Eliana Willis

After several years of family drama and monarchal mayhem, the Netflix series “The Crown” will come to a close after five seasons, the series’s Twitter account said on Friday.The announcement said that Imelda Staunton will play Queen Elizabeth II in the show’s final installment.Imelda Staunton will play Queen Elizabeth II in the fifth and final season of The Crown. pic.twitter.com/hUOob58A9p— The Crown (@TheCrownNetflix) January 31, 2020
“I have loved watching ‘The Crown’ from the very start,” Ms. Staunton said in a statement that praised both actresses who previously played the queen, Claire Foy and Olivia Colman. “I am genuinely honored to be joining such an exceptional creative team and to be taking the crown to its conclusion.”“The Crown,” which debuted in 2016 and focuses on Queen Elizabeth’s II’s reign and family, was created by the writer and producer Peter Morgan. In a statement on Friday, he said that the time had come to end the series.“At the outset I had imagined ‘The Crown’ running for six seasons but now that we have begun work on the stories for season five it has become clear to me that this is the perfect time and place to stop,” said Mr. Morgan, who also wrote the script for “The Queen,” the 2006 movie that earned Helen Mirren a best actress Oscar. “I’m grateful to Netflix and Sony for supporting me in this decision.”Cindy Holland, vice president of original content for Netflix, said in a statement that she fully supported Mr. Morgan’s creative decision and that she was “excited to see how he, Imelda Staunton and the cast and crew of Season 5, bring this landmark series to a fitting and spectacular end.”The show has cost Netflix nearly $150 million, which is about twice as much as the royal family costs British tax payers each year, and putting together the story line is no easy task. It involves a team of researchers who once a week come to Mr. Morgan’s London home for script meetings, based in part on documents they have attained.There is an expectation to “deliver TV on an annual basis, but what we’re making now is feature-film-quality stuff, and no one ever expected you to make 10 feature films a year — because you’d die,” he told The New York Times last November.Regularly recasting the roles of Elizabeth, Philip and other royals in efforts to reflect their advancing ages, was always part of the plan. “I think that the longest you can believe an actor in an aging part is about 20 years,” Mr. Morgan said in November. “Right from the start, we decided that if it all worked and kept going, we would recast every two seasons.”Ms. Foy famously kicked off the first two seasons, playing a young Elizabeth before she inherited the crown and in the early years of her transformation into a powerful global figure. Her star turn won a Golden Globe in 2017 and an Emmy in 2018.In November, Netflix released the third season starring Ms. Colman as the queen in the 1960s and 1970s, navigating political and economic issues as well as handling complicated family dynamics with her eldest children, Prince Charles and Princess Anne, and the death of her uncle and former king, Prince Edward. Ms. Colman, who won a Golden Globe this year for her performance, will continue in the role again in the fourth season.Since the show began, it has been widely recognized, winning multiple awards at the Emmys, Screen Actors Guild Awards and the Golden Globes, where it won in 2017 for best television drama.A release date has not yet been announced for the fourth season, but it will cover Margaret Thatcher’s premiership and most likely will also include Prince Charles’s relationship with Princess Diana, as evidenced by paparazzi photos.It was not immediately clear how far season five will go into the modern era of the royal family, especially the most recent news-grabbing headlines.Last year, Prince Andrew was banished from public life by the queen after he gave a disastrous interview to the BBC about his ties to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who hanged himself in a Manhattan jail in August while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.Earlier this month, Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, unexpectedly announced their plans to “step back” from royal duties. They will lose most of the privileges and perks of royalty once they give up their full-time status and forsake Britain for an uncertain future in Canada and the United States. More

What’s StreamingBOJACK HORSEMAN Stream on Netflix. After six seasons swilling whiskey and deadpanning, the sweater-wearing title character of this animated Hollywood satire is putting down the reins. The series has followed Bojack, an anthropomorphic horse voiced by Will Arnett, as he navigates a fictional version of Hollywood, where he lives as a has-been 1990s sitcom star. Toward the end of the most recent batch of episodes, he accepted a job at Wesleyan University. How he adjusts to collegiate life will be one of the questions that the final installments — which hit Netflix on Friday — will answer.TED BUNDY: FALLING FOR A KILLER Stream on Amazon. Those interested in learning just how wicked the serial killer Ted Bundy was have no shortage of Bundy-related programming to choose from — Netflix released both a feature film and a documentary series about him last year — but this Amazon documentary series promises a fresh perspective, looking at his behavior against the backdrop of 1970s feminism. It focuses on the misogyny of Bundy’s crimes, and includes the voices of some of the women affected by them. Those women include Elizabeth Kendall, who in the early 1980s published a book about her relationship with Bundy.THE PRODIGY (2019) Stream on Amazon and Hulu. Early intelligence comes with a heavy helping of crazy in “The Prodigy,” a horror movie about a gifted youngster who is possessed by the spirit of a serial killer. As he grows up, Miles (Jackson Robert Scott) exhibits increasingly disturbed behavior (one example involves a classmate and a wrench). The plot involves his parents (Taylor Schilling and Peter Mooney) racing to determine what’s wrong with him before things become too dire. It all adds up to “a ho-hum horror movie given a mild boost by its credible performances,” Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in her review for The New York Times.What’s on TVSPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME (2019) 8 p.m. on Starz. Peter Parker takes a break from New York to web-sling around Venice and London in this most recent “Spider-Man” movie. Parker is, of course, the alter-ego of the nimble Spider-Man, who for the past several years has been played by the British actor Tom Holland. Holland’s version of the hero is a high schooler, and in this movie, he goes on a school vacation to Europe, where his pursuit of love with MJ (Zendaya) is rudely interrupted by a bearded villain played by Jake Gyllenhaal, among other loud things. “As is often the case with these movies, a smaller, livelier entertainment is nested inside the roaring, clanking digital machinery,” A.O Scott wrote in his review for The Times. “The filmmakers try to enliven the big fights and action sequences by injecting a bit of self-consciousness about the illusion-driven craft they pursue, and a few sequences take place in an austere, dreamlike virtual realm where visually interesting things are allowed to happen. For a little while, anyway.” More

Fred Silverman, who as a top executive at CBS, ABC and finally NBC was one of the most powerful people in the three-network era — a force behind the success of beloved series like “All in the Family,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “M*A*S*H,” “Laverne & Shirley” and “Hill Street Blues” — died on Thursday at his home in the Pacific Palisades section of Los Angeles. He was 82.Julia Rossen, of the public relations concern 42West, announced his death in a news release. She said the cause was cancer.At 25, Mr. Silverman was made head of daytime programming for CBS, and in 1970, in his early 30s, he landed the network’s top programming job, putting him in charge of the prime-time schedule.CBS, known in the 1960s for relatively conventional comedies like “The Andy Griffith Show” and “The Beverly Hillbillies,” was looking to freshen its image, and Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin’s groundbreaking “All in the Family,” which tackled contemporary issues like bigotry with scalding humor, became a key component of that strategy.The show was originally made for ABC, but when that network rejected it, Mr. Lear took it to CBS, where Mr. Silverman and other executives watched a pilot.“I couldn’t believe I was seeing what I was seeing,” Mr. Silverman recalled in an oral history recorded in 2001 for the Television Academy Foundation. “Compared to the crap that we were canceling, this was really setting new boundaries.”He credited Robert Wood, president of CBS at the time, with putting the show on the air in January 1971. But it was Mr. Silverman who rescued it from its original, deadly Tuesday night time slot, stacking it on Saturday nights with another savvy series, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”“These were the first building blocks,” Mr. Silverman said, leading to other successes like the spinoffs “Maude,” from “All in the Family,” and “Rhoda,” from “Mary Tyler Moore.”In a message on Twitter on Thursday, Norman Lear wrote, “There would be no ALL IN THE FAMILY or MAUDE without Fred Silverman.”Mr. Silverman was lured to ABC, which had long trailed the other two networks in the ratings race, in mid-1975. He was named president of ABC Entertainment, the division that developed programming and talent. By the time he left in 1978 to become NBC’s president and chief executive, ABC was No. 1 in the Nielsen rankings, on the strength of shows like “Laverne & Shirley” (a spinoff of “Happy Days”), not to mention the landmark mini-series “Roots” (1977).Mr. Silverman failed to work his magic at NBC, which had fallen to third place in the ratings, despite some successes, like the police drama “Hill Street Blues,” which premiered in January 1981. He resigned in mid-1981 and turned to producing his own shows.His hits as a producer included “Matlock,” which made its debut in 1986 and ran for 181 episodes; “Jake and the Fatman,” which ran from 1987 to 1992; “In the Heat of the Night” (1988-95); “Diagnosis Murder” (1993-2001); and a series of made-for-TV Perry Mason movies.Mr. Silverman was famed for his programming instincts, but he admitted that he had backed some clunkers. There was, for instance, a short-lived 1972 comedy called “Me and the Chimp,” about a family that has a chimpanzee. The show, he acknowledged in a 1976 interview with The New York Times, “represented a new depth in television programming.”Fred Silverman was born on Sept. 13, 1937, in New York City to William and Mildred Silverman and grew up in Rego Park, Queens. His father was a television and radio service man, his mother a homemaker. Fred graduated from Forest Hills High School in Queens.As a child he was drawn to the radio, especially dramas, and he collected radio scripts.“When I was 10, 11, 12 years old, I used to go down to the studios and made friends with all the porters,” he said in the oral history. “They would collect scripts for me. I think at one point I had about four or five thousand scripts.”Mr. Silverman earned a bachelor’s degree at Syracuse University and a master’s in television and theater arts in 1959 from Ohio State University. (He later donated his boyhood collection of scripts to Ohio State.)His master’s thesis was a 406-page analysis of ABC’s programming from 1953 to 1959, and it helped get him a job at WGN-TV in Chicago in what was called the continuity department, “basically screening commercials and approving copy for live TV,” as he related in the oral history.“So I was a censor, basically,” he said.From there he went to WPIX in New York before landing at CBS.Mr. Silverman was pivotal not only to important shows, but also to careers. He told of once being impressed by a comedian who was performing at a dinner at which Mr. Silverman was receiving an award. It was David Letterman, and in 1980, while at NBC, Mr. Silverman gave him his first talk show. It was a morning show, and it didn’t last long, but it helped elevate Mr. Letterman’s profile.Mr. Silverman is survived by his wife, Cathy, and two children, Melissa and Billy.Though Mr. Silverman was associated with countless prime-time shows, he also had a hand in a number of daytime series in his initial job as head of daytime programming for CBS.In the oral history, he told of once wanting to make a scary animated show about kids in a haunted house, with a dog as a background character. His superiors resisted, thinking the idea was too frightening. After the rejection, he recalled, he was on a plane listening to music when Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” came on.“I hear him say, ‘Scooby-dooby-doo,’” Mr. Silverman said, slightly misrendering Sinatra’s “doo-bee-doo-bee-doo,” “and it’s at that point I said: ‘That’s it. We’ll take the dog, we’ll call it ‘Scooby-Doo’ and move him up front, and it’ll be the dog’s show.’”“Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!” premiered in September 1969 and became an enduring franchise. More

No matter how much free time you have this weekend, we have TV recommendations for you. Come back every week for new suggestions on what to watch.This Weekend I Have … an Hour, and I’ve Seen Every Episode of ‘Antiques Roadshow’‘Fake or Fortune?’When to watch: Now, on Amazon (three seasons) or Netflix (one season).If you like your shows British and enriching, try this series about art and investigations. On each episode, Fiona Bruce and Philip Mould attempt to authenticate paintings attributed to famous artists. A collector wants to know if he really owns a Renoir. An auction house thinks it has a Rembrandt, but isn’t sure. How did a Chagall wind up there? Some Old Master from the 16th century painted this part of a church, but who in particular? Episodes are thorough and surprisingly zippy, with the pacing of a detective show and the same “send it to the lab” analyses, but with added doses of European and art history.… an Hour, and Communication Skills Are Everything‘The Crystal Maze’When to watch: Friday at 7 p.m., on Nickelodeon.This family game show, hosted by Adam Conover, requires everyone to work together, sometimes with happy and exciting results and sometimes with “hm, have you considered family therapy?” vibes. Puzzles can be hard! Contestants move through different escape room-style challenges, earning more or less time inside a sphere that showers them with prizes at the end. Think the Nickelodeon game shows of the ’80s and ’90s, like “Legends of the Hidden Temple” or “Finders Keepers,” or especially “Nick Arcade.”… 6 Hours, and I Enjoy Both History and Netherworlds‘The Ghost Bride’When to watch: Now, on Netflix.Based on the book by Yangsze Choo, this six-part series (in Mandarin, with English subtitles, or dubbed) is a frothy historical romance with a supernatural streak and a murder mystery. Pan Li Lan (Huang Peijia) lives in Malacca, Malaysia, in the 1890s, and now that she is 20, she’s practically an old maid. When a wealthy family suggests that she marry its recently deceased son as a “ghost bride,” she thinks it could solve several problems at once — until she gets sucked in to the tumultuous world of afterlife drama. This show is definitely not for everyone, but if you watched “Cable Girls” and thought “I wish this also had a minotaur-like monster, handsome ghosts and an entire shadow realm,” it will be for you. More

Season 1, Episode 2: ‘Maps and Legends’In the second episode of “Star Trek: Picard,” we learn about a super secret group of Romulans, called Jhat Vhash. I admit I’m not sure if I’m spelling that correctly, which is partially a good sign: It means there’s something new being introduced in the familiar “Trek” universe (or old, depending on how you look at it).I’ll also overlook the old television trope of there always being a villain that is truly behind the villains we are already familiar with. But I found this offering of “Picard” to be just as compelling as its premiere. It has some key elements of what made the best episodes of “The Next Generation” strong.For example, characters like Laris and Picard, use deductive reasoning to solve a problem instead of brute force. The stakes are gradually raised as Picard finds out he has some sort of syndrome that is likely terminal. It is unclear whether this is the Irumodic Syndrome that Picard discovers he has in the series finale of “Next Generation,” but nevertheless, it gives Picard’s story a bit more urgency. By the end of the episode, we’ve uncovered a mysterious Starfleet-related conspiracy that could destabilize the Federation.In this case, Laris refers to the Romulan group as a “cabal” and that the Tal Shiar, seen often throughout different “Trek” iterations, are merely a front for this cultlike institution with a secret. This organization of radicalized Romulans has a particular antipathy for synthetic life-forms for a reason that is yet to be revealed. There are other mysteries that need solving, like why the late Dahj seemed to be created only three years before Picard met her.We do know just a bit more than Picard does — this villainous and secretive Romulan group perhaps has infiltrated Starfleet for a mysterious purpose. Their plan involves the shady but charismatic Narek (Harry Treadaway), a Romulan agent, who is particularly interested in Dahj’s twin sister, Soji Asha. Narek’s sister — posing as Lieutenant Rizzo at Starfleet headquarters — suggests that they are looking for other androids. Soji is working on what appears to be an artifact of a Borg cube, a “Romulan Reclamation Site.” This place seems to be, in part, a research facility where former Borg drones are pulled from the collective, much like our old friends Seven of Nine and Hugh, who will show up at some point in this series.“There’s nothing very Romulan about this place at all,” Narek says in bed with Soji. We don’t fully know Narek’s intentions yet, other then that he is a Romulan and that Romulans are known to be a treacherous bunch. (It’s always a red flag when the person you’re involved with tells you not to tell anyone about it.)The episode really takes off when Picard arrives at Starfleet headquarters. You get a sense of just how alienated the legendary figure is from the institution he once revered. Even though he feels a familiar sense of coming home as soon as he walks through the door — perfectly played by Patrick Stewart — the man at the front desk doesn’t even recognize him, much to his chagrin. (It was a nice touch to have a hologram of the Enterprise floating above the door.) The admiral Picard meets with is immediately icy toward him, defensive about Picard’s public thrashing of Starfleet.“There is no we,” Admiral Clancy says. (It is not clear whether this Clancy is the same character as the one who was an ensign on the Enterprise played by Anne Elizabeth Ramsay in a handful of “Next Generation” episodes.)There is a remarkable exchange as the argument quickly escalates.“Ignore me again at your cost,” Picard spits out. “You are in peril, Admiral.”“My cost?”“You are in peril.”“There is no peril here,” Clancy responds. “Only the pitiable delusions of a once great man desperate to matter. This is no longer your house, Jean Luc. So do what you were best at. Go home.”The gravity of this conversation is stark. For decades, Picard’s sole purpose in life was to serve Starfleet. He rarely showed an interest outside of his work. He did not date, save for his love interest in “Star Trek: Insurrection.” He did not have his own family. It’s not clear he had many friends outside of his crew. The Enterprise, and by extension, Starfleet was his home.That the relationship has deteriorated to the point that a fellow admiral will barely acknowledge his presence is surprising, no matter what has happened in the past. (This wouldn’t be the first time Picard has clashed with Starfleet — note the events of “Insurrection.” But even then, the plot seemed to suggest a rogue Admiral rather than an institution gone wayward.) Any good will Picard built up with the Federation has evaporated.But this argument animates Picard nonetheless. He has a focus we haven’t seen since Picard was an active member of Starfleet. He realizes that he is going to have to chart his own path without the Federation’s help — which would have been unthinkable for much of Picard’s life. And of course, Picard is right. Starfleet is in peril. Clancy should have listened to a man whose instincts have saved Earth several times over.It took two episodes, but by the time Picard is putting together his own crew, he feels more comfortable with himself — ready to set off on an adventure, perhaps his last one. More