Media Archaeology and the Aesthetic and Textural Features of (Trans)National Memory: The Crown (2016-2023) As Case Study

Abstract

This article argues that Netflix’s premium original series The Crown (2016–2023) exemplifies a strategy by which the platform positions itself as the latest technological successor in an ongoing history of televisual memory production. Drawing on media archaeology, the analysis proceeds on two registers. At the textual level, the drama stages the history of broadcast ing technology as itself constitutive of historical consciousness, making television’s centrality to collective memory-making a self-aware and recurring preoccupation. At the technical level, Netflix’s deployment of digital production technologies – VFX fabrication, the artificial ageing of footage, uncompressed archival preservation – actively acknowledges, interrogates and transforms the prosthetic memory produced by the historical broadcasts it remediates. Comparing the BBC’s 1953 Coronation broadcast and The Crown as structurally analogous yet institutionally opposed moments of televisual memory-making, the article demonstrates that cultural memory in the streaming era is materially produced not only through visual ae sthetics but through platform infrastructure itself.