If there’s a TV series that impacted emotionally and positively with viewers worldwide it’s The Crown, created by Britain’s leading contemporary screen dramatist, playwright, TV-series creator and showrunner Peter Morgan, who specialises in taking the lives of public figures, mingling the events and words of their lives with his own imaginings, and recasting it as a masterful docudrama.
At its inception in 2014, Peter Morgan‘s The Crown succeeded in becoming one of the most ambitious television projects of all time — and by the time it concluded its 60 episodes in 2023, his vision for the show had proven to be monumental. Created for Netflix, and premiering in 2016, Morgan’s series which he wrote or co-wrote comprised a six-season landmark depicting the life of Queen Elizabeth II from right before she became the monarch through the year 2005, when then-Prince Charles married the love of his life, Camilla Parker Bowles.
Peter Morgan / The Crown (TV series) / List of The Crown episodes
As a writer, Morgan had not always been interested in writing about historical figures.
“It came to me when I was about 40, so I’ve only been doing it about 20 years. I mention it to my own children, always, somebody said to me, which is that “The best creative years of your life are 40 to 60.” That doesn’t mean it applies to everybody, but it certainly applied to me, and I was told it before I got to 40. Stephen Frears told me that, he said that “Your best years are 40 to 60.”
Some writers write for TV, some for film or theatre and Morgan was lucky enough to participate in all three media. “I think I felt most home in theatre,” says Morgan. “When you have any idea you must think which media it will suit the best. When I wrote Frost/Nixon I wanted it to be a film. Nobody wanted it for film. So I wrote it for TV and nobody wanted it for TV. So I wrote is for theatre and everybody wanted it for the film. Each time the route is different, but process of writing I find the same. Technically speaking it is the same process.”
Morgan’s advice for writers is to write.
“On one hand I would wish everybody a success with their first screenplay, on other hand I have seen many people, who had success with first screen play and it destroyed them and their career cos they have never been able to repeat that. The ultimate goal in the career is to have longevity. For this you have to practice early on and disregard what happen next when it´s done, you get a finance for that or what will be reaction of the audience. It is beyond your control. Only thing you have the control over is whether you get up and write each morning or not. If you don´t you are simply not a writer.”
When Morgan took on The Crown, one of the most ambitious television projects ever to be planned, he had no sense of what he’d taken on.
Says Morgan: “Because I think if you do know, you wouldn’t do it. I think you stumble in like an innocent fool, and you thought, “Oh, well, that sounds like fun!” And you assemble a nice group of people, and you think, “Oh, this is nice.” I’m speaking now, just as a freelancer, there’s something unsettling if you’re a writer or a director or an actor, always looking for the next job, or meeting different people or wondering if it works out here, works out there. And a lot of us as artists are unsettled, complicated people from complicated backgrounds with complicated lives.
So the idea of finding stability and a family — there’s an extraordinarily high percentage of people that made “The Crown” that stayed from Episode 1 to Episode 10 of Season 6. It was such a functional, gorgeous group of human beings. It sort of removes the noise and the nonsense of freelance life, where you’re worried about this, worried about that. “This new person in that job, that new person — do I know them? Will they develop a relationship with them?” We were spared all of that, all that existential crackle, and we’re able to just do our jobs. Because the freelance life, the self-employed life, there can be a cold, whistling wind of discomfort. And I think we were all enormously privileged at a very special time for television to have had that opportunity.
So when it got very tough, and it always gets tough — a show like this is impossibly tough to do. I’m just talking about how to make it good, rather than personal relationships. I kept pinching myself and reminding myself of what I felt might be a unique moment. And indeed, the climate has changed. Now, I don’t know that the same show would get made again. We were left alone to do it — left alone! I mean, I can’t stress this enough. We were given support, and no notes. This is the show we wanted to make, and it is the way it is because that was how we wanted to make it. I mean, when do you get that?! I mean, I kept thinking, on behalf of all the other people who haven’t been given this opportunity, I’ve got to not screw it up. I’ve got to not drop the ball.”
One of the most powerful scenes in Season 6 is where Morgan wrote a scene depicting what happened between Diana and Dodi Fayed on the night of her death.
Says Morgan: “We know everything that happened from the minute they left that hotel suite and went down to the car. We know yard by yard, second by second what happened. But what we don’t know is what they were saying to each other in that hotel room. And that’s where I come in, and I have to use my imagination, but I don’t just sit there, and I don’t just start writing immediately thinking, “Well, I wonder what they had…” — you think really long and hard. Where is this particular character at this moment in their life? So many people both close to Diana and close to Dodi, have spoken about the frames of mind of the two individuals at the time, and you piece together what you imagine to be the case. And if you get it wrong, an audience will tell you. An audience, even without doing the research, will intuit if something is right or not. Audiences are so smart, and you can’t pull a fast one. If it’s implausible, an audience will know it instantly. They’ll just reject it.”
My harshest critic is not actually a historian, because historians are always pushing their own agenda. They’re often people with a certain point of view. I find an audience’s response much more telling, much more appropriate, because it comes from a huge cross-section of people with different political views, different ages. They reject if they’re being lied to. So we have to do a lot of work, and a lot of thinking.
And I call it joining the dots — where you know that this happened, you know that this happened. You sort of are reliably told that this person felt this, and this person felt this. But there still leaves this gap. And that’s the gap that a dramatist has to step into, and do their best. And I don’t know, it just so happens to be that I’m drawn to that gap-filling.
For many writers, it would be too restrictive. They want the wide-open planes of their imagination to be able to go in any direction they want with pure fiction. And for other people, they would want to do real second-by-second recreations of verbatim, where we know what was said, and they would want to recreate that. And I’m somewhere in the middle. For me, the fun is in the imagination. But imagination which is so well backed up with either anecdotal records, personal interviews you can do, historical books, that you can actually then imagine accurately.”
Figuring out how to map the seasons., Morgan always knew where he wanted to get to.
“In my head, I always think of The Crown as a train, moving through history. Our train particularly moves at the same pace all the way through, which is a decade a season. So when things suddenly happen in bunch, you think, “Well, we might need three episodes to deal with one year,” the train, its rhythm, is messed up. The bulk of my time, I’d say 60% of my time as a showrunner was spent figuring out the season, mapping out the 10 episodes.
Once I started writing episodes, I would stick to it. But mapping out the outlines took me many months. And is always a process where I pitch it to the researchers, the researchers grant me permission or give me the red card. The architecture of it — thereafter, every decision is small. Once you’ve mapped out the architecture of the season, after that, everything else is like sure, until you get into the cutting room where things are minute. So you keep going down and down and down in terms of the size of your decisions.”
“I’m always wrestling, every single day when I am writing a biographical film, I wrestle with the relationship between truth and accuracy. And I have two ways of making myself sleep at night. The first is, if it’s truthful, I feel okay. And the second is I tell myself that what I’m doing ultimately is painting a portrait. When you are in the busi ness of cre-ative writing, there is an unspoken covenant between you and the audi-ence, where the audience is expecting you to bring something to it that is beyond conventional, documentarian, accuracy-based treatments.”
5 Screenwriting Lessons You Can Learn from Peter Morgan and The Crown
1. Find the Perfect Platform for Your Story
Morgan originally conceived The Crown as a feature film. Morgan was initially known for his brilliant work on the stage as a playwright, but he then segued into film, and later, television. He’s the screenwriter behind The Queen (2006), Frost/Nixon (2008), The Damned United (2009), Rush (2013), and Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). As he was developing and researching the feature version of The Crown, he began to see the potential of the overarching story and the real-life characters had through years and years of rule. Rather than focus on a smaller window within that story, he decided it would be better as a series. When you’re developing concepts, pay attention to the stories that you’re trying to tell. And know the differences between the demands of a feature and the demands of a series. So for The Crown, rather than trying to compact years of great stories into a single feature, Morgan decided to shift towards a series approach.
2. True Stories Still Require Imagination from a Screenwriter
Many screenwriters struggle handling stories and characters that are based on historical facts and events. They struggle with balancing fact vs. fiction — and don’t understand how to handle creative liberties. As a screenwriter, it’s your job to fill in the blanks and explore what those real-life characters may or may not have been feeling. And it is certainly your job to interpret what they may or may not have been feeling through dialogue and emotional manifestations. If anything, it’s should be considered a freedom — not a constraint. You have the freedom of interpretation. And that requires a lot of imagination. Telling a true story isn’t just about great research. It’s about taking that research and using your imagination to bring it to life in cathartic fashion for the audience.
3. Look for the Smaller Historical Gems Beyond the Obvious Events
“In advance of writing every season — each season is approximately a decade long — so I look at that decade and there are the obvious tentpole historical events, and if you don’t, at least in some way, allude to them, it feels like a dishonest representation of that decade. And then there are the surprising ones. And it can often take quite a lot of time to find those.”
The series handles a lot of the obvious historical events. But where it shines most is with the smaller details that many don’t know about — those hidden historical gems. When audiences watch a series or movie based on historical events and figures, yes, they want to see those tentpole historical events covered. They want to learn more about them. They want to feel like they are getting a look into what really happened — or may have happened. But they also want to be surprised. They also want to learn new things. When you’re researching your screenplay based on historical events, keep your eyes peeled for little gems that you can focus on as well.
4. Stories of Love are Universal
Whether it’s between Queen Elizabeth and her beau, Prince Philip — or Princess Margaret and her many romances, especially with Captain Peter Townsend — love stories are an excellent way to help the audience relate to otherwise unrelatable historical figures.
It’s easy to get lost in the history of everything when you’re dealing with a historical event or figure. You focus so much on the facts and relinquish the emotion that you’d normally find in a feature film or series. You need to find ways to bring the audience in. And you accomplish that by exploring themes that are universal.
And what better universal theme than love?
The love of a wife or husband. The history with a former love. The love you always wanted but never had. The love you had, and have never forgotten. The crush. The love affair.
These are all universal themes. And you can branch out, much like The Crown does, by exploring the love between a mother and daughter, father and son, etc. As well as the complications between those types of relationships.
Don’t let the historical significance of your screenplay cloud the themes that every great story needs. Find any opportunity to portray those universal themes within your true story screenplays. Facts are interesting and fun to explore. Themes are what keep the audience invested and attached to the story and characters.
5. Find the Core of Your Story
“I’m not being presumptuous, I hope, when I say that ‘The Crown’ is a little bit like ‘The Godfather.’ It is essentially about a family in power and survival.”
Sure, The Crown covers historical events and figures. But when you take on a historical project — or any project, based on history or not — you need to understand the core of the story.
The Crown isn’t just about the Royal Family. It’s about: What it is like to have power. How different people handle that power. And how others survive through that struggle with power
What’s the core of your story? The core of your story is the overarching theme that audiences can relate to most. What’s it really about? That’s what will drive every single choice you make as the writer.
With this series, it’s not just about presenting the factual details of the historical event portrayed. It’s about the struggle of power and surviving through the decisions made, and the repercussions that follow.
