The six-season Netflix series The Crown couldn’t be called The Queen, because series creator Peter Morgan had already made a movie called The Queen, about the same subject: Queen Elizabeth of Britian, long that she reigned. The Crown sometimes pretended to be about the whole royal institution, but it was really the Elizabeth show, as is made clear in the series finale. 

Morgan is devoted to his cherished monarch, and thus mourns her while insisting on her everlasting immortality. In the series finale, “Sleep Dearie, Sleep,” the queen doesn’t quite die, but her death is gestured toward as the event that will end an era, perhaps an entire tradition. So some part of her must remain, the show seems to suggest. Because without Elizabeth’s steadfast influence, the British monarchy cannot endure. 

The Crown was often accused of shameless royalism. It’s to the show’s credit, then, that the finale allows for some ambivalence about the enterprise. As Elizabeth (Imelda Staunton—but also Olivia Colman and Claire Foy) entertains the idea of stepping down and letting her son Charles assume the throne, she considers what it has all meant; what personal identity she ceded to her position and what will be left of the title once she’s gone. Prince Phillip (Jonathan Pryce) tells his wife of so many years that, sure, the monarchy is destined to fall, but what will it matter to them? They’ll be dead and buried. That sort of fatalism is not what I expected from Morgan’s often laudatory, forgiving survey of this freakish family. It seems that Morgan was perhaps more an Elizabeth devotee than he was a Windsor stan.

From the Archive: God Save the Queen!

Although he is awfully generous to Charles, played in the final two seasons by the rakishly handsome Dominic West. That casting alone is a sort of gift, lending Charles a charm and charisma that the real man does not quite possess. Morgan also chose to end his series on the wedding of Charles and Camilla (Olivia Williams), the realization of a dream held so fiercely, and dangerously, for 30 years. No one was rooting for Camilla the way they rooted for Charles’s first wife, Diana, yet Camilla was always the ultimate endgame. And so The Crown lets the couple have their day in the sun, albeit with a few clouds. In the show’s version of events, Charles holds the vain hope that his mother will hand him the throne during her wedding toast. He ends the day disappointed, but in other ways fulfilled. 

His sons, William and Harry, leave the series in an uneasy peace. As their grandmother assesses her unique aptitude for rule (both heroic and tragic in the show’s estimation), William (Ed McVey) and Harry (Luther Ford) are shown to be messily unfit for duty. William doesn’t object when Harry chooses a Nazi uniform to wear to a costume party, though he distances himself from his brother once photos leak and an infamous scandal blooms. Harry is not prominent in the line of succession, and yet his indiscretions are looked at as mortal threat to the whole project of rule. 

The most cynical read could view this as The Crown foreshadowing what’s to come for Harry and his family. Morgan chose to end his series before Harry meets Meghan Markle and the palace turns even more vicious, which leaves good drama on the table and also feels sinisterly evasive. To spend 60 hours on this group of weirdos and then demur when it comes to the foundational prejudice at the heart of the family’s second biggest news story is a bold and somewhat indefensible narrative choice. The Windsor saga was most certainly not neatly concluded when Charles and Camilla wed—but I guess The Crown wanted a vaguely happy ending. 

So what did The Crown achieve, then, if it was selective in its telling? Certainly there were great performances over the seasons. Staunton, Colman, and Foy all formidably rendered a strange woman, in differing shades of pinched imperiousness. (Seeing them all together in the finale was as poignant as the show intended.) I loved all of our Margarets: Vanessa Kirby’s glam sadness, Helena Bonham Carter’s sozzled black sheeping, Lesley Manville’s bitter swan song. And, of course, Emma Corrin and Elizabeth Debicki made piercingly credible portraiture of Diana—so elegant, so effortlessly likable, so doomed. 

And there was the stately pomp of the series, most effective in the earlier seasons but still lingering through to the finale. When that signature score keened away, awfully dull matters of state theater seemed of vital importance. At its highest function, The Crown made the drama of these cloistered oddities, living so richly on the dole, seem of real significance. The series’s power lied in its sprawl, the many decades it traversed, the varied eras it sought to unpack or recontextualize. Sure, more criticism was warranted, more unblinkered honesty about who these people really are. But if one can accept The Crown as TV melodrama rather than history, then it did its job well, and compellingly. 

So much so that I will probably long crave another season in which the Harry and Meghan of it all is addressed—even if I suspect it would be handled with a peculiar and off-putting deference to Meghan’s antagonizers. The show has become a fascinating object unto itself, a telling example of celebrity obsession and worship; I know The Crown would get it wrong, but I would love to see how it gets it wrong. There will never be a series about these ghouls (or, at least, I don’t think there will be) as thorough and credulous as The Crown, as devoted to its friendly anthropology. I’m glad to have stuck with the series to its muddled, deflecting end. The British people I know are appalled at Americans’ embrace of The Crown. But over these six seasons, I couldn’t help but enjoy being part of the problem.