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For three seasons, “The Crown” has explored the life of Queen Elizabeth II — everything from her marriage to her coronation and beyond. Now, season 4 has premiered, bringing along with it two of the queen’s biggest threats, according to Decider.
When does season 4 premiere?
- While most big Netflix shows premiere on Fridays, the entire fourth season of “The Crown” debuted Sunday, Nov. 15, Decider reported.
- Netflix made the new season available beginning at 1 a.m. MT.
What we know about season 4
- The new season has 10 episodes.
- Season 4 introduces Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (played by “X-Files” star Gillian Anderson) and Princess Diana (Emma Corrin).
- According to Vulture, if you’ve never watched “The Crown” before, season 4 is a good starting place since it covers some of the more familiar stories regarding the royal family — Charles and Diana, the Thatcher era, etc.
- A young Diana enters the first episode of the season, and a wedding is in the picture by episode three, which is titled “Fairytale,” according to Decider.
- Season 4 thoroughly chronicles the first decade of Diana and Prince Charles’ relationship, but the series will not show the wedding, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Instead, it’ll show the events leading up to the big event that at the time was viewed by 750 million people (Diana’s iconic wedding dress, however, has been recreated for the show).
- “We never recreate things just for the sake of recreating them. I think if we do recreate a scene — like the engagement scene, for instance, when they do the announcement — it has to be because it’s linked to something that the characters are going through. It has to be part of the story. It has to further the plot, basically,” actress Emma Corrin told the Hollywood Reporter. “The wedding scene, you can YouTube it and you could be watching it in 10 seconds so I don’t think there’d be any point in us recreating it.”
Also ...
- Across three seasons, “The Crown” has painted the queen as a “faultless heroine,” according to The Atlantic. Things take a drastic turn in the new season.
- “In its sharp and splashy fourth season, the show finally criticizes Elizabeth for her ignorance, characterizing her as a ruler whose stubborn devotion to tradition makes her and her family out-of-touch fools caught off guard by change,” The Atlantic writes.
- Season 4 marks “the darkest” season yet, as the family confronts “unexpected challenges from every side,” according to the Deseret News.
- The fourth season also marks Olivia Colman’s last performance as the queen, as an older cast will take over for the show’s fifth and sixth seasons, the Deseret News previously reported.
Beyond season 4
- In January, “The Crown” producers announced plans to end after five seasons, the Deseret News reported. The conclusion would’ve come before the storyline reached the present day with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
- The storyline still won’t reach present day, but Netflix has since renewed “The Crown” for a sixth season, the New York Times reported.
- “As we started to discuss the story lines for Series 5, it soon became clear that in order to do justice to the richness and complexity of the story we should go back to the original plan and do six seasons,” Peter Morgan, the show’s creator, said in a statement, according to the New York Times. “To be clear, Series 6 will not bring us any closer to present day — it will simply enable us to cover the same period in greater detail.”