[This story contains spoilers about the ending of The Crown.]
After seven years and six seasons, Netflix’s The Crown has come to an end at a point in time that audiences might not have initially expected. Having chronicled Queen Elizabeth II’s ascension to the throne beginning with her marriage to Prince Philip in 1947, the historical drama doesn’t bring the monarch’s story completely into the modern day. Instead, The Crown concludes its saga in 2005 — 17 years before her death at the age of 96 in 2022.
“It was always my feeling that I didn’t want to come right up to the present,” says series creator and writer Peter Morgan in a featurette for Netflix that debuted over the weekend. “I always wanted to remain a careful distance from where we are now.”
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To achieve that, Morgan notes, “We had to construct, narratively, an episode in which you were genuinely satisfied that you had reached the end, even though you were almost 20 years from the end.”
The resulting finale, which unites onscreen actresses Claire Foy, Olivia Colman and Imelda Staunton — who’ve portrayed Queen Elizabeth over the course of the show’s six seasons — sets up a conflict within the head of state that, in the end, reaffirms her longstanding devotion toward her civic duty since she somewhat reluctantly took on the crown in 1952, just two months before her 26th birthday.
“I wrote the final episode being an internal conversation that the queen was having about whether she should carry on or hand over to Charles,” Morgan explains. “I thought one could dramatize the internal dialogue with her in conversation with her younger self. That was a fun challenge, because I was completely committed to not coming up to the present day.”
In the feature, Morgan, who also wrote the script for the 2006 biographical drama The Queen starring Helen Mirren, reveals the motivation behind his decades-long exploration of the life of the Queen Mother.
“My own mother was, to the month, the same age as the queen and so part of what I was originally doing was writing to understand my mother’s generation,” he explains before later admitting, “Having written 60 episodes of television, I don’t think I’m any closer to knowing what I think about the subject.”
Still, Morgan remains staunch in his position to end The Crown now, noting both a sense of satisfaction and relief over the series’ conclusion.
“I’m proud of having got to the end and doing what I said I would do,” he says, reaffirming his belief that she show is “stopping at just the right time.”
“I loved it. I gave everything to it,” Morgan adds. “I don’t think I left anything on the table.”
