Every Season Of Netflix's The Crown, Ranked

In its heyday, “The Crown” represented every shiny thing that streaming-era TV could be. With precise and powerful storytelling, a cast full of stars-in-the-making, and cinematic flair, the historical drama from “The Queen” writer Peter Morgan was as aesthetically masterful and emotionally potent as it was bingeable. The show’s early seasons were an awards season powerhouse and a clear-cut case of must-watch TV in an increasingly crowded programming slate.

If this sounds like a eulogy, it’s because the best parts of “The Crown” seemed to die with its subject. Where the show’s ambitious earlier seasons revealed shattering truths and scathing critiques through restrained performances and symbolic imagery, its later chapters often flailed under the pressure of approaching the present day. In its old age, the show reused its original tricks in increasingly obvious and unconvincing ways, becoming as obsolete to the streaming landscape as its monarch did to the modern world. The downfall of “The Crown” wasn’t a steady descent, and moments in the later seasons still shine, but its earliest triumphs already feel like a precious relic of a different time in both TV and global history. Here’s how every season stacks up today.

Has there ever been as gutless a season of television as season 5 of “The Crown”? Wider audiences may have caught on to the show’s decline during its sixth and final season, but the cracks in the series were already showing a year earlier, and they felt particularly galling given the obvious about-face between seasons 4 and 5. The show’s introduction to Diana, then played by Emma Corrin, was fantastic, but it followed up a season that portrayed her with sympathy and complexity with one that recast her part in more ways than one. “The Crown” season 5 saw Elizabeth Debicki take over the Diana role, and her once-loveable character was suddenly made into the wrongheaded attention-seeker the Royals (in the series, at least) seemed to think she always was.

The 180-degree turn on several characters in season 5 reeks of a bending of the knee, and paves the way for a more toothless version of the once-great show going forward. Morgan’s sudden chilliness towards the Peoples’ Princess is counterbalanced by a bizarre attempt to redeem perpetually unlikeable Prince Charles (now played by Dominic West). The future King of England, who coincidentally became the ruler of the British Empire two months before this milquetoast season was released, is here shown dancing dorkily with underprivileged youths as if we didn’t just see him more or less tell his severely ill wife to kill herself a season before. Meanwhile, the character who gave the show her name (Imelda Staunton, who looks the most like Elizabeth of all three of her actors yet leaves the slightest of impressions in the role) becomes less and less active. By the time the season ends with a plot about Queen Elizabeth mourning the loss of her publicly funded yacht, the show’s once crown-critical edge had already dulled beyond repair.

Is season 6 of “The Crown” any better than its predecessor? Not particularly, but the shockingly cowardly writing of season 5 broke the show’s fall a year before it ended, leaving the final batch of episodes to limp towards a long-awaited finish line in a mostly predictable fashion. Fans of the show knew a lot about how it would end before the two-part season dropped, including the fact that Morgan would not tackle the vicious, racist legacy of the Meghan Markle era. Instead, the show ends in full “God Save the Queen” mode, landing solidly on the pro-royalist side with a final episode that sees an elderly Elizabeth, one foot in heaven, refuse to abdicate the throne.

When the sixth season isn’t being twee and overly generous in its take on the modern royal family and British Imperialism in general, “The Crown” winds down the clock with some truly weird narrative decisions. Diana’s death is mostly used as an excuse for both her partner Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla) and her ex Charles to explore their man-pain (also shared by her young sons), and a melodramatic episode imagining the lead-up to her fateful car crash reads like bad fanfiction. Prince Harry’s (Luther Ford) semi-formed arc ends with his Nazi armband tabloid scandal, and an extensive plotline about the courting of William (Ed McVey) and Kate (Meg Bellamy) lands with a thud. There are very few glimpses of the show that once was in “The Crown” season 6, a swan song that rings false at almost every turn.

The first signs that “The Crown” wasn’t a dynasty built to last came in its third season, which replaced the phenomenal original cast with an older ensemble to match the time jump in Elizabeth II’s life. The switch makes sense, and the new ensemble does a serviceable job, but something immutable and precious is clearly lost between seasons and recasts. The dropoff is most steep with Olivia Colman’s Elizabeth, who’s decidedly tougher to root for than Claire Foy’s eager-to-prove new royal. This, of course, may be by design, as “The Crown” season 3 demonstrates the less-than-subtle ways in which the stubborn and occasionally subversive young ruler ages into an establishment figure.

If “The Crown” does care about the culpability of the British monarchs, season 3 is one of the last chapters of the saga that really shows it. These 10 inconsistent episodes are focused on missteps and failures — moments in which the crown is out of sync with the public, and times when decent choices could have been made but weren’t. One of the season’s most emotional episodes sees Elizabeth initially refuse to visit the site of the deadly Aberfan disaster in Wales, while another imagines her burying the identity of a KGB mole at Buckingham Palace. The self-defeating obstinance of the monastic system is countered by moments of human longing that transcend titles, like when Prince Philip (Tobias Menzies) speaks to astronauts about the moon landing, or when Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter, who knew playing the role would be tricky), heartbroken amidst the dissolution of her marriage, attempts suicide.

Tackling the Princess Diana story was always going to be a herculean task for “The Crown.” The real-life figure was once named the most photographed woman in the world, so how on Earth could a show — even one as prestigious as this — find a new angle to examine? Newcomer Emma Corrin, who earned a much-deserved Emmy nomination for this role, turned out to be the answer.

Corrin captures Diana perfectly, bringing a version of her back to life via a multifaceted performance that’s charming and heartbreaking in turn. This is the season of “The Crown” that pulls the fewest punches in its retelling of real-life events, and it puts its Diana through the ringer as she attempts to navigate a new life with a husband who seems to hate her (Josh O’Connor, wonderfully loathsome), a world that’s keen to pick apart her every blemish, and famous in-laws who are indifferent to her increasingly deep personal pain. “The Crown” season 4 all but turns Diana into the show’s protagonist, a bold choice that pays off as the show explores the ways in which everything from her eating disorder and depression to her sense of style chafe against the system into which she marries.

“The Crown” season 4 loses some points for its weirdly soft take on Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson) and some dud side plots, but it’s also the show’s most poignant, vivid, infuriating, alive chapter. Diana is the pop of color that explodes the monarchy’s drab heart, and before her light is extinguished, it’s given its proper due thanks to Corrin’s inspired performance.

As dazzling and dark as the early Princess Diana chapters of “The Crown” are, the show’s first two seasons still reign supreme thanks to the unbeatable one-two punch of Claire Foy and Matt Smith. Much of the sophomore season is devoted to the persistent nastiness of Smith’s Prince Philip, whose role in his marriage and the monarchy steadily becomes one of bitter, gaslighting second fiddle. Scenes in which the pair spar and speak plainly are riveting, but so are the slow-burn moments of tense silence between them. Vanessa Kirby’s Margaret is the spark that often makes the whole season light up, and the show has never been better at contrasting her love of life with Elizabeth’s dour sense of duty.

Season 2 no doubt features some of the same shaky politics of the show’s later chapters, but it hides them convincingly (to American audiences, at least) under a sheen of glamor and angst, and holds multiple complex truths at once. Foy makes Elizabeth someone worth rooting for, but she also plays the emerging rulers’ flaws and insecurities as convincingly as her talents. Between Philip, John Lithgow’s Winston Churchill, and a slew of stodgy male supporting characters, the sophomore season of “The Crown” serves as the concluding chapter to the show’s original story of patriarchal power, oppression, and repression. The toxic rot of the male-dominated ruling family comes through most clearly when Philip cruelly obsesses over the perceived weakness of Charles. In this family, harmful cycles don’t just repeat — they threaten to destabilize entire nations.

The second episode of “The Crown” distills the show’s essence into one perfect hour. In that span of time, “Hyde Park Corner” ingratiates viewers to its benevolent, dying version of King George VI (Jared Harris, whose presence lingers long after his exit from the show), introduces Foy’s Elizabeth as a wide-eyed ruler-to-be with no clue what she’s getting into, and touches on the dark tendrils of Imperialism that the British monarchy couldn’t (and still can’t) shake. The death of George and surprise ascension of Elizabeth — conveyed to her by the bowing of her new Kenyan subjects during a trip to Africa — is expertly paced, surprisingly thrilling, gorgeously shot, slightly soapy, and sickening in its colonial context. It’s everything the eternally mythologizing show would become, and it’s the real starting point for a first season that never runs out of steam.

“The Crown” season 1 is less concerned with history than good storytelling, and it weaves a fantastic yarn by pitting furrowed-brow Elizabeth against an absurd, centuries-old system that staunchly refuses to get with the times. Every moment of emotional payoff from the show’s later seasons builds upon the strong dramatic foundation season 1 lays, and Morgan paints a portrait of a fallible royal family that’s unlike anything their real-life counterparts would ever broadcast to the public. Edward VIII’s abdication, Churchill’s battle with London smog, Elizabeth’s coronation, and the institutional thwarting of Margaret’s engagement are all relayed with a sense of gravity and deep meaning, yet even as the show establishes the crown’s importance, it also lays plain its myriad weak spots. Tightly controlled, beautifully shot, and rigorously acted, “The Crown” season 1 breathes life into history in a way few of its contemporaries can. It’s a fantasy masquerading as a political thriller dressed up as a history play, and it’s also 2010s prestige TV at its finest.