The Trailer for 'The Crown' Season 5 is a Bittersweet Symphony

Queen Elizabeth II hasn't been gone for 45 days yet, and yet, her story is about to become one of November's most highly anticipated debuts. Netflix's The Crown, which has been chronicling the life of the late monarch decade by decade since 2016, has reached the most dramatic part of her extraordinarily long life, the 1990s, when everything seemed to be falling apart,

The series has always been somewhat controversial since Netflix announced it in 2014 when Elizabeth was still in the prime of her health. The idea of telling a fictionalized dramatization of a living monarch, especially one at this scale, was a bold choice. However, for the first two seasons, with Claire Foy and Matt Smith as the young Queen and her consort Philip and Vanessa Kirby as sister Princess Margaret, it felt less like fiction and more like hagiography, a propaganda piece doing its Shakespearean damnedest to be the authoritative voice of the Second Elizabethan Age, with small-time viewership to match.

But that has faded since the show reached its second casting with Olivia Colman, Tobias Menzies, and Helena Bonham-Carter as the central trio. The difference was Diana, who arrived in Season 4, with Josh O'Conner and Emma Corrin as the doomed Prince and Princess of Wales. The ratings shot through the roof, but so did the royal family's response, with the first official complaints and demands for Netflix to put disclaimers at the beginnings of the episodes stating this was all fiction. It didn't help that Elizabeth's health was starting to fail, and the imminent King Charles III was the one who was not being made to look good on screen.