EMMYS WATCH 2024 – Fit for a Queen: The Final Season of 'The Crown' and Its Royal Fans

This post is part of a series of critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama Series and Outstanding Comedy Series at the 76th Emmy Awards.

We don’t often think about the Windsors, the British royal family, through the lens of fandom. Most of what is written about them is framed in terms of history, politics, and, increasingly in the past few decades, celebrity studies. Yet fandom is precisely what keeps them in their ceremonial positions of power. Without fandom, there is no celebrity. Without fans to consume photographs and gossip, there’s no point to tabloids. And so taking a fan studies approach to the Windsors, I argue, is paramount to understanding their continued influence on global popular culture.

Since its premiere, Netflix’s stylish period drama, The Crown (2016-2023), has been interested in how the Windsors can control their popular appeal. In season one’s “Smoke and Mirrors,” we see Elizabeth’s 1953 coronation in real time and on television, which allows the common people to experience the spectacular event. The first three episodes of this final season focus on the paparazzi’s relentless hounding of Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) and her companion Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla), leading up to their deaths in a car crash in Paris in 1997 in the episode “Dis-Moi Oui.”

Diana’s death has been told many times over in various media. In 2006, the feature film The Queen portrayed the first fateful days in which Elizabeth (Helen Mirren), kept Princes William and Harry stashed away from the public eye at Balmoral Castle and refused to make public appearances herself. The film attempts to relate that the queen’s primary concern was the mental welfare of Diana’s children in an attempt to tell the inside history; the story outside the castle was that she was cold, untouched by Diana’s death and ignorant to the grieving of a nation. The film was written by Peter Morgan, who created and wrote most of The Crown, and both share a sense of peeking behind the curtain.

In the retelling of Diana’s death in The Crown, the Fayeds are portrayed as the villains. Dodi, Diana’s friend and lover, wants to marry her to please his father, Mohamed Al-Fayed (Salim Daw). Mohamed sees marriage into the extended royal family as a means of upward mobility for a family of Egyptian immigrants who have had to prove their way in British society. While vacationing on the Fayeds’ yacht in the Mediterranean, Diana decides she needs to return home to see her children, but Dodi stalls by taking her first to Paris, where he can purchase an engagement ring and propose. In Paris, the pair are quickly spotted by the paparazzi. A miserable Diana asks again to return to London or at least hide out in Dodi’s apartment for the night before they take a morning flight, but on the way to the apartment, they are again chased, and the car crashes, unseen to the viewer. Mohammed likes Diana, but he doesn’t seem to particularly care about his son’s feelings or her desire to be at home. Instead, he fixates on how to convince the world there is a romance between them and even tips off the press as to their whereabouts. Dodi is so desperate for Mohamed’s approval that he, too, trounces on Diana’s wishes, dragging her out in public when she begs to stay in and stalling her return to the UK, which gives the paparazzi time to find them.

The series gives us a few glimpses at some of the photographers who pursued Diana, including Italian paparazzo Mario Brenna, and a few scenes in which crowds of admirers recognize Diana in public and throng her. But, as in 1997, The Crown blames the Fayeds and a blood-thirsty paparazzi for her death. That those same fans motivated the paparazzi is left out of the conversation.

Instead, The Crown opts for a view of fandom with which we are more familiar: hordes of mourners leaving bouquets and other tributes at the crash site in Paris, outside Balmoral Castle, and along the funeral procession route in London. In “Aftermath,” the series even incorporates archival footage of these mourners. Not taking into account the role the public’s obsessive interest in Diana has had on her death, this familiar version of public interest in the late princess portrays a grief-stricken world who simply loved and admired her.

After Diana’s death, fandom again becomes the centerpiece of family life as young William’s (Ed McVey) appearance at her funeral brings him to global attention, and soon he finds himself the teenage heartthrob whose picture girls have taped to their bedroom walls. When he appears in public, he finds crowds of screaming girls waiting to get a glimpse of him (Figure 1). The episode is appropriately titled “Willsmania,” but, as fan studies has demonstrated with Beatlemania, the positioning of girls’ fandom as mere hysteria neglects the way girls use fandom to express their sexual and romantic desires, in contrast to social expectations of them being, as we might say today, demure.

I’m roughly the same age as William and remember watching news of Diana’s death, interrupting a music festival my high school friends and I were attending. It was the first time any of us had noticed him, and suddenly half our ranks were declaring that they would, somehow, one day, marry him and become royal. This is, of course, what happens to young Kate Middleton (Meg Bellamy), prodded by her mother to get closer to William in a bit of symmetry with Dodi and Mohamed Al-Fayed.

Later in the season, Queen Elizabeth (Imelda Staunton) faces her Golden Jubilee and worries that, given William’s meteoric rise in celebrity, no one will want to celebrate her. When she steps onto the balcony at Buckingham Palace with her husband, Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce), she is touched to see throngs of admirers waiting for her.

While the continued theme of this season is fandom, the royals’ relationship to fans at the beginning and end of the season are quite different. On the one hand, obsessive fandom encouraged a relentless media, which resulted in Diana’s death. In simpler and more cynical terms, we might see the message here as “Fans killed Diana,” an iteration of the argument that “fandom is ugly” Mel Stanfill makes in their latest book. On the other hand, a lucky fan might be able to wiggle into the inner circle, as Kate has done. William and Kate’s romance as portrayed in The Crown unfolds like so many self-insert real person fan fiction stories.

And that is the hitch about media like The Crown. It has been nominated for an Emmy Award for outstanding drama series every season, winning in 2021 for its fourth season. It’s also been nominated for and won a slew of other awards, from superior choice of location shooting to represent historical settings to numerous acting awards for its cast. The series gets so much attention because the Windsors are a subject of great fascination. Particularly in the U.S., they represent not only a form of icon we don’t explicitly have (movie stars are fun to worship, but they don’t have the lineage and history behind them that royals do) but also a cultured sophistication. We might be fans of the royal family, and that might be why we consume stories about them, whether fictionalized or not, but we don’t often call ourselves fans. We call it interest in history and tradition. The Crown might be painstakingly researched and lavishly produced, and part of the fun of watching and discussing it is determining what is fact and what is embellished fiction. (Nearly every episode prompts a slew of articles doing just that.) The Crown is prestige television, but it is also historical fiction about real people.

And that means at its core it is real person fan fiction (RPF). RPF is uncomfortable territory, often prompting ethical questions about fictionalizing (and often sexualizing) the lives of real people. But wrapped up in careful research and period-specific costumes and a multimillion dollar production budget, The Crown as RPF becomes a way of learning about that which we can’t access on our own. The Crown’s first two seasons, set from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, made tangible a distant past many viewers might not have been alive for. As I wrote a few years ago, as The Crown marched forward in time, the likelihood that it would begin to make more of us uncomfortable increased because we would start to perceive it less as a historical series and more as a fictionalizing of people we know and see regularly on television and in the news and of events we lived through.

This season, we watch a young William attend a party in the college dorms at which Portishead’s “Glory Box” plays – the same song my friends and I often listened to in our own college dorm parties. Watching the scene made me uncomfortable because this history is so recent and because I know it is fictionalized. No matter how much research the writers and producers have done, they can’t know everything. Real life never makes as good a story with clear conflict, climax, and resolution, and real conversations never make as compelling dialogue. Thus, I know I’m watching producers’ and writers’ accounts of who they want their versions of William and Kate to be. These producers and writers just get to tell that story in a way that is more culturally sanctioned than RPF on AO3.

My own experience with discomfort with The Crown is related to my age and generation, which always makes a difference in how we consume and understand media and shapes how we become fans and enact that fandom. Obviously someone older than me might have felt the same sense of discomfort mixed with nostalgia in earlier episodes that triggered young adult memories for them. A younger viewer might not find anything strange about this latest season, which concludes in 2005 with the marriage of Charles (Dominic West) and Camilla (Olivia Williams).

The series’ fifth season, its second to last, was released on Netflix in November 2022, less than two months after Elizabeth II’s funeral and the associated media coverage that depicted the two-mile long queue to view her body. Eight months later, the real-life Windsors were again flooded with media coverage during Charles III’s coronation. Instead of a queue, this time average citizens were encouraged to attend street parties, a veritable fan festival of the monarchy. This final season of The Crown was released in November and December 2023, before #WheresKate spread across social media in the absence of Kate Middleton at public-facing events (later known to be the result of her undergoing cancer treatments).

I mention these intersections to point out how the Windsors are never truly absent from media, neither in fictionalized nor nonfiction form. Between interest in them as characters and historic subjects in series like The Crown and as subjects of gossip in real-life news stories and social media posts, the Windsors are never long out of the public eye. A combination of a rigorous PR and comms team on their part and active fandom on ours ensures that. But what is telling is that lining the street for a glimpse at William and creating memes about #WheresKate are much more understood as fannish behaviors, and often framed as too emotional and too invasive of the royals’ privacy, than watching a historically-set prestige television series like The Crown. And yet these are all fandom behaviors. It doesn’t matter if they are organized by Buckingham Palace or fan-creators like Peter Morgan, and it doesn’t matter if the expected fannish reaction is crying (the queue), joking (#WheresKate), or quiet appreciation (The Crown). Ultimately, The Crown contributes to a wider textual universe about the Windsors and to royal fandom more generally.

This season marks the end of The Crown’s chronicling six decades of royal life. It concludes with Elizabeth contemplating stepping down from her role as queen to allow Charles to take the throne after his wedding to Camilla. Elizabeth doesn’t, of course, as we all know: she continues to reign until her death in 2022, the longest reigning female monarch in history. In the final moments of the series finale, Elizabeth recognizes that her place is to remain on the throne because she is good at it. She understands duty and service. It feels like a suitable conclusion to a narrative that is not about any particular royal but about “the crown,” the role itself and its history and future, something more eternal than any individual. The Crown is now concluded, but the crown continues, and so too will its fandom.

Biography

Bridget Kies is Associate Professor of Film Studies and Production at Oakland University. Her research on royal fandom has been published in M/C Journal, and her other research on television and fans has been published in numerous academic journals and edited collections. With Megan Connor, she is co-editor of Fandom, the Next Generation (University of Iowa Press, 2022), the first academic book to study transgenerational fan communities and fan generations in the age of media reboots, revivals, and remakes. This blog post is part of a new, longer project on royal fandom.