But Will There Be Corgis? Thread Where We Discuss Netflix's THE CROWN

Jared Harris is so good. Bloody love him after this and Mad Men, and fuck it, I'll even take that accent in the Expanse too.

yeah he is A+ perfect in this

i'd love a prequel season showing his wartime years, the family in london after the blitz, etc

It's all so delicately done, reminds me a bit of the early golden british drama era, the Brideshead Revisiteds, very far from the deluge of period fluff in the wake of Downton Abbey

otm

idk what Phil thought would happen

I think he thought that it would be more of a partnership, like Churchill and his wife. He obviously has plenty of good ideas - like televising the coronation.

true

i just hate the petulant absenteeism & carousing

"i'd love a prequel season showing his wartime years, the family in london after the blitz, etc"

A bunch of priv Naziphiles waiting for their government to stop this nonsense and sue for peace might not cut it as a worldwide hit netflix series tbh. I wish next time Netflix have a spare 100m and loads of good actors, they will do a House of Plantagenet epic or something.

Seems the spat on the Australia tour in front of the film crew did actually happen

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/it-happens-even-in-royal-marriages-20110927-1kvi8.html

I said this on the Westworld thread already but:

Game of Thrones credit sequence: mechanical mapworld comes into being before your eyes.

Vinyl credit sequence: an LP comes liquidly into being before your eyes.

Westworld credit sequence: various biobots come liquidly into being before your eyes.

The Crown credit sequence: molten metal liquidly becomes a crown before your eyes.

I think we've found the MMteens' dominant visual cliché. It's the new teal & orange.

Oh and btw ilx hath infected my brain so thoroughly that at the beginning of E3 all I could think was YES! THERE ARE, INDEED, MOTHERFUCKING CORGIS.

:D

the Corgis just turned up though. I wanted an origin story

I finished the final ep last night

A+, looking forward to more in the future if it's more of this calibre of storytelling.

The stuff between Lizzy & Margaret in ep10 is so sad & kinda gutwrenching to watch it play out even when you know what's coming. Actress who plays margaret is so good

do they explain the awful hats?

Jared Harris currently brilliant in Certain Women btw

no hat explanation sry morbs

Daredevil has the same opening sequence design too.

matt smith should play frankenstein's monster in something. he looks like frankenstein's monster.

i will get back to this soon. thanks, trump!

apropos of nothing I am really into the Queen + land rover + headscarf + gumboots look, it's a real winner for me

the woman clare foy reminds me of also rocked that look -- well, not the land rover, she had a SHOOTING BRAKE instead

or actually one of those half-timbered morris minor travellers full of smelly king charles spaniels

http://www.classicandsportscar.ltd.uk/images_catalogue/large/morris-minor-traveller_17586.jpg

watched this last weekend (except for episode one which my wife had already watched), certainly addictive. matt smith is great as philip in this, since I only ever think of him as an ancient horrible racist monster. princess margaret is much too pretty in this compared to her real life self.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/80/d6/4f/80d64f2c25860c419df4a01024e5b8c0.jpg

xp really? i always thought margaret was v beautiful as a young lady

Like a good looking version of the Queen.

p much yeah

looking thru her pix on GiS she's one of those people who just looks really -- almost unrecognisably --- different in different photos, at least until she worked out her glam mojo in the 60s

Margaret was royal family attractive. Vanessa Kirby is attractive attractive

from either eavesdropping on some misspeak from my mum or something misheard when I was a kid, for most of my adult life I was convinced she had an affair with Pete Townsend.

haha

anyway margaret def best 'character' here, love it when she takes over while queeney is away and just says whatever the fuck she wants

also, next series needs more dog

best character is elizabeth, forzen at the centre dissolving herself in duty; margaret is the most fun character

yeah elizabeth for me is the best character; rmde @ margaret & phillip with their endless "wants" & "needs" worse than actual corgis imo (/jk)

maybe it's just the older sister in me that sympathizes with lizzy

it's fucking hard work being the square responsible one!

this is v good but i have to remind myself what kind of life i'm seeing, what's being dramatized. lethal smog has the same weight as whether philip has enough to do day to day.

yeah I'm a bit torn between thinking ^that is kind of the point of the series and wondering if I should really be spending hours contemplating said basically appalling point. In TV drama terms though, so far my only real complaint is that Edward is no fun as a villain, he's just really contemptible and joyless to spend time with.

he isn't the villain, he's the warning

I had a feeling "villain" might be objected to, and I don't disagree about his importance to the show's central idea of the function of the monarchy. Maybe it's the actor? I stand by "joyless to spend time with" so when he's central to an episode I find them a bit more of a slog (but I'm only halfway through in case that matters).

as an american i shd probably look into what duties the monarch has. the 'heavy hangs the crown' type stuff between harris and foy is the show's strongest, but again i'm like... why. why is it like this.

It seemed like that to them. At the time.

Not an expert on this by any means but it seems like in 195whatever they still had a huge hangover from empire and from, of course, the wars, where they felt the idea of the steady "leadership" of a dutiful self-effacing monarch made a bit more sense.

As they do less and less of consequence nowadays, they're just reality-show-type celebrities given stilts by history, so it seems silly to us now. But even non-royal britishes in 1952ish might well have regarded the persons and fates of individual royals as a sort of proxy for the national identity, in the way perhaps that we regard sports stars. To what extent is Cleveland's fate entwined with LeBron's? It isn't, except for the person who feels that it is.

yes, the series is basically about duty vs the call of modernity (which is already super-unusual, i can't actually think of another drama that's done this in the present-day era)

my feeling (having watched it all) is that it's surprsingly harsh on ppl who don't usually get harshed on (churchill, for one): but yes, it is entirely (and deliberately) told from inside the buck house bubble

i suspect if it had tried to make much of the view from outdside, it would actually probably sentimentalise both

i also suspect that it will get less rigorous as it approaches the present

my favoutite exchange was a burn from queen mary (of teck, aka edward/george's mum) pointing out that philip's family (the schleswig-holstein-sonderburg-glücksburgs) are jumped up parvenus, whose line did not -- of course -- go back a thousand years

it was just to win a minor family argument but she was irritated

From the perspective of now, the royals who basically said "hey, we're rich and we have basically nothing to do, so let's just party and fuck" are actually sort of on the right side of history. The ones who thought they had a moral obligation to lead, set a good example, and carefully read government documents actually come off looking sorta like chumps. Because a parliamentary government can run fine without them (in fact, most do).

But just like we take the internal logic of a show seriously when we watch "The Tudors" or "Wolf Hall" or "Man for All Seasons" or, heck, "Game of Thrones," to enjoy "The Crown" requires inhabiting, however temporarily, its point of view.

That said, "The Crown" might be made more exciting with tits 'n' dragons.

i think the approach will make it v interesting in later seasons - all of the things that Elizabeth has to give up, repress, compromise & reject entirely now will all become (for her) depressingly moot as her role as queen becomes more & more meaningless

The ones who thought they had a moral obligation to lead, set a good example, and carefully read government documents actually come off looking sorta like chumps.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=FTQ

yes -- and i think it's a bit deeper even than this, as well, bcz the ones who say "let's party and fuck" (who are totally the ones who make sense, even more in the 60s than the 50s, are also the ones where it's obvious that they're doing nothing to justify the colossal privilege: elizabeth's determination is a double one, to prove she can be a satisfactory monarch even though she's a young girl with a very odd and inadequate education (except in the constitution), one that can match up to her dad, and victoria and the other semi-mythical elizabeth, but also to justify the privilege by an iron committment to a selfless version of the duty she owes and the role she must commit to (the dowdiness is an expression of this, like the other elizabeth's quasi-holy virginity)

^^^which is a bonkers insupportable topsyturvy view, but without it, there's just nothing left to ground the wealth and the palaces, etc, as any kind of equitable settlement -- and that's where elizabeth is coming from

re the constitution: she refers to bagehot* when he comes into conversation as "badgett", but her teacher -- a professor with a northern accent, who drinks -- calls him "batshit"... which is not IMO an accident

*(walter bagehot, the 19th centry theorist of the constitution and apologist for the victorian monarchy)

until i watched this i don't think i ever *fully* appreciated just how insane the mythology of the monarchy is when applied to a human being

It has been announced Brenda is getting a £370 mill full electrical/mechanical refurb to her house scot free, now that's what you call full bennies.

Just finished watching this with Kate (ie, my girlfriend, not a certain princess) over the past few days. Good stuff, all points above taken on board of course.

Our favorite character was the mustachioed hatchetman.

"Bon voyage."

he was so good!

yeah they really struggle to make the second half of S6 interesting. just little there work with, I suppose. I preferred the Diana episodes even if I knew a lot of the story

this back half feels so speculative as to beggar belief, like beyond fictionalizing and into “we have now decided to just invent new characters we are calling The Royals”

Charles going off into the scottish highlands to wail abt Dianas death seemed insanely fabulist, like ok what are we actually doing here

and ghost Dianas convo w the queen
lmao ok whut

wait this sounds good tho, all historical reconstruction should include ghosts, cf hamlet etc

to affirm my claim i found a fine portrait of the real actual historical hamlet aka "amblett"

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ad/Amblett_Hamlet.jpg/800px-Amblett_Hamlet.jpg

FWIW the ghosts didn't bother me nearly as much as the boring shit

true, the boring shit is definitely the worst aspect

fiiiiiinallly finished this trudge through the treacle of s6

high point: really liked the episode about Margaret, thought it showed their relationship as sisters quite nicely. i didn’t know she had burned her feet, v awful

i liked all the scenes btw William & the Queen, they have good chemistry in their scenes together

camilla puffing on a cig while tending to the tomato plants was v good

harry’s nazi uniform moment lol ugh

the rest of it was decidedly boring/mid and i am glad its over

should have stopped at s4 tbh

OH and the penitence prayer scene for Chuck & Camilla was pretty great imo