'The Crown' S5 Critics Review: The Show Finds It Has Nothing to Say

The fifth season of The Crown released on Netflix on 9 November. The season highlights a family who is in crisis and the world is a witness to the cracks the royal family is beginning to showcase. The series takes us through Queen Elizabeth II's life in the 1990s, showing us the political and personal events that shaped her. We also witness the hugely troubled relationship between Charles and Diana.

Here's what critics have to say about the show.

"What’s actually interesting, from a historical standpoint, is how the show seems more fantastical even as it moves firmly into living memory. Given what we have lived through since the show’s premiere in 2016, the idea that these characters’ relatively prosaic misbehavior and benign recriminations could bring down the monarchy feels like a story from a distant and very different past".

Mike Hale, The New York Times

"The continuing documentation of the late Elizabeth II’s reign – we have reached the years 1992 to 1997 – is not the issue, since the end of her era in real life ought to increase the need for a complete dramatisation. Nor should the show’s increasing proximity to the present day present a problem for its writer, Peter Morgan, whose reputation pre-Crown was for finding new angles on statespeople’s recent exploits, the royals included. Yet these new episodes are bitty and often just boring, with Morgan casting around for side plots to hide the fact that everything he has to say about the Windsors has already been said".

Jack Seale, The Guardian

"Perhaps it’s merely reactive to the genuinely impressive work in the Thatcher-and-Diana era that lends the sense that the new, fifth season of 'The Crown' is the show’s weakest outing yet: A generally scattered and unfocused show is less disciplined than ever. The fact of the divorce between Prince Charles (Dominic West) and Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) being so obviously the point of greatest interest for a contemporary audience has forced the series to slow its pace and linger. ('The Crown' faces the same problem the Queen did; Diana, with her ravenous eyes and her need to be cherished, consumes all the oxygen.) But even after having been handed the gift of a memorable scandal with two hugely charismatic and flawed participants as grist, “The Crown” finds it has nothing to say".

Daniel D'Addario, Variety