The Crown is currently streaming on Netflix. (Photo: The Crown/ Instagram)The Crown is back with its fifth season, revealing more drama as it bites into the 90s with Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s volatile story taking the center stage. The season, which is currently streaming on Netflix, has opened to mostly positive reviews, with critics calling it an as-ever engaging show about the British monarchy.
The fifth season of the show puts spotlight on the life of the royals in the 1990s, a tumultuous phase when the family navigated marital upsets and public dissent.
The show currently sits at 68% score on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, whose consensus reads, “In its fifth season, it’s hard to shake the feeling that this series has lost some of its luster — but addictive drama and a sterling cast remain The Crown’s jewels.”
According to Kayleigh Donaldson of The Wrap, the latest season of The Crown “adeptly tackles” Diana and Charles’ divorce and the Queen’s reputation woes. “It may not reach the heights of Season 4, which benefitted from the more soapy tensions between the Wales couple and grander focus on the women of the time. Still, as a representative of the ultimate embodiment of Keep Calm and Carry On, The Crown remains a sturdy piece of prestige TV with a strong, clear vision of its tangled subject,” a part of the review read.
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Writing for Vanity Fair, Richard Lawson praised Elizabeth Debicki for her portrayal of Princess Diana and said she “precisely calibrates the elegant ennui of the public Diana, her familiar crooked-neck pose…”
Judy Berman of Time Magazine noted in her review that The Crown has become “richer than ever” in its latest season. “The Crown has always been both a pleasure to watch, thanks to its lush production design and soapy undertones, and a more mixed success from an artistic standpoint. Season 5 is the same, but for different reasons. While the acting is no longer stellar across the board, and a vividly evoked Queen Elizabeth no longer dominates the story, the narrative itself becomes richer than ever.”
Vulture’s Jen Chaney, however, said the season “wades into a royal mess”, writing that it feels “more disconnected than usual” from the previous seasons. “While it depicts tumultuous and unpredictable times for the royal family, it also presents some of the members of that family in ways that seem inconsistent with what we’ve come to expect from them, both within the context of this series and in the real world.”
This will be the first season of The Crown to be released after both the death of Prince Philip on 9 April 2021 and the death of Queen Elizabeth II on 8 September 2022.