Annie Sulzberger reflects on the work she and her team put into building a base for the Netflix series and why it's "frustrating" for the accuracy to be questioned.
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00:00 For you, the show has been called up
00:01 on its historical accuracy over the years,
00:03 and there's a lot of debate around
00:05 the way the show approaches the royal family
00:07 and their story, and I wondered,
00:09 for you as the head of research,
00:11 how does that feel, and how do you want to tackle that?
00:15 - The way that we've approached the show
00:16 has always remained the same,
00:17 so our tactics have never shifted.
00:19 We always start the outlining process from research.
00:24 That is how Peter has always intended
00:25 for the show to function,
00:26 and that's how we've done it from the beginning.
00:28 In the beginning, it was just five of us,
00:30 and two and a half of us were on research,
00:33 so you can tell where his emphasis was, really, at the start.
00:36 In the beginning, it felt so removed.
00:40 Nobody questioned it.
00:41 Those decisions, which have not been changed,
00:44 and those tactics that have not been changed,
00:46 it never really occurred to people,
00:49 like, oh, is this exactly how it happened,
00:52 or is this some creative license
00:54 because this is a fictional drama,
00:56 and Peter's decided to put his own spin on something,
01:00 and now that we've reached into collective memory,
01:03 which is as inaccurate, if not more, I would say,
01:08 than many of the decisions that we've ever made,
01:11 to stray from history, it's just become much harder
01:15 because you take Diana's death, for example.
01:18 Most people, their memories of that incident
01:22 stop with the information they received in 1997.
01:25 That's a very flawed place to stop
01:30 because it isn't until the inquiries
01:33 and the inquests are published in 2008,
01:35 they go all the way to 2008,
01:37 that we actually gained the information we needed
01:39 to recreate the events of 1997
01:41 because that's when witness testimonies were published.
01:44 That's when the Met Police vetted
01:47 the people who were telling their stories.
01:49 What we find is un-Google-able, I would say it.
01:52 We are knee-deep in National Archives research,
01:56 we have confidential sources,
01:58 we vet not only the kind of history,
02:01 but the source it comes from,
02:03 so we actively research the journalists who are reporting,
02:07 who their conduits of information are,
02:09 directly from the palace, or in this series,
02:12 the Fayyad family, for example.
02:13 When you see those particularly true and false
02:16 kind of articles, unfortunately, a lot of those are wrong
02:19 because they haven't done the depth of research
02:21 that we have been able to
02:23 by having five full-time researchers for 10 years.
02:25 [BLANK_AUDIO]