry—they’re both the same age (mid-thirties), but Jackie looks (and acts) ten years younger, and, of course, Jack and Jackie are just the coolest couple in the world. Britain’s got the jewels, but America’s got the money. Jack (Michael C. Hall) is portrayed as an Irish street tough,4 which is probably how the Brits saw him, while Jackie (Jodi Balfour) is suitably breathless. Poor Liz suffers egregiously from Jackie’s long-gloved one-upmanship but eventually has her revenge, enjoying the pleasure of “forgiving” the suitably penitent Jackie for, basically, being a drug addict.5
These two episodes gave me some hope, so that I suffered through all of Meg’s emotional problems—suffering more than she did, actually—and then really suffered, when the final episode turned out to be easily the worst, the worst worst of the ten,6 soppily “royalist” and self-congratulatory to the nth degree—“royalist” being the notion that these people somehow really are “better” than the rest of us.7 Beware of clever heads!
Afterwords
I frankly assumed that “everyone” hated The Crown as much as I do, but, as usual, I got it totally wrong. There are people who love all this fabulous fifties royal fashion, the massively ornate interiors, the ponderous pre-war Rolls Royces, etc., and for those folks Vulture’s Kathryn VanArendonk, who definitely has the name for it, explains it all for you.
- I remember the headlines, though not much else, in 1960. Princess Margaret was always referred to as “Princess Meg”, but that seems to have been purely an American thing, because it never turns up in “The Crown”. ↩︎
- Although Liz is now innocent, The Crown carefully explains to us that among upper-class Brits adultery was definitely a two-way street. Philip’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten, “comforts” Liz by describing to her how, while he led the negotiations that ultimately led to the independence of India, his wife was having a charming affair with Nehru. And we’re repeatedly told that Harold Macmillan, prime minister during the late fifties and early sixties, was forced to turn a blind eye to his wife’s long-running affair with another politician, Robert Boothby. Macmillan is portrayed as a weedy, unimpressive figure, but in fact “Supermac” was both bluff and cold-blooded. He wisely got rid of Britain’s African empire but wasn’t able to get Britain into the European Economic Community. ↩︎
- Both Phil and Tony had seriously poor little rich boy childhoods, shuffled around while mummy and daddy focused on more important things. Phil had three sisters (three!) who married second-rate German princes who were all enthusiastic members of the Nazi Party. Phil was very lucky to go to school in Britain, thus ending up on the winning side. Tony’s parents divorced, and mummy snagged an actual peer of the realm, so Tony’s two younger stepbrothers outranked him socially. Maybe Liz and Meg had more in common than they realized. ↩︎
- My grandmother called JFK “a cheap Irish mick that I wouldn’t have in my own living room.” Some years later, when Richard Nixon went to China and met with Mao Zedong, a reporter, obviously desperate for copy, asked William Faulkner’s widow what she thought of Nixon’s visit. “Why should he go half way round the world to meet a peasant I wouldn’t have in my own living room?” ↩︎
- Jackie blames some malicious gossip that got back to Liz on the “vitamin injections” she and Jack got from Jack’s Dr. Feelgood Max Jacobson. ↩︎
- The last episode is largely devoted to the “Profumo Affair”, named after cabinet minister John Profumo, who gave his word to the House of Commons that he had not been sleeping with the once notorious Christine Keeler, when in fact he had. The Profumo Affair, following up on the defection of Kim Philby, a high-ranking intelligence officer, to the Soviet Union, significantly damaged the British Establishment’s reputation for both competence and honesty, and The Crown portrays Macmillan as abandoning Liz when the going got rough. In fact, Macmillan, who had defended both men in Parliament, was not in an attractive position. The Conservative Party had been in power for twelve years and Macmillan, who thought at the time that he had cancer (though as it turned out he did not), may have felt entitled to concern himself more with his own funeral than that of his government’s. ↩︎
- The cherry on this royalist bullshit sundae is applied when Meg and Liz, bitterly divided on every issue, unite in worshipping at the throne of their father, George VI, “the King”. In fact, there is pretty universal agreement that George VI was a stupid, selfish, blinkered man, as anyone raised in the lap of grotesque luxury and privilege would likely be. It was their mother who was the brains of the family. Both the king and queen were “appeasers” if not pro-Nazi. The rich were terrified that a second world war would bring their world to an end. Better let that fellow Hitler take what he wants and hope that he’ll leave us alone. ↩︎
