So far, Prince William is the young hero in ‘The Crown’s’ Season 6

In 'The Crown,' the future King William is presented as a serious and sensitive 15-year-old boy who begins to feel the full weight of his royal status when his mother dies in globally seismic car accident.

The royal family and their supporters shouldn’t be too put out by the first four episodes of Season 6 of “The Crown,” however much the show applies its usual artistic license to depicting real-life events and controversially produces the Ghost of Diana to offer the future King Charles III and the late Queen Elizabeth II words of encouragement.

In fact, the royal family should be relieved and even celebrate that “The Crown” presents Charles as a caring father to his two sons, as well as a friendly ex-husband to Diana and the voice of reason in the chaotic days after her death.

Just as important for the monarchy’s public image, the first part of Season 6 sets up Prince William as the show’s young hero and even suggests that the institution will be in good hands. The future king is presented as a serious and sensitive 15-year-old boy who begins to feel the full weight of his royal status when his mother dies in globally seismic car accident. Indeed, the narrative arc of these episodes could be seen as William’s coming-of-age story, or as his hero’s journey.

The final six episodes of the season, which premiere Dec. 16, could cement William’s hero status. The trailer for Part 2 of the season shows him being treated as a global teen heartthrob, and reports say the episodes focus on William’s university days, when he meets his future wife, Kate Middleton.

Most of the scenes in Part 1 explore the final weeks of Diana’s life, when she embarked on a romance with Dodi Al-Fayed and sought to find a new purpose after her divorce from Charles. But William (played in these early teen years by Rufus Kampa) is an important presence, a fact that probably won’t please critics of the monarchy or supporters of his estranged brother, Prince Harry, and his sister-in-law, Meghan Markle.

Among other things, William is presented as Diana’s adored oldest son. Sometimes, inappropriately, he also becomes her confidant, as when Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) gives him knowing glances to explain why she’s dragging him and Harry (Fflyn Edwards) on a vacation in the South of France with Mohamed Al-Fayed, Dodi’s socially ambitious father.

There’s also a poignant phone call, which is depicted as occurring hours before Diana’s fatal car crash. Diana briefly opens up to William after he pulls the phone away from a younger Harry, as if to protect him from grown-up matters, and meaningfully asks his troubled mother: “Are you OK?” Diana replies: “Don’t know how I ended up here. Mummy just needs to make some changes to her life. But that’s not your problem. That’s mine.”

This view of the Prince of Wales as a caring son and a protective older brother contrasts with the image that’s currently on display in excerpts from “Endgame,” a critical new book about the monarchy written by author Omid Scobie. “Endgame” will be published Nov. 28 and promises to offer “bombshell after bombshell” about the fragile state of the British monarchy following the death of Elizabeth in September.

Scobie brands Charles “unpopular,” William as “power-hungry”  and seems to offer up Harry as a more heroic figure in the royal drama. Harry and Meghan Markle were the protagonists in Scobie’s “Finding Freedom,” a sympathetic book about their acrimonious departure from royal life. The California-based Harry and Meghan are still on the outs, with reports this week saying they haven’t been invited to join the royal family for Christmas after sources close to the couple leaked details about their private phone call with Charles. (The pair were in Vancouver last night watching the San Jose Sharks lose to the local Canucks.)

An except of “Endgame,” which was published last week, portrays William as cruelly ignoring Harry’s text messages on the day the queen died. In his memoir, “Spare” and in one of his court cases against U.K. media outlets, Harry also described William as sometimes being a bullying older brother who insulted Meghan, cut a secret deal with a tabloid and allegedly assaulted him in his kitchen at Kensington Palace.

That side of William isn’t present thus far in “The Crown,” which is curious, considering Netflix produced “The Crown” and it has a relationship with Harry and Meghan in the form of a $100 million production deal.

But “The Crown’s” creator, Peter Morgan, said in 2022 he has “enormous symathy” for the royal family, and his series thus far shows William and Harry enjoying a close relationship, with no apparent tensions. The episodes also address William’s role as big brother and heir to the throne. They don’t show him enjoying additional privileges, as Harry claimed in “Spare.” Instead, they suggest William lives with an additional burden. While Harry is presented as a sweet, uncomplicated 12-year-old, William is portrayed as having a painful awareness of the consequences of his parents’ personal choices and of royal family dynamics.

For example, William broods at Balmoral Castle, after privately viewing tabloids showing his mother on vacation with Dodi and reading headlines about them getting married. His aunt, Princess Anne, and grandfather, Prince Philip, notice his low spirits. Their solution is to send him out hunting. After William successfully shoots his first stag, he undergoes a traditional ritual, in which the stag’s blood is smeared over his face. William swells with pride when he tells his mother about this triumph in their final phone call.

But this pleasure is short-lived. Charles awakens William the following morning to tell him that his mother has been killed in car crash in Paris, saying, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to be very brave.”

Critics of Harry have accused him of exploiting Diana’s death by talking about it so much, whether in “Spare,” his Netflix doc-series, “Harry and Meghan,” or in various interviews. As Harry has made his mother’s death the key event in his own origin story, critics say he seems to be implying that he suffered more than anyone else.

“The Crown” focuses on William’s despair more than Harry’s and builds suspense over an event that royal author Sally Bedell Smith said is greatly exaggerated. In the immediate aftermath of Diana’s death, the show has William disappear from Balmoral Castle, inciting a frantic search. He returns after 14 hours of wandering around the Scottish Highlands and getting caught a storm.

Bedell wrote in the Times that William did go on a walk in the hills, but didn’t go missing because he was very much focused on looking after Harry. But for “The Crown’s” dramatic purposes, William’s disappearance fits into the standard hero’s journey narrative, when the hero leaves home, has some kind of adventure and returns with newfound knowledge.

“The Crown” implies that William bolted in distress after overhearing Charles (Dominic West) tell the queen (Imelda Staunton) and Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce) that he, as future king, needs to be seen at a state funeral for his mother to show that he shares the public’s grief. That specifically means he needs to participate in the famous walk he did with his father, grandfather, brother and uncle behind his mother’s coffin.

“Yes, he’s a shy boy but he’s also a future king,” Charles says. “When his mother dies and people grieve, he has to behave like one.”

In real life, Harry expressed anger about having to walk behind his mother’s coffin, telling Newsweek in 2017, “I don’t think any child should have to do that.” In a 2017 BBC interview, William acknowledged that it was “one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.” But he said it was a necessary choice. “It was a sort of collective family decision to do that,” he said. “There is that balance between duty and family, and that’s what we had to do.”

In “The Crown,” the camera focuses on William during the walk, with Philip whispering to him to to “concentrate on the act of walking, sep by step.” When a perplexed William asks Philip why people in the crowd are crying “for someone they never knew,” the duke responds, “They’re not crying for her. They’re crying for you.”