As the final season of the hit Netflix series The Crown reaches our screens, the show’s head of research, ANNIE SULZBERGER, speaks to Elinor Evans about the importance and process of interrogating power
Annie Sulzberger is head of research for The Crown. The final episodes of the series are available to watch on Netflix now
HISTORY ON SCREEN
The final season of The Crown charts the story of the royal family from 1997 to 2005. Are there any unique challenges of telling the stories of living royals, and of the Windsor dynasty in particular?
Sometimes the biggest issue is our collective memory, because we remember things in the moment. If, for example, you asked the public today how many people died in the car crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed, they would say two. In fact, there were three – but that third victim got little coverage in the newspapers.
Most of the information about the crash did not come out until 2008, when Operation Paget [the Metropolitan Police inquiry established in 2004 to investigate conspiracy theories surrounding Diana’s death] was published. All of a sudden, you could rebuild that entire summer through very credible testimony from close friends, bodyguards and the Ritz staff who went with Dodi to buy the ring that we feature in the series.
We needed those 10 years of investigations to get to the fundamental material with which to build our story. If we had stopped in 1997, and used only resources from then, pretty much what you would have been stuck with is the emotional responses to a moment in history, because that’s all we had at the time. But nobody had quite figured out truly what had happened, and what Diana was feeling about Dodi.
I think sometimes collective memory can be a harder thing to deal with when it comes to the monarchy, because they don’t often do interviews themselves. We get most of our information from newspapers, vox pops, and the public at large – but that is not how you attempt to piece together history.
This is one of the reasons why our show stops in 2005. You need to allow time for the true story of those moments to emerge. If we were still depicting the story up to 2023, we would only have today’s newspapers or interviews to help us shape the narrative.
Why do you think the royal family are fair game for portrayal on programmes such as The
