The Crown Season 1
Overview
She's 25 and on safari in Kenya when word comes that her father is dead, which means she climbs down from a treetop hotel as a queen. The first season of Peter Morgan's Netflix saga is really about what that costs, week after week. Claire Foy plays Elizabeth with a kind of clamped-down stillness — she barely raises her voice all season, and you can watch whole arguments happen behind her eyes. The job doesn't just change her life; it slowly works on her marriage to Philip (Matt Smith), a naval officer who now has to kneel to his own wife and give up his name. John Lithgow, of all people, is magnificent as Churchill: old, vain, hiding strokes and decline, and his scenes with Foy are two forms of power recognizing each other. Every episode pairs a private wound with a public duty — a sister in love with a divorced man, a killer smog swallowing London, a coronation the old guard insists shouldn't be televised. It cost a fortune and looks it. But the money isn't the point. The point is a young woman learning that the job is to have no self at all.
