No, “The Crown” Doesn’t Need a Disclaimer That It’s Fiction
By: Anthony Aycock
Tags: Television, TV Series, Britain, Hollywood, Writing

No, “The Crown” Doesn’t Need a Disclaimer That It’s Fiction

Who would believe it anyway?

Image available from IMDB.com

God save our gracious Queen,

Long live our noble Queen,

God save the Queen;

Send her victorious,

Happy and glorious,

Long to reign over us . . .

And please, God, please, make her look good on Netflix.

Since 2016, the streaming service has been home to The Crown, a series about the life and reign of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II. Over 73 million households have watched the series; mine is one of them. Season 4 just dropped, and it looks like it will be even better than the first three. I can’t wait to dive in and laugh, cry, maybe throw pillows at the screen.

One emotion I don’t expect to feel: confusion.

The show is fiction. Historical fiction, yes: the characters were, and are, actual people. But as I watch, I know what I’m seeing is artifice based on events, not the events themselves.

This puts me in a minority, apparently.

British Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden thinks The Crown should include a disclaimer emphasizing its untruth. Earl Charles Spencer, Princess Diana’s brother, agrees: “People see a program like that, and they forget that it is fiction.” Helena Bonham Carter, who plays Princess Margaret in the series, is also on board, saying the producers have “a moral responsibility to say, ‘Hang on guys, this is not … it’s not a drama-doc, we’re making a drama.’”

Few people, I think, confuse documentaries and dramas. Documentaries have narrators. They use still photos and video clips, and awkward interviews with college professors. They don’t hire Bellatrix Lestrange, Dick Solomon, or the Eleventh Doctor for live-action sequences. You don’t watch a documentary and think, “Is this real?” Questioning whether something is real is proof that it was written as fiction.

Besides, every viewer has the opportunity to Google anything they find weird or curious. In fact, that’s part of the viewing experience, according to one critic:

Consider Peter Townsend, the equerry whose doomed romance with Princess Margaret is depicted in the show’s first season. In the month before “The Crown” debuted in November 2016, Townsend’s Wikipedia page drew an average of 669 visitors a day. In the month following its debut, the number of daily visitors grew exponentially to 45,676.

The series is full of nuggets like this, showing the crew’s fealty to research, which is handled by a five-person team (most shows use only one or two). I pause episodes to look up stuff all the time, which means I’ve learned more about British history from my sofa than any classroom chair. I haven’t learned it from the show; I’ve learned it because of the show, which calls into question generations of critics who claimed that TV makes us stupid.

Crirics like Frank Lloyd Wright, who called television “chewing gum for the eyes.”

Harlan Ellison, for whom it was “the great enervator of the American people.”

Ray Bradbury, who called it “that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.”

To them, I say: shut up, bitches. The Crown is active viewing. A worldwide, real-time study group. Fortnite for fact-checkers.