Suddenly, The Crown is everywhere, ushering popular culture away from The Real Housewives and lip-syncing children on Tik-Tok and inviting it, very politely, into a claustrophobically hot tea room in which everyone is wearing three overcoats and admiring an embroidered doily commemorating the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt.

Of course, I understand the lure of lush escapism, where the only class conflict is whether you have all the money or merely a huge amount of it. But that doesn’t explain why the current season seems to have outdone its three predecessors by taking on a life of its own beyond the conventional silo of streamed television...