Finished season 4 yesterday.

Agree with Mordecai that they have significantly played up Diana's naivety and innocence. Stuff like her receiving tutoring in "royal ways" - complete nonsense, she was brought up in those circles and even attended formal finishing school before she ever met Charles. They've also played down her celebrity-hunger to make her seem more of a victim.

In reality it's fairly plain that she married into the royal family precisely for that reason - when you marry the heir to the throne without even really knowing him first, there's really only one reason to do so, and it's not fairytale romance. Perhaps she was infatuated, but it would be an infatuation with the idea of a prince rather than the actual Charles. So I think a lot of the unhappiness which followed is very much the product of her own poor decisions, marrying for fame and status over love. Her one excuse is that she was young.

On the flip side, Charles has been made considerably less sympathetic. In reality by all accounts he did stop seeing Camilla upon marrying Diana, for quite a few years. It was only when his relationship broke down with Diana that he returned to Camilla (in 1986, apparently).

So it seems that in reality, both Charles and Diana attempted to make the marriage work for a number of years, but their differences in character and temperament where irreconcilable. Then once the relationship broke down they started seeing other people. But obviously that's less dramatic for a TV show.

I think the show here and there attempts to hint at Diana's desire for fame and attention but it always holds back from portraying it fully.

WITH ALL THAT SAID

Putting aside the fact that these are real people and there's a responsibility to tell their story accurately, evaluating season 4 purely as a fictional story, I did enjoy it a lot. Emma Corrin's Diana is simply breathtaking in charm and beauty, successfully conveying how it was that so many people loved her. And the first 2 episodes - the meet cute with Charles, the Balmoral test - were both excellent.

If I would pick out one flaw in Diana's characterisation (from the perspective of fiction) it would be that she seems to have a dramatic character shift between episode 2 and 3. At Balmoral she's depicted as a country girl at heart, comfortable with the royals and adept at navigating their world. Then suddenly in episode 3 she's a naive, ignorant girl who feels out of place in the country. It's like two completely different characters. That could have been used by the show - they could have used it to show how Diana was putting on a show in the early episodes, to get what she wanted (a royal marriage) and then once that was secured she stopped pretending to be a country girl. But because the show never goes there, the volte face in her characterisation goes unexplained and is therefore a glaring continuity flaw.

Aside from Diana, I think the season falls flat mostly. The political events used as a backdrop (e.g. the Falklands war) are shallow and generally skipped over. But that's always been the case in this show (see the Suez Crisis episode). And Thatcher felt like a caricature.

 

Yeah, I completely agree on this point. My impression was that they flirted with the idea of showing her as manipulative, but then reversed course and doubled down in the opposite direction. Being the perfect country girl in Balmoral, only to declare her hatred of country life a few episodes later...it wasn't cleverly done as characterisation.