Netflix is having a helluva year. Stranger Things dominated summer, though The Get Down was the better show— and a pretty incredible six hours of storytelling—Luke Cage premieres this Friday and is sure to inspire a thousand thinkpieces, and yesterday they released a trailer for their fall drama, The Crown, about the early years in Queen Elizabeth II’s reign. Netflix is rumored to have spent a hundred million or more on The Crown, making it their most expensive production to date, and every cent shows on screen. The locations, the clothes, the detailed recreations of famous royal jewels—just the trailer is eye-popping. This show looks GORGEOUS.
Aesthetic pleasure aside, the story looks compelling, too. Claire Foy stars as twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth at the time of her coronation. Matt Smith stars as Prince Phillip, and while he isn’t a dead ringer, he is tall and handsome, which Prince Phillip was back in the day. The casting is really good—it doesn’t look as if they put resemblance over ability, yet everyone looks vaguely like their real-life counterpart in that movie way of being close enough to accept but not so similar as to be distracting. John Lithgow is striking that balance as Winston Churchill. He doesn’t look like Churchill, yet he’s unmistakeably Churchill.
I love shows and movies about the behind-the-scenes lives of royals—I re-watch The Young Victoria all the time when it comes on TV, and I even tried to get into E!’s terrible soap opera, The Royals—and Netflix has spent a lot of money to make a drama about the behind-the-scenes reality of QEII’s ascension to the throne. It’s like this show was made specifically for me. I can already tell I’m going to be obsessed with The Crown come November. Are you?
Attached – Prince William and Catherine continue their tour in Canada.
