The Crown, like the people whose lives it so lavishly depicts, is quite comfortable in its wealth. Said to be Netflix’s most expensive series to date—costing north of $100 million—The Crown has tailored itself beautifully, abundant with upper-crust fashion and luxe shots of castles and horses and grounds. As is also true of the British royals, the show can be a bit stuffy in all that fanciness, its stiff opulence sometimes masking a dearth of personality. But largely, The Crown is a stately success, alluring and easily digested, as high-end as anything can get without being profound.

The first season of this ambitious series, which has plans for five more seasons, takes place largely in the 1950s. We watch Elizabeth, played with poise and pinch by the marvelous Claire Foy, marry her beloved, Philip Mountbatten (Matt Smith, dashing and vaguely sinister), and plan for a long life as a Navy wife until she eventually ascends the throne. That day comes much sooner than expected, though, when Elizabeth is just 25. Her father, King George VI (made effectively ill by Jared Harris), dies of lung cancer, and the life that Elizabeth and Philip had planned for ceases to be a possibility. Heavy hangs the head on The Crown, which spends much of its first 10 episodes watching Elizabeth be educated in the ways of duty and tradition, often at the expense of those she loves.

The most emotional arc on the series belongs to Elizabeth’s sister, Princess Margaret, played by Vanessa Kirby, an up-and-coming talent who effortlessly commands most every scene she’s in. Her role is flashier than Foy’s, certainly, so she has that advantage over her co-star. But Kirby—who was so smashing onstage as another overshadowed sister, Stella in the Gillian Anderson–starring Streetcar Named Desire—radiates something innately powerful. I believe it was once called star quality. Anyway, she’s one to watch. As Margaret’s doomed romance with Peter Townsend (Ben Miles) unfolds, hampered by pesky things like divorce, Kirby lends a much-needed flare of drama, a sad glamour, to the muted proceedings.

Margaret’s matters of church are balanced out with problems of state, in the form of John Lithgow’s lumbering Winston Churchill. It’s an inflected, weighty performance that, despite its outsize-ness, yields some nice results. Beyond its more intimate study of personal duty, The Crown is a broader look at post–W. W. II Britain, both its eagerness to return to the sturdy empire that existed before, and its drive to move into the future as a modern nation. Churchill, with his steadfast, haughty conservatism, is a bellowing defender of the old ways, a man raging against his own mortality as much as he is lamenting the quaking of the Commonwealth. Lithgow plays the wounded, principled statesman well, particularly in scenes with Foy and with Stephen Dillane, who makes a beguiling cameo as a portrait painter in one episode.

That Churchill is given this kind of shading—both lionized and critiqued—stands in stark contrast to the credulous way the royals are handled. The Crown is timid about its subjects, giving them human dimensions, but denying us a truly full picture. Where, for example, is the sex? Elizabeth’s children, Charles and Anne, are glimpsed on occasion, but rarely and never for very long. Perhaps that’s a reality of how royal children are raised, stowed away somewhere where they won’t interrupt or interfere. But the children’s absence on the show sometimes seems almost bashful, as if writer Peter Morgan keeps them out of the picture lest the audience be reminded that the Queen of England has had sex at least twice.