Earlier this year, Netflix filled the Downton Abbey-sized hole in our hearts with The Crown, the genteel-as-balls series about the life of Queen Elizabeth in the period between 1947 and 1955.
If you were frothing for more right royal drama, well, you’re in luck, as the show’s creator Peter Morgan recently gave an interview to People, and revealed a little of what’s to come.
In particular, the show has big plans for the volatile relationship between Prince Charles and Princess Diana, who remains a figure of fascination nearly two decades on from her death.
Morgan said that the second season of the show, set between 1957 and 1965, will premiere on Netflix in late 2017,and will focus on the monarchy as it struggles to find its place in “an evolving world.”
“It’s goodbye to a different, Edwardian, post-Imperial world,” Morgan told People. “We get a classlessness and a modernity beginning to creep in. It is going to be terrific.”
He also said that the second season will “feature a greater emphasis on the life of Elizabeth’s husband Prince Philip and introduce a greater role for her oldest son and direct heir, Prince Charles.”
Charles and Diana met in 1977 and wed in 1981, and their marriage was rocked by various scandals before their divorce in 1996. Media attention was so great after her death in a Paris car crash in 1997 that her funeral was televised worldwide.
Morgan told People that Diana will make her first appearance towards the end of the show’s third season, and that seasons four and five will focus “heavily” on her as a main character.
The time jump will mean that certain key roles, including Elizabeth, Prince Philip and Prince Charles, will need to be recast, but it’s too soon for any announcement on that front just yet.
The Crown has so far been a very sympathetic portrait of the monarchy, so it will be interesting to see how Diana – presumably one of the forces of “modernity” that the creator mentioned – will fit in. Mark us down as keen.
Source: Vanity Fair.
Photo: Princess Diana Archive / Getty.
