“The Crown” and the Problem of Historical Narrative

This has been a pretty good season for the Windsor family.  To general acclaim, Prince Harry announced his engagement to the American TV actress Meghan (“Suits”) Markle.  Then Queen Elizabeth herself participated in a much-heralded televised conversation about her coronation, which was shown in the U.S. on The Smithsonian Channel.

But the real TV action for the British Monarchy has been “The Crown,” the sumptuous Netflix soap opera for viewers who think “Downton Abbey” is too downmarket.

The series, which purports to depict the behind-the-scenes lives of the Queen and her family, is based on material from three sources: 1) the public record; 2) unofficial and sometimes gossipy backstage accounts published in books and articles over the years; and 3) the best guesses and inferences of showrunner Peter Morgan about what happened among the royals in private.

For example, it is a known fact that Prince Philip went on a months-long royal tour in the 1950s, during which the hijinks of his private secretary burst into view and created a scandal for the prince.  It is also known that before Philip returned to the U.K., the Queen flew to Portugal and the two of them had a long private tete-a-tete on the yacht Britannia.  Also on the record is that soon thereafter, Philip got a title upgrade to prince.

But what actually happened during that private time on the ship?  Did they do what many long separated couples would do under those circumstances vis-à-vis marital relations? Or did they, as Morgan depicts, have a major row about Philip’s escapades with the ladies, during which he agreed to turn over a new leaf in return for being anointed Duke of Edinburgh?  Only two people know what happened in that stateroom, and neither of them is talking.

Here’s the problem with the genre of historical drama.  In real life, people have multiple motivations and complex feelings.  Moreover, larger-than-life figures who attract TV bio-series are infinitely more interesting than the simplified characters you see on even the most subtle TV show. Inevitably TV prunes away complexity in order to get to a story that has a point, a theme, and a lesson.

Claire Foy gives a very good performance as the young monarch but is handicapped by our long exposure to the real Elizabeth.  Perhaps no person in history has been as publicly gawked at by as many people as the Queen, and after sixty years we all know how she talks, walks and generally presents herself.

We can, for example, compare the Queen’s actual televised Christmas message in 1957 (see below) with the show’s version, which shows how Claire Foy fails to capture the essence of the Queen.  The real Elizabeth has an extravagantly flutey upper-crust accent and looks nervous throughout the broadcast; all this is smoothed over and softened in “The Crown,” presumably to make her more approachable to us in 2018.

The same thing happens when you compare the recreated and real coronations, royal weddings and other events captured on newsreel footage.  Foy is an attractive and talented actress — but in her mid-20s, the real Queen was somehow both more beautiful and charismatic than a mere Hollywood movie star.

But Foy’s performance is Emmy-worthy compared to how the Americans are played.   An entire episode revolves around a visit by Jack and Jackie Kennedy, and Michael C. Hall’s presentation of JFK as a nasty jealous husband is so not-credible that it calls into question the verisimilitude of the whole series.

This is supposed to be JFK and Jackie? I don’t think so.

The issue of whether dramas based on “real events” can begin to depict the “truth” becomes more pressing as the number of historically based limited series increases.  “Waco,” “Versace,” “The Feud,” and “The People vs. O.J. Simpson,” for example, have all mined the recent past to critical acclaim and big audiences.

You’re asking for trouble when you try to impersonate the Queen and O.J. Simpson — or, as in “The Feud,” Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, whose faces, voices and mannerisms are already better-known to us than our own family’s.  Second-string famous people like David Koresh and Gianni Versace are more believably portrayed in highly fictionalized historical dramas that the uber-famous.

In truth, if you want to dramatize history, the distant past is much easier to exploit.  Claire Foy was completely believable as another Queen – Anne Boleyn –  in “Wolf Hall.” And I’m more than happy to accept that the youthful Victoria was exactly as played by Jenna Coleman in “Victoria.” And let’s not forget the gold standard for Queenly portrayals: Glenda Jackson as the first Elizabeth 40 years ago in “Elizabeth R.”

Here’s Claire Foy completely convincing as Anne Boleyn 

This is not to say that I haven’t enjoyed “The Crown.”  Generally I consider each episode a perfect hour of TV.  It’s great to look at, it makes me feel smart because I already know a lot of the history, and it’s just complicated enough to stimulate my brain.

But after every episode, I rush to Wikipedia to see how much of it is “true” – that is, objectively true, not just a jumble of concocted scenes to get at an “essential truth.”  And that’s when I decide how much I like the episode: when I confirm how much it sticks to the facts.  This is not the way art is supposed to work, but that’s what happens when a TV show claims to be based on the historical record.

“The Good Place” Is Very Good

Congratulations to last Thursday’s season finale of “The Good Place” season for forcing me to do something that I haven’t done since “Mad Men” went off the air – to sit down and watch a scripted, ad-supported TV show live.

It was a little weird watching TV the old-fashioned way – yelling out to my wife at 8:30, “Hey come on, ‘The Good Place’ is starting in two minutes.”  And sitting through all those commercials?

Although watching that episode live was a throw-back to the days of “Must See TV,” the series itself offers a glimpse into the way TV might be headed, both in terms of content and as a business model.

“The Good Place” is a show about a shallow and selfish young woman played by Kristen Bell who dies in an accident and wakes up in a heaven-like world called The Good Place.  It’s immediately apparent that she didn’t earn her way to a happy after-life and season one depicts her efforts to prevent the community overseer, played by Ted Danson, from discovering the mistake and sending her to The Bad Place.

The series itself is a joke-a-minute sitcom with a wide range of pop culture references in the style of  “30 Rock” that seems to have walked into a freshman seminar on moral philosophy and ethics.  The series is essentially a meditation on who deserves to be in heaven and what it means to be good.  What role does circumstance play?  In flashbacks we see that Kristin Bell’s character had a lousy childhood.  How much should that count?  And what if you’re doing good only because you expect a reward of some kind?

The series is liberally sprinkled with references to philosophers ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Kant, Kierkegaard and Sartre.  A whole episode, for example, revolves around “The Trolley Problem” in which a runaway train is heading for a group of workers on the track who will all be killed, unless you throw a switch to send it on to a side track where it will kill only one person. The dilemma is: do you let numerous people die by doing nothing or actively murder a completely uninvolved bystander?  Never saw that on a sitcom before.

As delightful and thoughtful as the series is, it only has niche appeal, averaging about a million live viewers an episode and attracting just over one percent of all viewers in that all-important 18-49 demographic.  Numbers like that would have once consigned a TV series to The Very Bad Place.

But here’s where “The Good Place” is showing the way to the future.  It’s really a Netflix show that happens to be on NBC.  Each of its two seasons features 13 heavily serialized episodes.  On most sitcoms, each episode has a new story with a couple of subplots for the supporting characters.  This allows you to watch and enjoy every episode in isolation.  On “The Good Place” there are no subplots – just one story that starts in episode one and continues straight through the entire series.  You can’t watch just one episode mid-season – you’d never get the jokes.

What’s also revolutionary about “The Good Place” story-line is the whiplash you get from the show’s constant reinvention.  You think it’s about one thing, only to find that it’s about something else and then quickly discover that it’s about something else altogether.  The famous surprise at the end of Season One rebooted the whole series, which was followed with three or four more reboots during Season Two.

The series is the creation of Mike Schur, who co-created three other great comedies, “The Office,” “Parks and Recreation” and “Brooklyn Nine Nine.”  These are famously sweet and humane sitcoms in an era of snark and vulgarity.  What a gift it would be to American culture if the critical success of “The Good Place” were to provide a model for the rest of network television.

That’s a big challenge.  Any network that fills its line-up with 13-week serialized series needs to green-light twice as many shows as it used to in the old days when sitcoms had 26-week episodes.  And how often does a talent like Mike Schur come along anyway?    It’s a lot easier to produce a standard workplace or family sitcom where a writer’s room can grind out obvious and predictable set-up/joke, set-up/joke narratives.

But here’s what “The Good Place” business model has going for it; you can monetize quality over the long-term.  Many once-popular but mediocre sitcoms are long since forgotten while the classics survive.  NBC is certainly still reaping financial rewards from timeless series like “Cheers,” “Seinfeld” and “Friends.”   Season One of “The Good Place” was trending on Netflix less than a year after it went off the air and the same will be true of Season Two.  “The Good Place” demonstrates that good television can be good business.