A part of my awesome responsibility as a blogger is my duty to comment on various shows on Netflix. (It is somewhere in the fine print, trust me on this).
I have some experience in blogging about TV shows. When I started Humor Me, I did a weekly recap on "Mad Men". It was season three of "Mad Men" which finds Don bedding another woman in town and Betty finding out Don's real name is Dick. It was a great season. The boys of Sterling-Cooper started a new firm, Peggy dated Duck, and a man named Guy gets his foot run over by a riding lawn mower.
Then I did a weekly recap of "24", with a lot of help from Dave Barry. It was more popular than the "Mad Men" recaps when I learned an important lesson about recaps: recap shows that are seen by a lot of people.
Unfortunately, I cannot do a weekly recap of "The Crown", which is the Netflix series about Queen Elizabeth and the gang. They made only ten shows and you can watch them all in a day if you want.
As a history major, I found "The Crown" interesting because it dealt with something I knew and cared little about: British history. Sure, I knew all about The Magna Carta and all that, but you know, big deal, a ball game is on.
Then a few years ago I found out that I am a direct descendant of King Henry VII. I never thought I'd be royal, but it just runs in my blood.
So when we stumbled on "The Crown" and I got to see what old Cousin Liz is doing.
The first three seasons of "The Crown" have this one question: How does the monarchy, which has been in power for 1209 years deal with the rapidly changing times of post-war Britain?
The question in season four of "The Crown" is: Which one is the biggest douche: Queen Elizabeth or Prince Charles? (Answer: Charles by a mile.)
Season four introduces two new characters into the mix. One is Margaret Thatcher, who was the Prime Minister of Great Britain for eleven years. The other is Princess Diana.
Margaret Thatcher is played by Gillian Anderson, so I naturally called her Prime Minister Agent Scully. (When reading my blogs, you might want to try to remember 90's television.)
I would say even Agent Mulder would not recognize Prime Minister Agent Scully. They really have her in heavy, heavy makeup where she almost sort of looked like Thatcher. They also had her speak in the slow, ponderous way that would take five minutes to say "Your majesty". ("Y.........ore......Ma......jes....ty")
You would expect she would get along with the Queen, being a gal and all that. Wrong. Whereas Thatcher was a self made person, Queen Elizabeth was just the winner of the lucky baby club. This caused friction between the two, particularly in a system where the person with all of the power has to genuflect in front of someone with no power.
"The Crown" questions most of Thatcher's motives because, after all, she is a conservative. She starts The Falklands War because her goofy son was lost in the desert. She refuses to call for sanctions for South Africa because the same goofy son has business ties there. "The Crown" goes out of its way to blame Thatcher for some loon that broke into the palace and had a personal interview with the Queen. It supposedly had something to do with Thatcher's "policies", In real life, the Loon has said for years he didn't talk politics or politicians with the Queen.
Basically, "The Crown" holds Thatcher at arms length and treats her with an odd condescending contempt.
They did a little better with Princess Diana. Emma Corrin plays Princess Diana and they couldn't have found someone who looked more like her.
When Diana first appears, you just want to yell at the TV set "RUN!" because you know she's going to marry Prince Charles and we all know how that turned out.
The marriage of Charles and Diana was doomed from the start because: 1) They had nothing in common and 2) They hated each other.
It was all fun and games when they had a whirlwind romance which was spurred on by Mummy, Daddy, and Dead Uncle Mountbatten. Before Dead Uncle Mountbatten became Dead Uncle Mountbatten, he wrote Charles a letter stating Charles' booty call days are over and it is time for him to get busy and make heirs for the crown.
The problem was Charles (stop me if you had heard this before) was in love with another woman, who just happened to be married to someone else. Charles started looking around, discovered Diana, and Bob's your uncle, decided Diana would be a good baby factory for Great Britain.
It didn't take long for Charles and Diana to tire of each other. Diana had trouble adjusting to all of the adulation and fame. After all, here was this knock-out blonde beauty who acted like a human being, in the Windsor family which was as dull as dish water. As we macho guys would say, Charles outkicked his coverage and she knew it.
Meanwhile, Charles went around walking in that weird hands in the front pockets way of his telling everybody except his mom and Diana, that "Camilla" (the married woman) was the true love of his life. The fact that they both were married and Diana was way better looking didn't even register to Charles.
In fact, the only way Camilla was superior to Diana was she knew how to tell a joke first told to me by the great Greg Marshall who I can only assume heard it from Camilla.
Charles was just a royal (ha-ha) pain in the butt. He sulked and criticized Diana mainly because she was good looking and had a good personality. This took all of the attention away from Charles and he didn't like it one bit.
Back in my insurance days, I worked with a lady from England. I asked her if she liked Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles, and all of the rest. She said, "I don't-they're no better than the rest of us and they put their trousers on one leg at a time".
That lady from England was a great American.
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