‘The Crown’ Recap, Episode 1: “Wolferton Splash”

My experience of starting The Crown, Netflix’s wildly expensive and highly watchable take on the early days of Queen Elizabeth II, was enhanced more than I can say by the presence of my visiting mother, a woman who hates the British monarchy so much that she always put the stamp with the Queen on it upside down while addressing letters. Because your children are designed to disappoint you, she was burdened with a daughter who has never grown tired of these terrible inbred people and their drama, especially when given to us in television form with extremely high production values.
The decision to make yet another nostalgia show in the first place was not mine (period pieces being an easy excuse for a completely all-white cast that in no way represents the current makeup of the British people), but it exists, and I will be recapping it for you with great vigor. It is a true panacea that the monarchy was already a powerless bread and circuses sham in the era showcased in this series, although Winston Churchill (very gamely portrayed by a hammy, turtle-in-a-fat-suit, soup-slurping John Lithgow) was busily dropping racist turds in the punchbowl when not making excellent inspiring wartime speeches. The coronation of Young Lilbet, however, often cited as the reason thousands people in the UK purchased their first grainy television set, as well as that weird chicken recipe, really cannot be over-emphasized as a cultural event. She’s been old and predictable for so long that it’s hard to imagine her being the luminous young thing we see before us in The Crown, which Claire Foy is working overtime to achieve, a woman utterly besotted with her handsome suitor and shoved into a lifetime position under the gimlet eye of the British public a few decades ahead of schedule schedule. I must at this point admit to being rather fond of Queen Elizabeth II, who, to be fair, pumps more money into the economy in tourism dollars than she costs, and has mastered the gift of never saying much of anything about anything, even as her idiot family gets repeatedly recorded having their toes sucked on yachts and expressing desires to be reincarnated as a tampon.

Here we go.
Let me begin by saying that Matt Smith is (at least physically) nothing like Prince Philip, a man I have devoted years of my life to studying. If you want to know more about Prince Philip, please acquire a copy of the half-bullshit Kitty Kelley gossip tome The Royals, which is like being on one of those wine trains in terms of visceral pleasure mixed with self-loathing. You may not believe me when I say the man was a babe in his youth, but he most certainly was (Elizabeth thought so, at least), and Matt Smith may have many fine qualities, but plausibly capturing the heart of an attractive young princess is not among them. Smith does do a fine job with both the gloomier and perkier sides of Philip, who we sometimes forget was kept away from his schizophrenic (and heroic!) mother for most of his childhood and was a bit of a lone wolf. I will cease being snotty about his looks at the current time, he’s VERY good at planting a big wet one on Elizabeth, whose fluttering heart can be heard from space.

The show opens in 1947 with King George VI romantically hacking up clots of blood into a toilet, the universal cinematic symbol of death. You just might as well have a tall hooded figure with a scythe standing behind him in all his shots. Jared Harris (son, of course, of the legendary Richard) is a very serviceable George VI; it’s been fun to watch him really begin flexing as a solid character actor these last few years. He forced a wry chuckle out of me as he asked his valet if he thought puking up blood might be a bit of a bad sign (the valet assuring him that “cold weather” often causes healthy middle-aged men to disgorge chunks of their lungs.) I refuse to get attached to him!

Claire Foy’s slightly-twitterpated, wide-eyed Elizabeth is a goofy, often-moving pleasure, as is the determinedly DTF Princess Margaret. In the words of the immortal Judge Smails of Caddyshack, Margaret is a young woman with a certain…zest for living. One expects that the power exchange between Elizabeth and Philip will run a lot of this series: Elizabeth, despite all her besottedness and decision to stick “obey” in her vows, was notorious for cutting Philip out of her actual political dealings, and Philip chafed (silently, for the most part) over giving up his naval career to be a stud horse who has to visit a different bottle-cap factory every day and pretend to care about the process.
Foy, who was absolutely entrancing as Anne Boleyn in Wolf Hall, has made her Elizabeth perhaps a little too flustered for a woman who has been in the public eye since birth and capably drove ambulances around the streets of London during the Blitz. It’s that fluster that makes her character so sweetly vulnerable, however, and this is television, after all. She also butches up noticeably following the multi-year flash-forward that drops us off as George VI slowly circles the drain and Elizabeth and Philip play with their kids (more often than they did in reality, I am quite confident.)
The moments which telegraph This Is Television — numerous heavy-handed cuts to people smoking cigarettes who should obviously not be smoking cigarettes, SEXUAL INNUENDO, an unexpected dose of Matt Smith’s naked butt, a terminally thirsty Winston Churchill stage-whispering “HIS FAMILY ALL MARRIED NAZIS” during the wedding ceremony — are all forgivable, in my opinion, as they help boost the show out of the realm of misty-rose-colored colonial nostalgia (see also: the bad parts of Downton Abbey) into the sort of lush upper-middle-brow fictive soap opera (see also: the better parts of Downton Abbey) that one can enjoy with a clear conscience. Even my mother, who mostly sat in stony silence and requested we put Black Mirror back on, found herself mildly entertained against her will, especially by the scene in which a fond George VI attempts to quietly prepare Elizabeth for what is to come.

This first episode sets up the series of push-pulls, both professional and domestic, which promise to give the series its juice: Elizabeth the mother, Elizabeth the wife, Elizabeth the daughter, Elizabeth — soon enough — the Queen. At the moment, she is not quite as interesting as the cast moving around her fixed, cardigan-clad point, but there’s a reason it’s called The Crown and not The Young Elizabeth. It’s an ensemble workplace drama as much as a romance, and that’s what I’m interested to see play out. See you tomorrow, when I anticipate more handkerchiefs soaked in blood will be strewn about the palace.   

[Watch The Crown, Episode 1 on Netflix]

Nicole Cliffe used to run The Toast, a niche site for queer archivists which Hillary Clinton at least pretended to like, but is now mostly just dicking around on Twitter.