NEW YORK • In the third season of Netflix's The Crown, Queen Elizabeth II (Olivia Colman) meets British prime minister, Harold Wilson (Jason Watkins) after a mining disaster in Aberfan, Wales, that killed more than 100 schoolchildren.
Wilson urges her to visit the grieving town. She insists that her presence would create a paralysing distraction and impede rescue efforts. Besides, she asks: "What precisely would you have me do?"
"Comfort people," he says.
"Put on a show?" It is as if he had asked her to don sequins and ride a unicycle, juggling, down a tightrope. "The Crown doesn't do that."
But The Crown - the scintillating Netflix drama, improving with age - is not at all shy about putting on a show, doling out all the pageantry and suds necessary. Season 3, which began last Sunday, delivers 10 entertaining episodes of personal history that are equal parts political, poignant and juicy.
But the creator and writer Peter Morgan has also set an unusual challenge for a TV series: How do you make compelling drama out of a stolid, purposely restrained protagonist? Is there fascination, power - virtue, even - in dullness? This is the koan that fuels this season: It is the sound of one hand stoically waving.
This season marks a changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, introducing a new cast to bring the royals into midlife. Elizabeth's husband, Prince Philip (Tobias Menzies, taking over from Matt Smith), is shifting from sullen resentment to grumpy middle age. Succeeding Vanessa Kirby, Helena Bonham Carter lustily pops the cork on the tragic, flamboyant Princess Margaret.
And then there is Her Majesty. For the first two seasons of The Crown, actress Claire Foy played the queen as a reticent new ruler, learning that her job leaves little room for individual humanity. Foy showed viewers a vibrant young woman being transformed, and flattened, into a national symbol.
Colman's Elizabeth opens the season witnessing the result: the unveiling of a new portrait of the monarch as an "old bat" (her words). The Crown lets us see Elizabeth age as she does - one new face at a time, within the four corners of a frame.
Colman, who just won an Oscar for Best Actress as the rather more expressive Queen Anne in The Favourite (2018), is more restrained than Foy, but no less spectacular. She is like a haiku poet, wringing meaning from the least gesture, able to summon heartbreak or dry humour from the same clipped "Thenkyou".
Her Elizabeth has conquered her emotions, at great cost and in the name of duty - and now here come the expressive 1960s and 1970s, in which she and her family are suddenly seen as the faces of stuffy hauteur. She took a job she did not want, killed a part of herself to do it, and now finds that self-injury held against her.
Morgan is empathetic, but not slavishly so. Colman's queen can be cold, as when her heir, Prince Charles (Josh O'Connor), more in tune with the emotive times, insists that he be allowed to have a public "voice." Her answer falls like the executioner's axe: "No one wants to hear it."
Elected leaders, if they are lucky, leave office before they fall out of step with the times. But though the world changes, one remains queen for decades. Only a series on the scale of The Crown can show how that feels.
The Crown does this pointillistically, structuring each episode around an incident in world or Windsor history. This season spans the longest stretch of time yet, 1964 to 1977.
Though it is arguably the most serial story on TV - a single life, evolving over decades - it has a strong sense of episodic structure, avoiding the blobby, binge-y sprawl of many of Netflix dramas.
The very broadness and sweep that keep The Crown lively can also hold it back. It is a portmanteau of many different kinds of drama: domestic, romantic, military, political, even espionage. It does all of them well, but none surprisingly. Its control precludes the wildness at the heart of many of the greatest series.
This show can be, like a distant monarch, easier to revere than to feel passion for.
NYTIMES
