The Crown season 5 trailer adds disclaimer after Judi Dench letter

If you missed the news earlier this week, Netflix released an official trailer for The Crown season 5 that chronicled a lot. At the center of it, though, was the saga of one Princess Diana. Her story will play out until the sixth and final season, but you can already see the constant pressures that are put upon her from both the media and the Royal Family both.

While the trailer has generated a lot of hits, the upcoming season has also led to a great deal of controversy. In particular, Dame Judi Dench recently published a letter at The Times slamming the show for potentially confusing viewers who think the show is telling a real-life account of everything that happened:

…The closer the drama comes to our present times, the more freely it seems willing to blur the lines between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism.

While many will recognise The Crown for the brilliant but fictionalised account of events that it is, I fear that a significant number of viewers, particularly overseas, may take its version of history as being wholly true … Given some of the wounding suggestions apparently contained in the new series — that King Charles plotted for his mother to abdicate, for example, or once suggested his mother’s parenting was so deficient that she might have deserved a jail sentence — this is both cruelly unjust to the individuals and damaging to the institution they represent.

In response to potentially this and other comments, Netflix has added a disclaimer in the description for the season 5 trailer: “Inspired by real events, this fictional dramatisation tells the story of Queen Elizabeth II and the political and personal events that shaped her reign.” (We should note that this is the same disclaimer that exists for the series on Netflix itself.)

All of this does once again pose a big question: How much responsibility should Netflix or any other broadcaster have in telling events exactly as they happened. This is a subject that surfaced earlier this year, as well, for HBO and Winning Time. Personally, we think that every viewer should enter a show like this with a careful lens, knowing that many events may be true but also that some artificial context could be created. Even with documentaries, not all of them are told from a completely impartial place.

Do you think The Crown season 5 needs an even larger disclaimer?

Be sure to share right now in the comments! After you do just that, come back for some other updates on the show. (Photo: Netflix.)

This article was written by Jessica BunBun. Be sure to follow her on Twitter.