How ‘The Crown,’ ‘The White Lotus’ and Other Emmy Contenders Depict Marriages in Crisis

Arguably one of the most indelible images from the much-discussed Succession finale was that of two hands not quite interlocked. Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) holds out his palm for his wife, Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook), to take in the back of a car. She doesn’t quite grasp it, her hand limply resting in his. It’s a final image of a marriage that audiences witnessed oscillate between flirtation and vitriol during the course of the season.

Of the many threads running through Succession‘s final season, maybe the most captivating was the fractured relationship between Shiv and Tom, who went from playing a bizarre sexualized game called “bitey” to screaming at each other on a terrace during an election night party. By the finale, when Tom was named CEO of the company formerly run by Shiv’s father, their relationship was even more strained.

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But the HBO/Max drama isn’t the only series this season to feature a marriage in a state of chaos. On The White Lotus, Ethan (Will Sharpe) and Harper (Aubrey Plaza) deal with cracks in their union when presented with a seemingly perfect pair (Theo James and Meghann Fahy) while on vacation in Italy. The Diplomat lays out a crisis involving a couple (Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell) against a geopolitical one. In The Crown, you probably know the players: They are Charles (Dominic West) and Diana (Elizabeth Debicki), divorcing in the public eye. Queen Charlotte tackles royal nuptials in the 18th century — albeit far more private than Charles and Diana’s public marital breakdown — with Charlotte (India Amarteifio) married off to George (Corey Mylchreest), who leaves her alone on their wedding night.

“Nothing more dramatic than a marriage and family life,” West tells THR. “And really, all the great dramas and human experience is seen in family life because we all have families. That’s what we all have in common.” (And, for the record, he loved watching Tom and Shiv: “God, they’re brilliant.”)

West has a lot of practice portraying difficult marriages onscreen after five seasons on Showtime’s The Affair, but on Netflix’s The Crown, he was tasked with stepping into a saga of historical proportions. What struck him about creator Peter Morgan’s interpretation of the material was how Charles and Diana went from having a “fairy tale” wedding to joining “a long list of divorcing couples, [most of them] anonymous, and it’s incredibly bleak, incredibly sad and incredibly commonplace.”

After other actors played the characters during the previous season, West and Debicki were tasked with inhabiting Charles and Diana at their most estranged. In fact, when West reached out to Debicki asking if she wanted to meet before rehearsal, she said no, because there was no need to develop any chemistry — even though they did eventually end up getting along. “We sort of had to play against whatever friendship we might have had,” he explains.

For HBO/Max’s The White Lotus, Sharpe and Plaza also had to begin at a low point in their characters’ marriage. Ethan and Harper are trying to convince themselves everything is OK despite the fact that he has no interest in having sex with her, preferring to watch porn on his computer. “We just wanted to be on the same page about the hinterland, like where they came from,” says Sharpe.

Upon reading the scripts, Sharpe’s first reaction, he says, was to “diagnose” Harper and Ethan’s problems. But creator Mike White told him that he didn’t want the crack in their relationship to be attributable to any one thing, just the slow march of time. The desire to solve a problematic onscreen relationship is familiar to viewers, as well. Sharpe felt it watching Tom and Shiv, he says. “Maybe it’s just a human instinct: You want to try to work out how to make something better or how to help people,” he says. “And certainly that was my first instinct, and then gradually I just had to surrender to the dysfunction and the toxicity of it.”

It also meant that — as funny as The White Lotus is — acting out these scenarios wasn’t humorous at all. “I started to feel how much I think Mike wanted it to actually be agony,” says Sharpe.

Watching all these couples bicker and betray one another can also be agony for viewers, but it is entertaining. In The Diplomat, the titular civil servant Kate Wyler (Russell) and her aggravating spouse, Hal (Sewell), who’s in the same line of work, get into a hilarious physical tussle that finds them rolling around on the grounds of their British residence while security guards watch. Meanwhile, one only needs to look at the millions of Harry and Meghan stories to know why The Crown‘s marital drama is juicy. (Or Queen Charlotte‘s, for that matter.)

When asked to analyze his fascination with these stories, Sharpe points out that Succession, like The White Lotus, takes place in a world of extreme wealth. These conflicts are a “grain of relatable sand” — Sharpe’s words — in worlds that are foreign to most viewers. At the same time, you have to acknowledge the schadenfreude in watching the misery of these high-powered marriages. However bad your union may be, at least it’s not as bad as Tom and Shiv’s.

This story first appeared in the June 14 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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