'The Crown' Season 2 Gets Huge PR Boost As Royal History Is Made

Netflix's The Crown Season 2 just got an added shot of relevancy as Prince Harry made history with his royal engagement announcement to American actress Meghan Markle.

The Queen Mother: No one wants complexity and reality from us. Do sit down.

In only ten short days, Netflix will release their second season of The Crown, a six-year project covering the life and times of the current reigning monarch of the United Kingdom, Queen Elizabeth II. Today, it just got the PR boost of a lifetime, as Prince Harry, a character to come along a little later in the series, made history by announcing his engagement.

The second season of The Crown will feel familiar to audiences who watched the first. Much of the ten episode season will focus on the rumors of infidelity between Philip and Elizabeth. Princess Margaret will continue to have her romances injected with embellishments to make them more dramatic than they already were. The now-abdicated Edward VIII will put in another appearance with Wallis Simpson, along with his extraordinarily catty letters on Palace life. American actors will once again do their best impersonations of historical figures. (Last year, John Lithgow as Churchill, this year Michael C. Hall as John F. Kennedy.)

But this season brings a new theme: the modernization of the monarchy. While in some episodes, it's left for subtle remarks, or played for laughs, in one remarkable hour, it takes front and center stage, as the series turns to the events that caused the Palace to take their first steps into the modern era. I won't spoil it here, but googlers will probably be able to figure out what event it revolves around, as not only is it the best episode of the series so far, it also contains the added benefit of being almost completely true.

This one small step for the Queen, one giant leap in taking the monarchy forward for the UK is, in fact, the first shift in the end game we see playing out today on the BBC rolling news. Harry has done what everyone on The Crown failed to do before him (and will continue to fail to do, as the series continues): Marry a completely unsuitable person, and open the monarchy to new members in a way that the Palace has refused to consider until now.