The Diplomat

Folks, I need to apologize. The intersection of politics and pop culture is, I think we can generally agree, my beat on this blog, and in particular when it produces work that is head-scratching or ridiculous. But as I mentioned in my recent best TV of 2023 post, there are shows from last year that I’m still catching up with. One of them was Netflix’s hit from last spring, The Diplomat, in which Keri Russell plays the newly minted US ambassador to the UK, who is thrust into the middle of an international crisis. I only got around to watching it earlier this month, which is why I am a whole eight months late in saying, from the very bottom of my heart: what the actual fuck.

The Diplomat was created by Debora Cahn, one of the few writers to emerge from out of Aaron Sorkin’s shadow while he was overseeing The West Wing, and who has gone on to write and produce on other politics-adjacent shows like Homeland. In addition, there’s a very strong The Good Wife vibe to The Diplomat‘s premise, with Russell’s Kate Wyler constantly torn between relying on, and wanting to stand apart from, her husband Hal (Rufus Sewell), himself a former ambassador with a broad network of connections and an extremely loose sense of when and how it’s appropriate to stick his nose in international affairs. So going into The Diplomat, it’s easy to expect some intersection between those three shows, in which attractive, middle aged people wearing sumptuous suits and coats deliver rat-a-tat dialogue on matters of foreign policy while trading coded glances and conducting long-unconsummated emotional affairs.

Friends, it is all a lot crazier than that. For starters, Kate is a career foreign service officer who was preparing for an ambassadorial post in Afghanistan before being tapped for the UK position. As she herself points out, she is thoroughly unsuited to the job, which is usually a sinecure granted to major donors. But that’s fine, because concurrently with her receiving the appointment, a British Navy ship in the Persian gulf is attacked, seemingly by Iran, and Kate suddenly finds herself acting as the US’s chief diplomat at a point where the UK is mulling starting WWIII, trying to soothe the belligerence of the entitled, childish British PM (Rory Kinnear) while making common cause with his foreign secretary (David Gyasi) and juggling the political needs of the president (Michael McKean) and secretary of state (Miguel Sandoval).

This is, as I’m sure you’re aware, not at all how any of this works, which in itself might not have been a problem. Most television series tends to simplify the worlds they depict, collapsing whole departments into a single person and piling several different jobs on their shoulders. But as Kate almost instantly takes over the investigation into the attack on the British ship, calling on clandestine sources for information and trading speculation with Hal which is rooted in both their contacts in the Iranian regime, it eventually becomes clear that The Diplomat‘s very title is a misnomer. Or rather, that this show seems genuinely to think that the work of both diplomats and politicians can (should?) be replaced with the work of spies. Kate ends up hand-delivering intelligence to the foreign secretary and planning clandestine operations with him (which, of course, also enables them to start a flirtation), making end-runs around both their bosses and the democratic process with the justification that they’re trying to prevent a war.

To be clear, in a show with a different tone, and whose aesthetic and storytelling sensibility was not so clearly rooted in the West Wing–Homeland–Good Wife axis, this kind of plotting would be unremarkable. There is no shortage of stories about a single, renegade secret agent who is the only person qualified to save the world (see, for example, Netflix’s own The Night Agent). But The Diplomat presents itself as something serious and grounded, a story about the complex realities of navigating the interests of both individual leaders and whole nations, of balancing short-term political considerations with the long-term good of the world. In between Hal being kidnapped by spies and Kate witnessing the murder of the Iranian ambassador, it pauses to discuss Kate’s lingering trauma over her profession’s failure to prevent the Iraq War, her deputy’s (Ato Essandoh) disillusionment with politics after the Supreme Court ruling in the 2000 election, and Hal’s insistent belief in the power of diplomacy to resolve even the most entrenched and bloody conflicts.

(It is also a show that takes as a given the US’s role as world police, a disinterested observer merely trying to keep the peace. Which is obviously a bit hard to take right now, but I think would have been a tough pill to swallow last April as well.)

All of which casts a very different light on what is truly the most bonkers aspect of The Diplomat‘s premise, which has been left out of most of its promotional materials. Kate’s appointment, it turns out, is part of a longer game, hatched by the white house chief of staff (Nana Mensah) and Hal to get her named vice president. The current VP is about to be forced to resign due to scandal (in an underplayed but clearly significant beat, it is her husband who has done something scandalous). The idea is to burnish Kate’s credentials and give her a bit of publicity so that her name isn’t a completely unknown quantity (the amount of faith this places in the American public’s ability to identify their country’s foreign ambassadors is, perhaps, a tad misplaced), then appoint her to the position without having to go through a campaign. And then, the chief of staff says, “something might spark”.

Again, the issue here isn’t that this is ridiculous. It’s that it betrays the show’s fundamental contempt for politics and the political process, even as it pretends to be telling a story about them. Crucially, no one ever asks what Kate’s political opinions are, or whether she is even of the president’s party. Her attraction, it seems, is that making her VP will allow her to do the work of politics—which, we are assured, she will be exceptionally good at—without having to go through the process of campaigning and winning an election, which she clearly cannot do. “No one with the temperament to win a campaign should be in charge of anything,” Hal explains. “No one who likes power should have it.”

I would like to propose a corollary: no one who genuinely thinks this is a reasonable thing to say should be allowed to write about politics. What The Diplomat‘s vision boils down to is The West Wing‘s fondness for wonks, its genuine glee at the idea of smart people with a lot of knowledge and a calm, clear vision of the world coming together to make it a better place, but detached from that show’s profound love of democracy. It’s not just that Kate is running covert ops with the foreign secretary of another country without the knowledge or approval of either of their heads of state. It’s that according to this show, that is how all government should be run. People who do politics, meanwhile, can only get in the way, as when the secretary of state scuttles a plan Kate had come up with that would have sated the British public’s need for vengeance without triggering wider geopolitical fallout, because he’s planning to run for president and doesn’t want to give McKean’s character a win.

To be clear, I would not be so annoyed at The Diplomat‘s rotten core if it were not otherwise such a fun show to watch. It’s poised just at the perfect intersection between classy and thrilling to satisfy viewers, like myself, who think themselves too good for something like Jack Reacher or The Night Agent. It’s a streaming show, but made by people who cut their teeth on network TV, so it understands structure and pacing, cramming a simply astonishing amount of incident into every 50-minute episode while still giving them distinct arcs and identities. It’s a tremendous showcase for established character actors—Kinnear is playing Boris Johnson, but so charmingly that you almost find yourself agreeing with him—and those who have been too long overlooked—Essandoh, as a career embassy staffer who is initially dismissive of Kate and then starts to recognize her potential, is a revelation, quickly becoming my favorite part of the show. Its depiction of Kate and Hal’s marriage is complex and deliciously ambivalent—Hal is both fanatically loyal to Kate, and ruthlessly manipulative of her; it’s suggested, for example, that he joined the VP plan in order to keep her from divorcing him. By the end of the season I genuinely did not know whether I wanted them to reconcile, or for Kate to push him out a window. And perhaps most importantly, it’s funny, combining its fate-of-the-world stakes with pratfalls and misunderstanding humor that this stacked cast delivers with aplomb.

(My only complaint—though it is one that seriously marred my enjoyment of the season—is the broom’s-head travesty that is Kate’s hair. Remember how thick, lustrous, and shiny Russell’s hair was on The Americans, where she played a suburban mom who was constantly changing disguises? Well, on The Diplomat she plays a career foreign office employee who constantly looks as if she hasn’t washed her hair in a week and has recently walked through some bushes. The point, presumably, is to convey that Kate, despite looking like Keri Russell, does not care about her appearance. But why do I have to suffer for that.)

It’s precisely that skill in its execution, not to mention the pedigree of the people behind and in front of the camera, that is getting The Diplomat treated seriously as a work about politics, despite the absurdity of its storytelling (the first season ends with both an explosion and the revelation of a conspiracy that reaches all the way to the top) and its infuriating take on politics and power. By the time the season ended, I truly didn’t know whether I was more charmed or exasperated. I will definitely be there for the second season, but I suspect my reaction to it will be much the same as to the first: what the actual fuck.