And you thought this year’s Oscars were exciting! On Tuesday, days before the premiere of Feud: Bette and Joan, FX announced that it has ordered a second season of _Ryan Murphy’s latest anthology—a 10-episode limited series officially titled Feud: Charles and Diana. It’s news designed to delight anybody with a yen for wealth, royalty, juicy behind-the-scenes stories, and 80s/90s nostalgia. So pretty much everyone, then.
Though the network’s release does not provide any additional details—beyond the fact that the series will be co-written and executive produced by Murphy and Jon Robin Baitz, who’s also currently working on Murphy’s Katrina: American Crime Story—its title indicates that it will take a deep dive into the complicated relationship between Charles, Prince of Wales, and his first wife, the late Lady Diana Spencer—mother of William and Harry. The pair married in 1981, formally separated in 1992, and were officially divorced in 1996. One year later, Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris.
Diana has remained an ongoing object of fascination in the nearly 20 years since her death; she’s been the topic of multiple books, television programs, and movies, including 2013’s Diana (where she was portrayed by Naomi Watts) and 2006’s Oscar-winning The Queen, which focused on the royal family’s reaction to Diana’s death. Netflix’s The Crown, which premiered last fall and will chart the British royal family over the course of six planned seasons, also expects to focus on Charles and Diana in Seasons 4 and 5.
Since the massive success of 2016’s celebrated The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, Murphy has made a habit of developing limited series that take a fictionalized look at some of recent history’s most talked-about events. He’s following O.J. with three planned Crime Story installments: Katrina, which will star Annette Bening as former Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco and Matthew Broderick as former FEMA director Michael Brown; Versace, which will feature Édgar Ramírez as the slain designer and Darren Criss as the man who killed him; and Lewinsky, which will focus on Bill Clinton’s presidential sex scandal and subsequent impeachment.
The first installment of Feud, starring American Horror Story mainstay Jessica Lange as Joan Crawford and Susan Sarandon as her legendary rival, Bette Davis, will premiere Sunday. Season 2 is coming in 2018.
