How season five of The Crown failed Diana

The Crown has faced a lot of criticism over the years, but fans will take a long time to forgive the show’s creators for not taking Diana’s side.

The dissolution of the marriage between the then-prince Charles and the former princess Diana has always been a topic that fascinated and fired up the imaginations of the general public.

The fifth season of Netflix’s The Crown took off where season four left off, with Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) finally coming to terms with the fact that she would never be able to fit into the ‘system’ into which she married.

And as a result, many fans across the globe tuned in eagerly expecting to see the ‘People’s Princess’ finally get some kind of an apology for how she was treated during this particularly tumultuous period in history. Unfortunately, the reality turned out to be much bleaker.

The problem with The Crown’s fifth season

While we should have all guessed that something was afoot the moment that the series cast the easy-on-the-eye Dominic West to play this season’s version of Charles, nothing could quite prepare the hordes of Diana fans all across the globe for the absolutely pro-royal stance that The Crown took with this particular narrative.

In the end, fans were not only snubbed of understanding, as Vulture’s Roxana Hadadi puts it, Diana’s uncanny ability to use her ever-iconic fashion choices “to make intentional statements about her own independence,” but also of re-examining this very public divorce years later in the hopes that we may add some new nuance to the situation years down the line.

And while The Crown has been criticized by everyone from Dame Judi Dench to Earl Charles Spencer for taking too many creative liberties, perhaps the biggest issue with season five is that writer Peter Morgan seemingly had nothing new to say.

The Crown season five

Before we can dive into the issues that contributed to The Crown season five’s lackluster outing, let us recap the season as a whole.

Overall, The Crown season five included a total of ten episodes which were all released on November 9, 2022:

Why Diana’s close friend parted ways with the series

Depicting a dramatized version of a real-life person is always tough. And this task becomes nearly impossible when this real-life person is such a beloved public figure, who passed away under notoriously mysterious circumstances.

And this is likely why The Crown contacted people like Diana’s close friend, Jemima Khan, requesting their assistance in season five.

However, it seems like Khan spotted the same issues that fans have complained about now that season five has hit the air, much earlier.

Khan pulled out of the project in 2021 after stating that Morgan had not honored their agreement and did not portray Diana’s storyline “as respectfully or compassionately as [she] had hoped.”

As a result of all the behind-the-scenes turmoil, Peter Morgan ended up being the only one credited for writing this season, and unfortunately, it seems like the old “two heads are better than one” adage has, once again, been proven correct.

Elizabeth Debicki’s portrayal of Diana is not the problem

Debicki certainly had big shoes to fill, not only in terms of picking up where Emma Corrin’s Diana left off in season four, but also going up against Kristen Stewart, who portrayed Diana in the 2021 Spencer film.

Even so, season five of The Crown’s less-than stellar reception had nothing to do with Debicki’s really spot-on portrayal of the character.

In fact, Jonathan Pryce (who portrayed Prince Phillip in this season) explained that he felt like Debicki’s acting was so “life-like” that it almost brought him to tears – which is truly saying something for an actor who has acted alongside talents like Elaine Paige, Kathy Burke, Keira Knightley, and more.

The Crown’s gradual decline

When season five of The Crown was first released on Netflix in 2021, it quickly shot to number one on the streaming service’s Top 10 list for English television shows.

And though this is certainly an impressive feat, and having 1.2 million households  watching The Crown is certainly nothing to sneer at, this number is not quite as high as what The Crown executives had likely expected.

The third season, for instance, drew in around 21 million households within its first month. Unfortunately, this downward trend continued after this highly-criticized fifth season, and season six’s viewership declined with another 35% in 2023.