Lilibet 1, Lilibet 2, and Lilibet 3 ponder the final fate of the Queen-Verse.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: at the start of the pandemic my wife Anne and I binged the first three seasons of Netflix’s The Crown, soon caught up with the rest of fandom, and kept up ever after. One slight hitch: while Anne is a major history aficionado, that was never my forte, especially not the story of Queen Elizabeth II and her subjects, some of whom were her own trod-upon relatives:

Compared to my blissfully ignorant self, Anne is far more knowledgeable of history in general and British royalty in particular. My interest in their reigning family went dormant for decades beginning on the morning of July 29, 1981, when my family woke up at 5 a.m. — over summer vacation, mind you — to watch Prince Charles marry Princess Diana, two strangers I knew only as frequent costars of my mom’s favorite tabloids. Their wedding lasted approximately six days and was performed in slow motion with British golf commentators prattling through the lengthy silences in between the happenstances of nothingness. For the next 15-20 years I retained nothing of British history apart from their role as the Big Bad in the American Revolution. Frankly, I’ve learned more about their country’s storied past from my wife and from Oscar-nominated movies than I ever did from school. Sad, unadorned truth.

So far I’ve enjoyed “The Crown” anyway, and understood most of what’s gone on…

We watched along as new episodes were released. I tracked our viewing with listicle rankings of season 4 and season 5. Not only were we enjoying the show enough for me to want to write about it, but all three entries also generated unexpectedly massive traffic, sometimes even dwarfing our comic-con cosplay galleries. (As I’m writing this, the Season 5 entry is still one of last week’s Top 3 posts.) I grumbled when Netflix made the very AMC-esque decision to split the sixth and final season into two parts, leading off with a four-episode miniseries-within-a-series covering The Death of Di. I understood the reasons (i.e., they were a self-contained story and Everyone Loves Princess Diana), but I felt the quartet didn’t justify a minuscule listicle. So I broke from the format and stretched my thoughts into a different sort of list. No one cared.

Looks like it’s listicle time again!

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