Diana’s arrival in the royal family famously heralded a new and very different kind of royal celebrity and Morgan’s scripts and Corrin’s nuanced performance carefully unpick just how and why that came to be. From her first appearance dressed as ‘a mad tree’ at the family home, Corrin commands the screen, capturing both the young Diana’s gawky awkwardness and her desperate desire to be loved.
This is particularly true of what is probably the outstanding episode of the series, episode three’s Fairytale, which begins with Diana’s engagement to Charles and then follows the soon-to-be Princess of Wales through the six increasingly lonely weeks leading up to her wedding. It’s a beautifully paced hour of television, anchored by Corrin’s charisma – the scenes of Diana roller-skating around Buckingham Palace, Duran Duran playing on her Walkman, are both charming and very funny – and tempered by dark hints of difficulties to come.
Like Anderson’s, Corrin’s is a performance that only deepens as the series continues and we see Diana not only evolve as a style icon but, more importantly, begin to grasp the unique power that she possesses within the royal family, a power that can be wielded against them as much as for them.
None of this would work, however, if Morgan came down too firmly on one side of the Great Wales Marriage Debate. Instead he paints a sympathetic portrait of all three individuals involved, with the pragmatic Camilla Parker-Bowles (a smart and sexy Emerald Fennell) repeatedly shown to be far more suited to the set-in-his-ways Charles, while Charles himself, genuinely in love with Camilla, is clearly railroaded into a marriage he knows is all wrong even as he desperately tries to believe it could possibly work.