The trailer comes after Dame Judi Dench accused the show of "crude sensationalism."
The first trailer for Season 5 of “The Crown” dropped Thursday — but not everyone is thrilled the Netflix series focusing on the royal family is back.
The upcoming season shifts to the ’90s, with new cast members Imelda Staunton as Queen Elizabeth II, Jonathan Pryce as Prince Philip, Lesley Manville as Princess Margaret, Dominic West as Prince Charles, Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana, Claudia Harrison as Princess Anne, Olivia Williams as Camilla Parker Bowles, Jonny Lee Miller as John Major, Salim Daw as Mohamed Al Fayed, and Khalid Abdalla as Dodi Fayed.
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The main focus of the trailer is the end of Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s marriage, which Netflix notes presents “a constitutional crisis for the monarchy.” Things only get worse when, “as media scrutiny intensifies, Diana decides to take control of her own narrative, breaking with family protocol to publish a book that undermines public support for Charles and exposes the cracks in the House of Windsor.”
The show returns Wednesday, November 9th — and one huge British star made it very clear she won’t be watching. On Wednesday, Dame Judi Dench released an open letter to The Times of London, in which she criticized the show for its “crude sensationalism” as it inches closer and closer to the present day. Her letter came after British Prime Minister John Major labeled the series and its depiction of his time in office as a “barrel-load of nonsense.”
'The Crown' to Pause Filming Season Five Following Queen Elizabeth II's Death
“Sir John Major is not alone in his concerns that the latest series of The Crown will present an inaccurate and hurtful account of history,” wrote Dench. “Indeed, the closer the drama comes to our present times, the more freely it seems willing to blur the lines between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism.”
“While many will recognise The Crown for the brilliant but fictionalised account of events that it is, I fear that a significant number of viewers, particularly overseas, may take its version of history as being wholly true,” she continued. “Given some of the wounding suggestions apparently contained in the new series — that King Charles plotted for his mother to abdicate, for example, or once suggested his mother’s parenting was so deficient that she might have deserved a jail sentence — this is both cruelly unjust to the individuals and damaging to the institution they represent.”
“No one is a greater believer in artistic freedom than I, but this cannot go unchallenged,” she went on. “Despite this week stating publicly that The Crown has always been a ‘fictionalised drama’ the programme makers have resisted all calls for them to carry a disclaimer at the start of each episode.”
“The time has come for Netflix to reconsider — for the sake of a family and a nation so recently bereaved, as a mark of respect to a sovereign who served her people so dutifully for 70 years, and to preserve its reputation in the eyes of its British subscribers,” she concluded.
As Dench alluded to in her letter, following Major’s criticism, the streamer released a statement of its own, saying that “The Crown has always been presented as a drama based on historical events.”
“Series 5 is a fictional dramatisation, imagining what could have happened behind closed doors during a significant decade for the royal family – one that has already been scrutinised and well-documented by journalists, biographers and historians,” they added.
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