Joy Behar challenges Judi Dench over The Crown letter: 'If you have a brain,' you won't think it's real

A queen on the royal court of daytime talk has challenged a noble British dame over issues regarding Netflix's upcoming season of The Crown.

After Oscar-winning actress Dame Judi Dench called for the show's fifth season to include a disclaimer warning audiences that the show was a work of dramatized fiction, The View panelist Joy Behar spoke out against the performer's scathing critique.

"This dame disagrees with Dame Judi Dench, because they tell you at the top that it is not a documentary, and if you have a brain, you can figure out that the writers have used history," Behar said on Thursday's episode of the ABC program. "And if it's documented history, then we can believe it, but we're not going to believe a conversation that's going on in the bedroom of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. Nobody was there but the two of them, so you don't believe that part. But the historical part, you believe."

The View moderator Whoopi Goldberg countered, saying that she felt Dench's statement focused more on plotlines following Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce) having an affair that reportedly never happened.

"He had several affairs, apparently, but not this one," Behar joked in response. The pair's cohost, Sunny Hostin, however, agreed with Dench.

"I do think a little disclaimer would be really perfect, thank you. I will say this, one of the pushback that they're getting is about Lady Diana's death... they're not going to show what really happened, but I think we all remember how tragic that was, and history is ugly sometimes, and I don't think there's a problem showing it," Hostin said, referencing Elizabeth Debicki's role as the late princess, who died in a car crash in 1997. "I think that storyline in particular, that people are saying you can't show her death is almost bastardizing history. It's something we should never forget what happened to Princess Diana."

Dench's open letter praised the series as a "brilliant but fictionalised account of events," though she feared that "a significant number of viewers, particularly overseas, may take its version of history as being wholly true. This is both cruelly unjust to the individuals and damaging to the institution they represent."

She also pointed to the recent death of Queen Elizabeth II (portrayed by Imelda Staunton in new episodes of the show) as reason for the production to be extra sensitive in how it portrays the family.

"I'll say that Peter [Morgan] and the entire crew of this job do their utmost to really handle everything with such sensitivity and truth and complexity, as do actors," Debicki recently told EW of the show's handling of true events. "The amount of research and care and conversations and dialogue that happen over, from a viewer's perspective, something probably that you would never ever notice is just immense. From that very first meeting [with] Peter, I knew that I'd entered into this space where this was taken seriously [in] a deeply caring way. So that's my experience of the show."

The Crown season 5 premieres Nov. 9 on Netflix.

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