‘The Crown’ Gets a Little Wrong and the Big Thing Right

There is a killer moment in the latest season of the Netflix series “The Crown,” the biggest event of the new TV year in Britain and many other places. Prince Charles tells his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, as she visits his new country mansion at Highgrove in 1982: “I really think I shall be happy here.” The personal pronoun reflects his self-obsession, oblivious of the fact that his bulimic wife lies sobbing upstairs, expecting their first child.

This intelligent and intrusive soap is hard to resist. In the latest episodes, the Royals, who in their leisure moments together look more like the Addams Family, are joined onscreen not only by the divine Princess Diana - an award-worthy performance by Emma Corrin - but also by Gillian Anderson, caricaturing Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, her hair so bouffant that it threatens to achieve liftoff. Prince Charles is every inch the Prince of Wails, forever bemoaning his lot, and Princess Margaret, the Queen’s younger sister, is never without a drink and a smoke.