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The Garden Variety — Week 50 (Dec 14–20)

Film: The Crown (Netflix, 2016–2023) | CTA: Big Ticket Copywriting ($97)

One of the stranger decisions in The Crown is that the same character is played by three different actors across six seasons. Claire Foy plays Elizabeth in the first two. Olivia Colman takes over for the third and fourth. Imelda Staunton carries the fifth and sixth. No explanation is offered. The Crown keeps going and the person inside it changes, and the show treats this as unremarkable because it is — the role has been doing this for centuries.

Peter Morgan has said in interviews that this was the only honest way to tell it. The Crown is not a biography of Elizabeth Windsor. It's a study of what the institution requires from whoever it happens to contain at a given time.

The show's central tension — the thing it keeps returning to in different configurations — is the gap. Not between public and private in the tabloid sense. The structural gap between what any given person actually is and what the role requires them to perform. Philip gives up his name, his naval career, his standing as the person in the marriage who has a purpose. Margaret gives up Townsend. Charles gets to be publicly himself, which the show argues is worse than suppression — because everyone can see what the institution does when you refuse to close the gap yourself.

The Crown's argument is that the role doesn't fit the person. The role fits no one. You don't close the gap. You manage it, every day, until you stop.

I work with people in Atlanta and Albuquerque who are the brand. Not running a large organization with a comms department — there's them, and then there's what they present to clients every day, and the space between those two things is real. Most of them know it's there. Some of them think the exhaustion they feel is about the work. Usually when we get into it, it's the performance they're tired of. Not the service. The gap.

The ones who've been doing it longest have usually figured out a way to make the performance and the self close enough together that it stops feeling like a costume. The ones who haven't figured that out yet are spending energy on both.

Philip's arc in the show is mostly about what happens when the role doesn't need the self you had before it. He had a clear identity before the marriage — a career he was good at, actual standing in it. Then the marriage made that identity ornamental. The role didn't ask him to become someone else. It just had no use for him as-is.

There's a difference between being asked to change and being made irrelevant.

Most people who call themselves leaders are just the last ones to give up.

Big Ticket Copywriting is $97. Part of what it covers is how to talk about what you're actually doing in a way that's honest about the gap — what you bring, what you don't, what the client is actually hiring. That clarity is most of what premium positioning is. Not inflating the role. Getting specific enough about what's real inside it that the price makes sense.

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— Brandyn

Draft notes (for Brandyn review)