'The Crown' Season 3 Trailer: Queen Olivia Colman Takes The Throne

The Crown returns next month with an all-new season and an all-new cast. To better encapsulate the passage of time, the Netflix series about Queen Elizabeth has brought in older actors to play its lead characters, with Oscar-winner Olivia Colman stepping in for previous Queen Elizabeth actress Claire Foy. A full The Crown season 3 trailer has just arrived to give us a better look at the new royal family.

The Crown Season 3 Trailer

Ready for a brand new season of monarch melodrama? The Crown, one of Netflix's most watchable shows, is back in November, and it has a whole new cast of fresh faces. Olivia Colman takes over from Claire Foy as Queen Elizabeth; Tobias Menzies is now Prince Philip, inheriting the role from Matt Smith; and Helena Bonham Carter is Princess Margaret, a part previously played by Vanessa Kirby. Other cast members include Josh O'Connor as Prince Charles, Erin Doherty as Princess Anne, Ben Daniels as Lord Snowdon, Jason Watkins as Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and Charles Dance as Lord Mountbatten.

Here's the synopsis:

The third season of The Crown sees a new guard sweep into Downing Street, as Queen Elizabeth (Olivia Colman) and her family struggle to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing Britain. From cold-war paranoia, through to the jet-set and the space age – the exuberance of the 1960s and the long hangover of the 1970s – Elizabeth and the Royals must adapt to a new, more liberated, but also more turbulent world.

It's going to be interesting to see how the new cast handles the material, especially since the original cast was so strong. But you can't really go wrong with Olivia Colman, so I'm sure things will turn out fine.

What makes The Crown one of Netflix's better original series is that it doesn't take the serialized approach that so many other Netflix shows do. In other words, this isn't handled as "one long movie stretched across 8-10 hours", like so many other Netflix originals. Instead, each episode more or less stands on its own, like watching a season made up of short movies. It's an approach that was followed by great shows like Mad Men and The Sopranos, and I wish more Netflix originals would give it a try.

The Crown season 3 arrives on Netflix November 17.