For three seasons, The Crown, Peter Morgan's dramatisation of the life and times of Queen Elizabeth and the Windsor family has sailed ably along on the back of some visually sumptuous period recreations, steady performances and a tendency to give the benefit of the doubt to its heroine.
It's been pleasantly entertaining and engaging enough, even if it's had a tendency to avoid criticising the queen and the Windsors too harshly.
However, in its fourth season, in which the sweeping political and economic changes of the 1980s bring the realities of the outside world crashing through the windows of Buckingham Palace, The Crown finally becomes something satisfyingly more than an elegant re-enactment of a well-studied family history.
This is thanks in no small part to the introduction to "Windsoria" of two very different but singular and determined strong women - Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson) and Princess Diana (Emma Corrin).
Much has been made by outraged royalists of the creative liberties Morgan has taken in this series - a young, newly engaged but abandoned Diana roller-skating through the palace to the music of Elton John, some bristling tensions between Maggie and Her Royal Highness that lead to Thatcher forgetting her place and lecturing the sovereign about class and privilege - but ultimately these help to deepen the drama and breathe some much-needed empathetic life into the show's characters and situations.
This is also - thanks to the much increased tabloid attention and televised coverage of the Windsors, in particular the thinly veneered "fairytale" romance of Prince Charles (Josh O'Connor) and Diana - the period with which more ordinary viewers are familiar and in which they are interested.
To simply reshow what we've already seen so many times would have been pointless. So Morgan pushes towards a portrayal of the series' dysfunctional family dynamics that offers us some human insight into its characters and some hints at things that we, with the benefit of hindsight, should have seen coming (cough, cough, Prince Andrew).
He also offers a useful critique of the queen herself - brilliantly and humanely played by Olivia Colman - as a woman who finally has to confront the fact that she cannot merely play the role she believes she must, without recognising that the world around her is changing and that she must change with it.
In order to do that she'll have to stop, listen and decide what's best for the people she's been chosen to represent by seeing them as actual, individual human beings, rather than a nebulous abstract and throwaway idea.
Because of this challenge, this season finally presents its viewers with something far more interesting, engaging and dramatically meaty than pleasant (but predictable) historical re-enactment.
• 'The Crown' season 4 is on Netflix.
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