Netflix's First Images of 'The Crown' Season 6 Skip to The Next Generation
The Crown's final two seasons landed at an awkward time for the Royal Family, though some might argue there would never be an ideal one. However, there's little argument the early seasons coincided with the Windsors on an upswing. With Prince Harry engaged to Meghan Markle — a divorced Catholic woman five years his senior — it looked like the family was correcting past mistakes and giving the new generation the happy ending denied to those who came before. And had the show been able to stick to its original release schedule of a season a year, it would have cleared the Princess Diana divorce hurdle in 2020 before all that came crashing down.
However, no one told Netflix that recasting a show nose to tail would lose the production an entire year, and with the plan to do it twice in place, the series' original plan to conclude Season 6 in 2021, ending with Queen Elizabeth II's 60th year on the throne and the Diamond Jubilee did not come to pass instead, by the time Season 4 concluded in 2020. Prince Andrew's scandals busting out all over, series creator Peter Morgan was already backing away from doing the 2000s at all since Andrew's alleged behaviors dated back to the early aughts, first trying to cancel Season 6 entirely before deciding to have Seasons 5 and 6 each cover half of the 1990s.
Then the worst happened, as Elizabeth passed two months before Season 5's scheduled arrival, rehashing now-King Charles' divorce from Diana and his affair with Camilla, about to be crowned Queen instead. Morgan's decision to extend the 1990s to two seasons rather than do Diana's later life in one go also backfired, as now the show will be recounting Diana's tragic death and the modern monarchy's darkest period in the eyes of the public all of six months after Charles has been coronated. With First Look images dropping only days before the historical coronation, the production is doing its best to mitigate the damage and keep the Palace happy the only way it can.
