After 60 episodes, Peter Morgan says goodbye to ‘The Crown’
On a cold day in December 2016, Peter Morgan stood on a London street watching a scene from his new television series about the British royal family.
Half an hour later he plopped down on a chair and ran his hands through his hair. As both writer and showrunner of the show, he was already working on season 2, while keeping an eye on every detail of season 1. “I love doing this, but it’s so overwhelming that it’s not sustainable in the long term,” he says. said.
“This” was “The Crown,” Morgan’s ambitious six-part series that would cover most of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, examining national and international politics, personalities and social changes through the prism of an intergenerational – and royal – family. After 60 episodes, all written or co-written by Morgan, he made it through.
On Thursday, Netflix will release the final six episodes of the sixth season, marking the end of a show that is one of the most watched, contested and influential creations in recent television history.
Reminded, in a recent interview, of those early doubts, Morgan, 60, nodded emphatically. “I’m really surprised I lasted,” he said. “I feel” – he paused – “surprised, grateful and quite emotional that we have reached the end.”
When Morgan, along with director Stephen Daldry and producer Andy Harries, first pitched “The Crown” to broadcasters in 2014, it was with “low expectations,” Daldry wrote in an email. Netflix was just starting to create original content and streaming was still in its infancy.
The BBC would have been a natural home for “The Crown,” but “Peter wanted to do something groundbreaking and different,” says Suzanne Mackie, who has been the show’s executive producer since its inception. “I remember feeling like the TV landscape was going to change and we were going to be part of that.”
‘The Crown’ was not only part of a changing landscape, but also an agent of change. The mix of meticulously researched fact and dramatic fiction, the cinematic production values and the rotation of the main cast every other season, all set new parameters for prestige feature-length television.
“What a special thing to have come up with: the story of a family with three different actors. I don’t think this has ever been done before,” said Imelda Staunton, who played Queen Elizabeth for the past two seasons.
The final season, which begins in 1997 with the build-up to Diana’s death, has been the hardest of all for Morgan to create, he said, not just because the events and images feel familiar to much of the audience. He also covered some of the same ground in his 2006 film, “The Queen,” in which the queen (played by Helen Mirren) confronted the emotional public response to Princess Diana’s death.
“I’ve been dreading this moment,” he said honestly. “How do I repeat myself without repeating myself?” He decided that if he couldn’t find a convincing Diana, he would tell the story of the end of her life through Dodi Fayed, Diana’s friend who died with her in the crash, and his grieving father, Egyptian billionaire Mohamed al-Fayed. , who longed for acceptance from the royal family and died this year.
“But once we had Elizabeth Debicki as Diana, I was able to enjoy her writing, the life she had, the mischief,” and her extraordinary ability to connect with people, Morgan said.
The Queen’s death last year and watching her funeral also changed Morgan’s approach to the final season, he said, which ends in 2005 with the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles. Elizabeth’s story now ends with the monarch celebrating and coming to terms with that union, but also reflecting on her own death and legacy.
“What about the life I put aside, the woman I put aside when I became queen?” the monarch wonders, in a rare moment of vulnerability.
Daldry, who directed the final episode, said that during filming, Staunton “went on an amazing journey with me to reflect the mortality and reign of the Queen.” For Staunton, “it was an extraordinary thing to try to inhabit someone who was completely dutiful all her life,” she said. “You’ll never see that again.”
By the end of the show, the queen, Morgan said, struggles “with the illogical nature of the system” that required such a duty of her. “It’s like religion,” he added. “Why lead such a powerful institution along irrational lines? But perhaps the irrationality is the romanticism. I’m no closer to an answer.”
Morgan, 60, grew up in London, the son of two refugees: his Jewish father had fled Nazi Germany; his Catholic mother escaped from communist Poland. “If I hadn’t been the son of immigrants, I wouldn’t have dared to write about the British royal family,” he said. “You have to feel one foot out and one foot in to understand it.”
While studying fine arts at the University of Leeds, he decided he wanted to work in theater and came to writing ‘through a series of accidents’. Now, he said, he can’t imagine doing anything else.
Morgan wrote television scripts for much of the 1990s before gaining wider attention in 2003 with “The Deal,” a film for British television about the rivalry between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. Then came his breakthrough in 2006 with ‘The Queen’, directed by Stephen Frears.
In 2013 he premiered ‘The Audience’, a play about the weekly meetings between the Queen, again played by Mirren, and her Prime Ministers, which played in the West End and Broadway and won several Tony Awards. While writing it, Morgan was struck by the relationship between the young Elizabeth and the older Winston Churchill, and thought it might be a film. When he started researching the idea, starting at an earlier point, “I thought there might be a TV show in this,” he recalls.
There was. In a negotiation between on-the-record history and the speculative imaginations that characterize his work, Morgan has depicted the royal family as normally human, with complicated and rich inner lives. Private versus public, tradition versus modernity, relevance versus mystery: ‘The Crown’ has explored these issues throughout the decades of the Queen’s reign.
‘The Crown’ caused ‘a seismic shift in royal representation on stage and screen’ Mark Lawson recently wrote in The Guardian, noting that before the series began, the fictional representation of the royal family was usually satirical or comedic. Morgan, on the other hand, “portrayed regality with the quasi-documentary realism of acting and lavish sets,” Lawson added.
As a result, the series has been criticized – especially during the last two seasons – from outraged royal watchers, critics and public figures, who have pointed out historical inaccuracies and objected to imagined conversations and meetings.
But the truth is elusive and ambiguity is essential for Morgan. “I can only repeat what I’ve always said,” Morgan said. “Some of it is necessarily fiction. But I try to make everything truthful, even if you don’t know if it’s right. He quoted the late author Hilary Mantel: “History is not the past, it is the method we have developed to organize our ignorance of the past.”
The royal family, Morgan said, “is like a shadow family for everyone, and that’s why people have such strong opinions.” And it is right for a playwright to write about kings, queens and leaders. Historically, that’s what we do to understand the world.”
For nearly a decade, the show has made stars of its young actors, including Claire Foy, Vanessa Kirby and Emma Corrin. “It changed my life,” Kirby, who played the young Princess Margaret, wrote in an email. Morgan, she said, “understands how to paint arcs and deep emotional journeys – no matter how big or small the part is.”
Khalid Abdalla, who plays DodiDiana’s boyfriend said in seasons 5 and 6 that before taking the role, he wasn’t interested in watching a show about the royal family. But once he joined the show, he said, he was “amazed by the way Peter gives a point of view you didn’t have before, and makes you think about what you thought you knew.”
When it came to the characters of Dodi and his father, “it was moving that he gave the al-Fayeds a cultural space for their grief,” Abdalla said. “There is a blindness to that side of the story that needs to be mentioned and acknowledged, and Peter did that.”
For each season, Morgan worked with a core team for at least six months to create a detailed timeline of the relevant time period, with a research team providing documents, photographs and other background material for each scene. “I like playing with stories like a puzzle,” he said. “I am very specific and detailed; if i was a doctor i would be an elbow man!
That detail extends to every character. “No two characters speak the same way,” Kirby said. “That is surprisingly rare in writing – and so lifelike.”
For the past decade, Morgan, along with executive producers Mackie and Oona O’Beirn, has also overseen every detail of the show’s production. “Creating a series like this is like making ten feature films per season, with the same care and detail,” said Morgan. “And unlike one film, it just continues.”
Now that he has reached the end: ‘People keep saying: you must be so happy and proud, but I’m not yet. I’m still a little traumatized.” He laughed. “I promise I’ll smoke a cigar soon.”
Nevertheless, he is working on his next project, which he said he could not talk about yet. “It won’t be about palaces,” he said firmly.