The Crown has a prequel series in the works.

This was news to me, although it has been public knowledge for six months. The Crown’s final season will probably premiere in the fourth quarter of 2023, but, our appetites for sumptuous treatments of British Royal Family drama yet unsated, there is a prequel series in early development. It will cover the turbulent first half of the twentieth century, from the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 to the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to Philip Mountbatten in 1947, where season 1 of The Crown picks up.

There is plenty of juicy material here. This time period spans the genteel Edwardian Era (1901–1910), King George V’s reign through the First World War and the whirlwind Roaring Twenties, the abdication of King Edward VIII amid his controversial romance with Wallis Simpson, and King George VI’s leadership through the Second World War. Lots of potential for dramatisation and also for lavish costume design.

This is where I cross the line from responsibly speculative to irresponsibly speculative.

Assuming the prequel series premieres in 2025 or thereabouts and gets four or five seasons at the pace of The Crown, it should wrap up by 2030 or 2031. What comes after this?

The Crown could go the way of Star Wars and announce a sequel series. This would pick up where The Crown left off in the early 2000s and cover another half-century of British royal history, until the 2050s or so. At some point in its second season there may be a throwaway scene in Buckingham Palace where the royals are watching The Crown, which would be amusing. But assuming the sequel series premieres in 2033, it would run into a problem around roughly 2036 or 2037—it will have caught up to the present.

The solution will be Game of Thrones-style. Game of Thrones was based on George R. R. Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire, but Martin, who famously took forever to churn out the novels, eventually let Game of Thrones catch up to where he was in the plot. This was a problem, because now the Game of Thrones producers were waiting on Martin to produce more canon for them to translate to the screen. At this point he just gave them all the outlines and planned plot developments that he had and decreed that whatever the Game of Thrones writers came up with is canon, which allowed them to finish the series.

So The Crown, overtaking the present, will make up a few more decades of British royal history, finishing up the William and Kate storylines and ending on the accession of Prince George to the throne. They’ll throw in some realistic scandals for the royals to weather, let some forbidden romances blossom, name some new royal babies. There will be an episode about runaway AI which will be treated with the same lavish set design as any other episode.

The royal family will dismiss this as arrant nonsense and also “kind of creepy”. They’d have a point—if I were Prince Louis in my early twenties I would probably be appalled by the showrunners making up future romance arcs for me.