Just five days after season five of The Crown premiered, Netflix has reported it as number one on its English-language most-watched television list. The drama, which launched on November 9th, has been streamed for a total of 107.39 million hours, according to Deadline.
The Crown, created by Peter Morgan, is a dramatized retelling of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, played by Imelda Staunton (Vera Drake, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). Other notable portrayals of the royal family include Jonathan Pryce’s (The Two Popes, Tomorrow Never Dies) Prince Philip, Lesley Manville’s (Phantom Thread, Another Year) Princess Margaret, Dominic West’s (The Wire, Chicago) Prince Charles, and Elizabeth Debicki’s (The Great Gatsby, Widows) Princess Diana.
As explained in Deadline, these figures are remarkable for a show in its fifth season, surpassing Manifest‘s (Josh Dallas, Melissa Roxburgh) season four release of 57 million hours last week, From Scratch‘s (Zoe Saldana, Eugenio Mastrandea) launch of 72 million hours the week before, and the fifth season of Cobra Kai (Ralph Macchio, William Zabka) with 106.7 million hours.
The launching of Dahmer: Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (Evan Peters, Niecy Nash) still claims the highest number of hours watched with 196 million, followed by the 125 million hours of The Watcher‘s (Naomi Watts, Bobby Cannavale) first season.
Last week, Netflix announced that over one million viewers watched the first episode of the series to BARB, a rating group in Great Britain. While more subscribers rush to watch the new season of The Crown, politicians have been very vocal about their thoughts on the show as it moves onto more recent events. According to Deadline, a spokesperson for former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who served during Princess Diana’s death, has slandered the show, calling it “complete and utter rubbish.” And John Major, who announced the separation of Princess Diana from Prince Charles in Parliament, has also smeared the series, saying “fiction should not be paraded as fact.”
The trailer for The Crown‘s fifth season featured a disclaimer, claiming it is based on true stories but remains a fictional adaptation.