The series “The Crown” earned a warning of “fictional dramatization” in the trailer for season 5, after criticism by actress Judi Dench and John Major, former prime minister of the United Kingdom.
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In the description for the trailer, posted by the official Netflix account, the logline reads: “Inspired by real events, this fictional dramatization tells the story of Queen Elizabeth II and the political and personal events that shaped her reign.”
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In an open letter to The New UK, Dench said that the success of Netflix “seems willing to blur the lines between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism”.
“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,” Dench writes. “No one is a greater believer in artistic freedom than I, but this cannot go unchallenged.”
She said a disclaimer clarification should be added by Netflix “for the sake of a family and a nation so recently bereaved, as a mark of respect to a sovereign who served her people so dutifully for 70 years, and to preserve their own reputation in the eyes of their British subscribers.”