As in Season 1, it’s soap opera presented with intelligence, taste and high production values, and it’s a pleasure to watch, though the pleasure is perhaps more lulling than it is exciting or truly moving. A reader, complaining when I left the first season of “The Crown” out of my year-end Top 10 list of international shows, described it simply as “impeccable.” That’s exactly its virtue — every detail in place, every idea accounted for.

That virtue flows from the show’s creator, Peter Morgan, who does most of the writing. In his screenplays for the films “The Queen” (2006) and “Frost/Nixon” (2008), he demonstrated a superior ability for fictionalizing history in smart, interesting and credible ways, and that continues in “The Crown.”

He’s not the most dynamic of dramatists, however, and what made those films special was casting — Helen Mirren and Michael Sheen in “The Queen,” Mr. Sheen and Frank Langella in “Frost/Nixon.” He needs great actors to put his words in motion, to supply the emotions underlying the history.

In the first season of “The Crown,” he had a great actor, John Lithgow, who enlivened things considerably with his shambling, towering presence as Winston Churchill (even if he probably wasn’t quite right for the role). Season 2 misses Mr. Lithgow, as well as Jared Harris, who played Elizabeth’s father, George VI.