The Crown (2016-2023): Season 1

Title: The Crown

Year: 2016

Genre:  Drama | History |

Season: 1| 2 | 3|

Runtime: 58 min/Episode

Directed by: Peter Morgan

Starring: Claire Foy, Matt Smith,  John Lithgow

8,7/10

STRONG, EMOTIONAL AND SOLID

When Netflix goes all in for production, they go all in. There is no bullshit nor reluctant approach to the story they want to tell. House of Cards, their first flagship marked their potential in how to conduct a good, exciting series that hooked a large audience. At the recent time, at it debuts, it was mesmerizing. Then Kevin Spacey F-upped and we got a horrible final season which was rushed, and everyone wanted to get that storyline behind us but at its peak, HOC was a top-notch series. There is no denial. It grew. The Crown has made the same impression on people with this craving. Maybe not for a broader audience but it captures storytelling in an engaging way and has success with it further along.

The Crown is a biographical drama-series produced by Netflix. It covers Queen Elizabeth II’s early years as a sovereign and gives an insight into family problems, distractions, and a heritage duty that the young queen was not quite ready for.  Spanning over ten episodes in season one, the audience will meet a dysfunctional royal family that struggles to fit in a new reality once King Georg has passed in sickness. The dysfunctional part extracts an honest exploration of the family. It gives you an insight into how the British monarch works and how exhausted it might be to take on a heavy as a queen. It does it properly, it does not rush, and it reflects deep in the character’s emotional development.

Claire Foy, who in this first season and the next, plays the young queen show an organic process to migrate from a princess to queen. At first, she brilliantly proves herself how heavy it is to the point when it affects her marriage and her family. Her antagonist is her husband Philip, played by Matt Smith, who constantly and frequently question her ability as a sovereign and wife. Foy always must prove herself capable to give him knowledge of it – that she can handle both the Crown and their marriage.  It is personal and even if it is a royal drama, no other series share so much family conflict as this series does. It balances adequately between on how Queen Elizabeth II are handling the new task and front of the Crown as everybody is criticizing in one way or the other.

The Queen often meets Winston Churchill in her work. John Lithgow gives a harsh, sarcastic approach to the former Prime Minister in a convincing way. His relationship and manner are entertaining. He gives his party a face that is worth remembering. Vanessa Kirby, who plays Foy’s controversial sister Margaret in a decent performance. She ain’t convincing but it a solid addition to the high-paid cast this series offers. The British dialogue scenes are superbly written, and everyone has their own way to communicate even if it can take all too long. There is a lot of small scenes that might not be necessary, yet it is for the bigger picture.

The music is thrilling and plays to the scenes as well as the series progress. The costume and sets work as well to the story and give a persuasive detail in the story. Even if there are three series out there, this is probably the most straightforward one. You follow the Queen’s family and colleagues from her first days to a new changed Elizabethan era. This is a binge-watching series about true events and about a monarch that still exist and facing difficult decision every day both private and publicly. It is ambitious and pedagogic in its way to tell a magnificent story. It might not be for everyone to see but it still worth a watch even if everything is not all accurate.

Repubblica.it: Michael Dobbs: “Il Regno Unito è un caos, peggio della mia House of Cards”

Intervista allo scrittore, Lord, ex consigliere supremo di Thatcher e autore del romanzo poi diventato serie tv mondiale con Kevin Spacey: “Oggi la politica è dominata dai social media, dove tutti pretendono cose, ma nessuno parla più delle responsabilità. I politici di oggi si accodano a questo andazzo e si illudono di sopravvivere, dicendo alla gente quello che vuole sentirsi dire. Starmer non ha visione, ma non vedo in giro alternative serie”

Michael Dobbs: “The United Kingdom is a mess, worse than my House of Cards.”

Interview with the writer, Lord, former chief advisor to Thatcher and author of the novel that later became a worldwide TV series with Kevin Spacey: “Today politics is dominated by social media, where everyone demands things, but no one ever talks about responsibility. Today’s politicians should follow this trend and delude themselves into surviving by telling people what they want to hear. Starmer has no vision, but I don’t see any serious alternatives around.”

#MichaelDobbs #TheUnitedKingdom #HouseofCards #Thatcher #KevinSpacey #Starmer

https://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2026/05/14/news/michael_dobbs_intervista_regno_unito_caos_house_of_cards_starmer-425343678/

Today: Tradimenti, bluff e pugnalate: vi racconto il "trono di sangue" che scuote Londra

Non è un caso che la versione originale di House of Cards sia nata tra i corridoi di Westminster prima di essere esportata negli Stati Uniti, né che il più grande autore di drammi politici della storia, William Shakespeare, fosse inglese. La politica britannica ha sempre avuto una certa...

Betrayals, bluffs, and stabbings: I’m telling you about the “game of thrones” that shakes London.

It’s no coincidence that the original version of House of Cards was born in the corridors of Westminster before being exported to the United States, nor that the greatest political drama writer in history, William Shakespeare, was English. British politics has always had a certain…

#London #HouseofCards #Westminster #theUnitedStates #WilliamShakespeare #English #British

https://www.today.it/opinioni/starmer-cosa-succede-partito-labour.html

The Amity Affliction don’t write songs to fix anything—they write them so you don’t feel alone in it.

House of Cards might be their most honest record yet.

Full review: https://metalinsider.net/new-music/album-review-the-amity-affliction-house-of-cards

#TheAmityAffliction #HouseOfCards #Metalcore #PostHardcore #AlbumReview #HeavyMusic

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/116440570565467277

"These long-running, parallelized workflows can yield great value, but they have also challenged our infrastructure and pricing structure: it’s now common for a handful of requests to incur costs that exceed the plan price! These are our problems to solve. The actions we are taking today enable us to provide the best possible experience for existing users while we develop a more sustainable solution." — Joe Binder, VP of Product

If people are already _commonly_ exceeding set monthly quotas/costs with just a handful of requests, you all have got much bigger problems, customers/users too (i.e. becoming deeply dependent on externally controlled & rented infrastructure from day one of your project/startup, plus slowly damaging your own cognitive abilities and a fast growing maintenance nightmare)! And this all is just the beginning... 🍿

Keeping up with other news about growing mineral, energy & supply chain shortages, the illusion that this might just be very short term, and the resulting cost bumps needed to produce and provision all the outstanding data center capacities at the heart of the above decisions (and similar ones made by Anthropic just days ago), I really don't understand where this optimism of AI boosters/users is coming from or on what planet they're living on...

genAI/agenticAI is a shoddily implemented/managed/secured technology & mentality for a computing-illiterate consumerist society, for an age of infinite resource abundance with stable climate/politics, all of which we're leaving (or have never really been in)! And that departure is partially driven/accelerated by said tech...

Instead of funneling trillions into this particular tech, we need focus/investment into methods, infrastructure, research/education, relationships, and above all, a culture focused on how to make computing magnitudes more sustainable, accessible, independent and which allows us to do generally more with less. Or, at least not with magnitudes more, just for some dubious, unspecified (and meaningless) measure of improved "productivity gains"... With almost no one ever questioning what this supposed extra productivity is even good for...

#GitHub #AI #ResourceScarcity #Decomputing #HouseOfCards

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@Sempf/116412330882479256

‘By Design’ Flaw in MCP Could Enable Widespread AI Supply Chain Attacks

"Researchers warn that a flaw in Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol allows unsanitized commands to execute silently, enabling full system compromise across widely used AI environments."

"OX extensively tested whether this ‘flaw’ was exploitable, extensively succeeded, and extensively disclosed its findings to the MCP providers; from Anthropic downward. Initially it had little response. Eventually, the common response was inaction coupled with the suggestion that this behavior was ‘by design’.

But OX discovered, and demonstrated, that this ‘by design’ behavior could be easily exploited, leaving potentially millions of downstream users exposed to sensitive data, API key and internal corporate data theft, the exposure of chat histories, and more. If the process that MCP failed included malware, that malware could be silently installed, potentially leading to complete system takeover."

#AI #MCP #InfoSec #Anthropic #HouseOfCards