Prince Andrew's Jeffrey Epstein scandal has already ruined Season 3 of The Crown

The Guardian

Queen Elizabeth II's third child has been making headlines in Britain over a recent disastrous BBC Newsnight interview described as "desperate" and "toe-curling" in which he denies involvement in Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking. "The thought of having to wait a decade for the Netflix take on the most staggering spectacle of our time – Prince Andrew’s interview – is torture," says Stuart Heritage of the interview arriving on the same weekend as Season 3 of The Crown. Heritage adds: "To watch the Prince Andrew Newsnight interview on Saturday night followed by The Crown on Sunday morning was to watch the difference between night and day. The former was extraordinary; an extended moment of clownish, life-changing stupidity wrapped around a kernel of true nastiness. Prince Andrew has been accused of doing genuinely awful things that reek of consequence-free privilege. The way in which he blithely slow-blinked his way into catastrophe during the interview seems to suggest that he still doesn’t understand the scale of what has been levelled at him, and that is absolutely damning for his family. And then came The Crown, a departure lounge chocolate box of a show that – like its subject – chooses to ride a series of decades-long ripples with relative placidity rather than plunge straight into the ravine on the horizon. And there’s nothing wrong with that, because there’s plenty to admire about a show as fastidiously gusseted as this. Also, and make no mistake, short of Netflix drowning in debt and disappearing, all this stuff is coming. But at the current rate of production, it won’t be coming for another decade. It’s torture."