“The Crown” returns for the start of its highly anticipated sixth season next week. “Streaming” columnist NICK OVERALL previews the final chapter to this award-winning and controversial series.

NEXT week “The Crown” returns for its sixth and final season and that also means one final round of heated controversy.

The series is infamous for attracting swathes of naysayers whenever release day rolls around.

Last year Dame Judi Dench and former British Prime Minister John Major took aim at the series, labelling it as “sensationalism” and “cruelly unjust”.

But that hasn’t stopped the show’s creator and writer Peter Morgan hitting back. He recently told “Variety”: “All the criticism about ‘The Crown’s’ attitude to the royals comes in anticipation of the show coming out. 

“The minute it’s out and people look at it – whether it’s Judi Dench or John Major – they instantly fall silent. And I think they probably feel rather stupid.”

Morgan has a point. Any criticism of the show hasn’t stopped it winning 21 Emmy awards and becoming one of Netflix’s most popular series. 

Season five managed to rack up 1.1 million viewers on its first day alone and across its first week garnered a staggering 107 million viewing hours worldwide.

With season six promising some of the most controversial moments in modern Royal history, it seems that viewers are as hungry for “The Crown” as ever.

The trailer, which scored close to two million views on YouTube in its first 24 hours of release alone, has hinted that the final season will dive into the tragic death of Princess Diana (played by Aussie star Elizabeth Debicki) and its aftermath.

Of course, this has already angered critics. 

One scene in the trailer, underscored by a haunting rendition of “Mad World” by Tears for Fears, appears to show Diana returning as a “ghost”, whipping up all sorts of fury that the show is “insensitive”.

But Morgan has been quick to address the backlash, saying they never intended for the appearance to be “supernatural” but rather her “continuing to live vividly in the minds of those she left behind.”

Though it might be “sensationalist” in some aspects, throughout the show’s near decade of streaming it has always managed to bring audiences back huge numbers, including it was rumoured, the late Queen Elizabeth II herself. Apparently, Charles is less keen though.

Undoubtedly the show sensationalises for the very reason of stirring up the huge amounts of attention it receives. This has resulted in cries for “The Crown” to have some sort of disclaimer that it’s “fictional”, but actress Claudia Harrison, who plays Princess Anne, says audiences are smarter than that.

“To think people are genuinely sitting down thinking this is a documentary and that everything they see is fact, I feel uncomfortable with that,” she told “The Guardian.” 

“Patronise an audience at your peril.”

Morgan also says the ending of the popular series has been changed to acknowledge the death of Queen Elizabeth II, an event which caused the final season to go on a filming hiatus out of respect.

This will have been no easy feat, as the series is set to end around 2005, close to 20 years before her passing last year.

“We’d all been through the experience of the funeral so because of how deeply everyone will have felt that I had to try to find a way in which the final episode dealt with the character’s death, even though she hadn’t died yet,” Morgan told “Variety”.

One can only wonder what that original ending looked like and how it would compare to what audiences will get now.

The first four episodes of the final season will officially drop on November 16, while audiences will have to wait until December 14 for the second half.

But as with all things popular in the age of streaming, this might not actually be the end of “The Crown” entirely.

The show’s writers have bounced around ideas of a prequel set well before the era of Elizabeth II but say it would “need a unique set of circumstances” to happen.

I’d wager a strong viewership of season 6 is all the “unique circumstances” Netflix will need.