The Crown season 5 is coming together right now, and the Netflix series about the Royal Family has shared new images of the actors playing the Queen, Prince Charles and Princess Diana.
Imelda Staunton will take over from Olivia Colman as the Queen, while Tobias Menzies is replaced by Dominic West as Prince Charles.
Meanwhile, Emma Corrin will be replaced as Princess Diana by Elizabeth Debicki.
This season will get into one of the most dramatic and incident-packed decades in the long history of the Royal Family – so much so that the showrunners added another season to make sure that everything is covered.
What will happen in The Crown season 5?
Having left the last era of The Crown in 1990 with Margaret Thatcher stepping down as Prime Minister and Charles and Diana at loggerheads over their respective affairs, season five will pick up as their marriage starts to fall apart.
The Queen referred to 1992 as her “annus horribilis”: three marriages in the family collapsed, the publication of a biography of Diana which she collaborated on extensively, and a fire at Windsor Castle.
In 1993 Buckingham Palace was opened to the public for the first time, while 1995 saw Diana’s interview with Martin Bashir and the slow collapse of John Major’s government. We might also see the Dunblane massacre of 1996 referenced, and of course Diana’s death in 1997.
The Crown has often looked at the gradual evaporation of the British Empire, and the handover of Hong Kong in 1997 is seen as its very last moments.
Season five was originally supposed to be the final season, but another was added to make sure that The Crown could pack in everything that happened in the nineties in enough detail.
“As we started to discuss the storylines for series five, it soon became clear that in order to do justice to the richness and complexity of the story we should go back to the original plan and do six seasons,” lead writer Peter Morgan has said.
He added: “To be clear, series six will not bring us any closer to the present-day – it will simply enable us to cover the same period in greater detail."
Morgan’s "20-year rule" means that anything more recent than the turn of the millennium will be too sensitive for him to write about.
When is The Crown season 5 release date?
The Crown tends to film two seasons back-to-back, so with seasons three and four a year apart in November 2018 and November 2019 it would make sense for a longer gap before season five is on our screens.
There is no release date as yet, but autumn 2022 is most likely at this point.
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