‘The Crown’ Season 6 Part 1 Review: Netflix’s Hit Falls Apart In The Wake Of Diana’s Death

It’s the beginning of the end for The Crown on Netflix. The Crown Season 6 Part 1 premiered this morning, focusing on the final days of Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) and the devastation left in the wake of her tragic death. Make no mistake: The Crown Season 6 Part 1 is the Princess Diana show. Queen Elizabeth II (Imelda Staunton) only really shows up to fret over her former daughter-in-law and the awkward situation Prince Charles‘s (Dominic West) divorce has created. Diana’s shadow looms over everything in The Crown Season 6 Part 1 and the show only ever lights up when she’s on screen. By focusing the first four episodes of The Crown‘s final season on Princess Diana, showrunner Peter Morgan simultaneously gives an iconic moment in royal history its due, while also showing just how much Lady Di rocked the royal institution just by existing.

The Crown first premiered on Netflix all the way back in 2016, at a time when the streaming service was still jockeying for critical acclaim alongside subscriber growth. The series, with its exquisite approach to recreating the early years of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, became an immediate sensation. Over the years, The Crown has gobbled up awards, launched stars like Claire Foy and Vanessa Kirby, and provided the pubic with a softer, more human side of the Royal Family. While The Crown Season 4 was an absolute triumph, the series stumbled a bit depicting the modern royals’ most disgraceful years, the ’90s, in Season 5. While Elizabeth Debicki rightfully received kudos for her uncanny take on the older Princess Diana, many of the other roles felt slightly miscast. Worse, the series seemed to lose its understated emotional current, preferring to embrace melodrama at turns.

The Crown Season 6 will pick up the story right where Season 5 left off, the summer of 1997, and will follow the Royal Family through the 2005 wedding of the current King Charles III and Queen Camilla. The Crown Season 6 will also be split into two halves. While Netflix has been forcing split seasons onto many of its biggest shows, from Stranger Things to Virgin River, it’s a programming strategy that actually makes narrative sense for the final season of The Crown. The first four episodes of The Crown Season 6 Part 1 — which are now streaming on Netflix — cover the final weeks of Princess Diana’s life and the immediate aftermath of her untimely death. The Crown Season 6 Part 2, on the other hand, will follow Prince William as he navigates young adulthood and the happily ever afters of Charles and Camilla, as well as Prince Edward and Sophie Rhys-Jones.

Before we can get to The Crown‘s happy ending, though, we have to wade through the horror of Princess Diana’s tragic last summer. The first three episodes of The Crown Season 6 Part 1 cover the whirlwind summer of 1997. We watch as a divorced, single Diana attempts to escape the gilded cage of her Kensington Palace apartment for a sun-soaked vacation on pal Mohamed “Mou Mou” Al-Fayed’s (Salim Daw) yacht. Young Prince William (Rufus Kampa) and Prince Harry (Fflyn Edwards) are in tow, and if Harry is happy to play with the Fayed kids, sullen tween Wills would rather be alone playing Goldeneye. (The most relatable the current Prince of Wales has ever been?)

What Diana doesn’t realize is that Mou Mou’s invitation is a secret set up. The obscenely wealthy Egyptian tycoon is dead set on getting Diana and his son Dodi (Khalid Abdalla) together, even if Dodi’s already engaged to a pretty American model. Ironically, Diana and Dodi do make a connection, albeit in spite of Mou Mou’s machinations. However, as Peter Morgan frames it, Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed’s summer fling was far from the tragic love story Mohamed Al-Fayed would push for the rest of his life. The lovers’s dalliance only became an eternal romance because death came before the inevitable break up did. (Again, this is Peter Morgan’s version!)

While The Crown doesn’t explicitly show us the death of Princess Diana, it vividly recreates all the moments leading up to the fateful car crash that claimed her, Dodi’s, and driver Henri Paul’s lives on August 31, 1997. There’s been much hemming and hawing about whether or not The Crown‘s version of these events would be in poor taste. The real issue, I found, however, was the quality of the writing that followed Diana’s passing in The Crown Season 6 Episode 4 “Aftermath.”

The Crown‘s creator and showrunner Peter Morgan first came to international prominence in 2003 for writing The Queen, an Oscar-winning film about Queen Elizabeth II’s (Helen Mirren) tone deaf reaction to Diana’s death. It’s a great, understated film full of fantastic performances and a lot of metaphoric imagery comparing stags in Scotland to wounded royals. It’s basically the template for what’s made The Crown so great for so many seasons. The Queen is also a much better take on the aftermath of Diana’s death than, uh, The Crown Season 6 Episode 4 “Aftermath.” Indeed, the fourth episode of The Crown Season 6 just feels like Peter Morgan cobbling together scenes that were cut from the script of The Queen.

If the writing on The Crown Season 6 Part 1 falls a bit short where it counts the most, the cast at least delivers the goods. Imelda Staunton is still the most ineffectual Queen Elizabeth II the show’s produced, but she’s no longer in the spotlight, so it’s fine. Instead, The Crown Season 6 Part 1 belongs to Princess Diana and Elizabeth Debicki. Debicki doesn’t just harness the memory of Diana in her performance, but offers nuanced layers of yearning, pain, and regret. Her performance is so stellar that the series loses more than just the character of Diana when she dies; it loses its beating heart.

The Crown Season 6 Part 1 doesn’t quite hit the incandescent highs of Seasons 1 or 4, but it’s a marked improvement over Season 5. That’s because it narrows its focus, like a camera’s telescopic lens, on Princess Diana’s last days. Elizabeth Debicki throws down one of the best performances of her career and the show suffers when she’s gone. All of which is to say, we should all be very curious how Peter Morgan intends to wrap up his royal saga without Diana in The Crown Season 6 Part 2…

The Crown Season 6 Part 1 is now streaming on Netflix; The Crown Season 6 Part 2 will premiere on Thursday, December 14.