Netflix’s Season 4 of The Crown: inside stories

Above : Emma Corrin and Josh O’Connor star as Princess Diana and Prince Charles in Season 4 of the Netflix series “The Crown.” (Photo: Netflix)

We Americans have always been obsessed with the British royal family. If you doubt this, pay more attention the next time you’re standing in a grocery-store checkout lane.

Some magazine or other will no doubt be featuring something about Prince Harry and Meghan or any of the other Windsors (even outcast Prince Andrew).

And this is especially true now that Netflix is showing Season 4 of its series “The Crown.”

My late brother Randy was a Brit-royal scholar, one who from the age of 10 could rattle off the succession of English monarchs. It was to please him that my wife and I began watching the Netflix series.

Pretty soon, though, we became hooked ourselves. And though my brother passed on more than a year and a half ago, we’ve continued to watch – on occasion wishing he were still around both to enjoy what Netflix is presenting but also to answer questions that we have.

We ended up googling Lord Mountbatten (played in Seasons 1 and 2 by Greg Wise , 3 and 4 by Charles Dance ) just to see what his connection was to Prince Philip (played by Matt Smith in Seasons 1 and 2, Tobias Menzies in 3 and 4).

My brother could have explained everything in a single breath.

He definitely would have enjoyed a feature I found on IMDb.com that has three members of the cast reflecting on Season 4 and the characters they play, from Prince Charles ( Josh O’Connor ) and Princess Diana ( Emma Corrin ) to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ( Gillian Anderson ). Or the longer feature you can see in the embed below.

If you’re a fan of “The Crown,” you might appreciate them, too.

If not, next time you go grocery shopping, avert your eyes from the magazine rack.