Netflix show could dish dirt on Meghan's in-laws

The Crown.

Netflix couldn't have timed it better if they'd tried. Less than two weeks after Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announce their engagement comes the second season of The Crown (Netflix, streaming now), a show about a young woman navigating the world of royal protocol and palace intrigue.

There are a few differences, of course. Whereas Markle is a divorced American actress marrying into a family that has chilled out considerably since the Diana years, Elizabeth Windsor — on whose head the crown in question rests — is born to rule, her entire life spent inside a rigidly rule-bound institution. And while Meghan and Harry can't stop beaming at each other like the loved-up young hotties they are, The Crown's Elizabeth and her new husband Phillip Mountbatten have an altogether more strained relationship.

"The Crown, or as I like to call it, 'Fancy Bickering'" one Twitter wag put it recently, neatly encapsulating just how much of this series — ostensibly about the institutional role one of the world's most powerful and revered women — is frittered away on tedious domestic arguments. Though to call them "arguments" might be too generous. The Crown's Elizabeth II is patient, loving and eminently reasonable; Prince Phillip approaches every disagree-ment like an over-tired toddler who needs his beddy-byes. He's petulant, he's whiny, he's overly entitled. He's a bit of a dick, basically.

But maybe it will be different this time around. After all, by the time we rejoin Elizabeth and Phillip at the start of season two, it's five months later and the couple have just been reunited after Phillip's long solo world tour of the Commonwealth. Could absence have made the heart grow fonder? "Who goes first?" Phillip snaps at his wife. "Stupid question — if there's one thing I've learned by now, it's that I go second." Oh.

So things are still frosty on the homefront, largely due to Phillip's (heavily implied) philandering. But what about the affairs of State? The news isn't great there either. New Prime Minister Anthony Eden is hopelessly out of his depth, bumbling into war in an equal parts pathetic and appalling attempt to bolster his low self-esteem. The contrast with his predecessor, the grand old statesman Winston Churchill, could hardly be more stark.

Churchill's departure — he retired from Government towards the end of season one — leaves a hole at the heart of The Crown. Played with Emmy-winning relish by John Lithgow, Winston improved every scene he was in, and without his larger-than-life presence, the show loses a lot of its energy, and its fun. Likewise is the absence of the reptilian Edward VIII and his icily glamorous wife Wallis Simpson, who brought entertaining weirdness to season one. She might have a similar flair for the dramatic, but Princess Margaret, currently preoccupied with drinking her Peter Townsend-related sorrows away, is an unworthy substitute.

Many of the problems that hobbled The Crown last year remain as we barrel towards the 1960s: writer Peter Morgan's preoccupation with the thoughts and feelings of the men who surround the Crown, rather than Elizabeth herself; its tendency towards melodrama; and the over-reliance on expository dialogue of the type known in the trade as an "idiot lecture". "As the world now knows," Eden tells his Chancellor, by definition one of the people who already know, "Nasser's rag-tag collection of part-time pilots have somehow managed to retain control of the canal." Hard to avoid when there's so much historical detail to get through, perhaps, but I wish it wasn't so clumsily done.

Still, the pleasures of The Crown are many. It looks simply marvellous, darling, from the sumptuous palace interiors to the cool late-50s fashion (let's quickly gloss over Phillip's horrific episode two beard), and as Elizabeth grows in confidence she becomes an increasingly interesting character. If Meghan is looking for info on her new grandmother-in-law, there can be few better places to start.