With each new season of The Crown, the royal family and those who support them seem to become even more offended than they were the year before. This time, the palace is said to be up in arms about a plot line involving the late Prince Philip getting “intimate” with family friend Penny Knatchbull—emotionally intimate, that is.
Even if the fictional prince does nothing more than some light hand-touching and confidence-sharing about his marriage, people think implying Philip ever pursued an affair is in poor taste, coming so soon after Queen Elizabeth died, according to the Sun.
“Coming just weeks after the nation laid Her Majesty to rest next to Prince Philip, this is very distasteful and, quite frankly, cruel rubbish,” Queen Elizabeth’s former press secretary Dickie Arbiter said, Britishly. “The truth is that Penny was a long-time friend of the whole family. Netflix are not interested in people’s feelings.” Speaking for myself, I don’t have much personal emotional stake in whether the late prince considered stepping outside of his marriage or not, but perhaps that’s only because I am American.
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This is not the first time since the queen’s death that Buckingham Palace has publicly bristled at the upcoming fifth season of the show, which will also cover the Charles and Diana divorce, their respective bombshell interviews, and Diana’s ultimate death. An unnamed “senior royal” stressed to the Telegraph in September that The Crown is a “drama not a documentary.” Another anonymous source, referred to as a friend of King Charles’s, said that Netflix has “no qualms about mangling people’s reputations,” and added, “What people forget is that there are real human beings and real lives at the heart of this.” I mean, we all know that King Charles has weathered worse public relations storms than this particular television show and he still gets to be king, so I’m assuming he will survive.
Even before the queen’s death, Prince William was reportedly “frustrated” that the show would be dedicating an entire episode to Princess Diana’s 1995 BBC interview, per the Daily Mail. To which I say again, this is all public knowledge.
