"Scriptwriting isn’t so easy, is it? I tend to think it’s not what you leave in but what you leave out that’s most important."
These were the words offered by a Prince to the man who would become, depending on your perspective, the bane of his existence, or a great ally.
British screenwriter Peter Morgan received a CBE from then-Prince Charles, back in 2016. This was after Morgan had written an entire feature film about Charles' mother grappling with the death of Charles' former-wife. That movie was, of course, called The Queen, and it made up part of a long body of work that saw Morgan get the royal-sanctioned medal for his Services To Drama.
Watch: The Crown Season 5 Official Trailer. Post continues after video.
If the Prince held any resentment that his family's most private moments of shock and grief had been turned into Oscar-bait by this man, he didn't show it.
As he pinned the medal on Morgan's chest, Charles made his suggestion of tactful omission. Did the prince know, in the moment, that Morgan's next project was going to be the greatest invasion of privacy the royal family would ever experience, on a global stage, over five years and counting?
Of course he did. That's not the kind of thing that's kept from the heir to the throne.
By then, Peter Morgan had already invented The Crown. His creation sat safely in the can, awaiting release. Morgan is the creator, writer and showrunner. The Netflix mega-hit is his baby.
And depending on who you ask, the family at the centre of the whole $150million sensation has been exploited and betrayed by the show's existence, or has found a whole new relevance under its eye.
This season, for Charles, it's definitely the latter. Whatever Judi Dench says.
Dame Judy, before Season Five aired, wrote a letter to the Times Of London, calling the show "cruelly unjust" to the living royals. She clearly had not yet seen it, because if she had, she would know that as far as the most senior of all living royals goes, the casting and storylines are sympathetic, to say the least.
Yes, there's that petulant start, where Prince Charles appears to agitate for his mother's abdication, wasting a sitting Prime Minister's time with droning talk of opinion polls and 'Queen Victoria Syndrome', where long-term familiarity has bred contempt (oh, how far from contempt the Brits ended up being, by this year's end to the second Elizabethan era). And yes, he is unfaithful and boring and seemingly callous when it comes to the tortuous existence of his dazzling, estranged wife, Diana. Oh, and yes, there's the whole, excruciating "tampon" conversation...
But Charles is played by Dominic West, for God's sake. McNulty himself. An actor who is real-life royal adjacent, married to a Viscountess. A man who went to the same school as the young princes, a man who once charity-hiked to the South Pole with Prince Harry, a man whose landscaper wife does Prince Charles' gardens. A man who lives in an Irish castle. Aristocratic West was never going to be playing the new King in some sort of anarchic take-down.
Some say that West is too Alpha to play Charles, who until this point has been portrayed as an insecure, bumbling mess, but West presents a very real side to the now King. A man who is the most important person in any room he enters unless his late mother was in it. A man who shouts at a pen that doesn't work. A man who travels with an aide who pours his martinis and squeezes his toothpaste. A man who has reportedly never been faithful to any partner. That man could quite easily be Dominic West.
And then there are the choices made about the telling of an epic royal love story. Charles and Camilla, now side by side on the throne, have a history that can be viewed through two different prisms.
One, despicable.
Charles as a powerful man who conspired to marry an unsuspecting young woman and impregnate her with the necessary heirs while consistently placing his mistress's needs above his young wife's. And then gaslighting her – 'you have everything anyone could possibly ask for, why are you so... difficult to please' – until her very sanity was hanging by a thread.
The other prism, tragic.
Charles, forbidden to marry the woman he truly adores, is forced into a union with someone he neither loves nor understands. There is miserable infidelity on both sides until they are finally set free to pursue their own versions of happiness and, decades after he first desired it, he finally gets to live his life with the woman who truly gets him. The one who makes him a better man. The one who can save his sanity.
It's this second telling that Morgan has settled on for The Crown, Season Five.
His version of Charles has swagger, and desperation about the impotence of his position, and is constantly out-manoeuvred by Diana, who is savvier about what really matters for royals – getting the public onside.
He's a jocular dad, who carries his boys on his shoulders and rumbles with them on glamorous holidays. He's the woke Prince, pushing for change in the moth-eaten institution he'll inherit. He's eco, before anyone was eco. He even wanted little girl royals to get the same royal inheritance status as little boy ones.
This is a version of the King we can get behind.
Is that surprising? Not really. It's easier to criticise the monarchy than the monarch, after all. And the royals who are still with us are watching. Camilla has said in the past that she "definitely" watches The Crown, and that Charles only stopped when his storylines got a little too... recent. Prince Harry has said that he's watched it too, and that although it's 'fiction' – something Netflix now admits – it offends him less than tabloid gossip.
Listen to this episode of The Spill, where Holly Wainwright discusses this very topic. Post continues after podcast.
There could be no firmer sign that the royals have no real beef with the show than Harry signing a multi-million dollar deal to make content for the same company that's documented his family at war for five years now. Since even before he started lobbing his own bombs in his dad's direction.
The diamond-dripping glamour of the show has returned gloss and intrigue to the older generations of royals. It's reminded people that Charles and Anne and even the inexcusable Andrew, are real humans, with pasts and desires and thwarted dreams and bits of their lives that they hate, just like the rest of us.
The Crown humanises the royals, and that's the kindest thing it could do. It's really a PR dream, dusted in glittering grit.
After all, the second-most famous family in the world got there via a TV show, yes? Set in Calabasas mansions, not English palaces, but equally jewel-studded, and every bit as drama-filled.
Morgan himself confirms Season Five is King-friendly.
“I think we must all accept that the 1990s was a difficult time for the royal family, and King Charles will almost certainly have some painful memories of that period,” he told Variety this year. “But that doesn’t mean that, with the benefit of hindsight, history will be unkind to him, or the monarchy. The show certainly isn’t. I have enormous sympathy for a man in his position – indeed, a family in their position. People are more understanding and compassionate than we expect sometimes.”
Yes, including the royals, when their dirty laundry is being washed in public, with just a few of the most stubborn stains 'left out'.
Feature Image: Getty