The Crown’s fifth season reportedly won’t bow on Netflix until 2022. The award-winning series will, per Deadline, take a lengthy break between its upcoming fourth season and the following season, which will see the show’s third and final cast take over, including Imelda Staunton as Queen Elizabeth II. Vanity Fair has reached out to Netflix for comment.
This kind of break is par for the course for the series; The Crown took a similar hiatus between its second and third seasons, when new Elizabeth Olivia Colman took the reins from Emmy winner Claire Foy, who originated the role. The fifth season will begin filming in June 2021, Deadline reports.
A small silver lining: this fifth round won’t be the show’s last, as show creator Peter Morgan had previously announced. Netflix recently extended the show’s tenure and added a surprise sixth season after Morgan, who had initially said the series would air five seasons, changed his tune, requesting more legroom to finish out the saga.
“As we started to discuss the story lines 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,” Morgan said in early June. But that extended timeline doesn’t mean the show will include contemporary royal headlines; we should not expect to see Meghan Markle and Prince Henry appear, for instance. “To be clear,” Morgan explained, “season six will not bring us any closer to present day—it will simply enable us to cover the same period in greater detail.”(Well, we’ll always have Lifetime.)
The show’s fourth season wrapped filming in March, right as the pandemic was closing down productions around the world. Season four does not yet have a release date, but it will arrive later this year, with newcomers Gillian Anderson playing Margaret Thatcher and Emma Corrin playing Princess Diana.
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