The smartest decision that Netflix’s marketing department made within the rollout of the Emmy-winning political drama series The Diplomat is to, from Season 2 forwards, debut the show weeks before a major national election. It’s acknowledges the superficiality of courting “realism.” The Diplomat is more of a soap opera than a calculated political thriller in the vein of The Americans, which also starred Keri Russell, but there’s nothing in the series that’s more unbelievable than most of what has occurred over the last 10 years. The characters in The Diplomat are scheming, whip-smart strategists whose pursuit of their self-interests are opaque enough to string out eight episodes per season; to sacrifice the blunt incompetence of contemporary world leaders may have cost The Diplomat some authenticity, but it’s the price that had to be paid to make an entertaining show.
The Diplomat was created by Debora Cahn, previously a writer on The West Wing and Homeland, and the series has split the difference between those two. There’s a strong presence of the banter that had made The West Wing engaging, but Aaron Sorkin’s idealism and faith in the system are absent; while The Diplomat has delved into the same global paranoia that drove Homeland, it hasn’t been so exploitative as to manically latch on to every recent headline. The Diplomat is about the fragmented relationship between America and Britain, at a time in which both have shifted as world leaders. Although global crises in The Diplomat move faster than in reality, the show has avoided getting into the debates that dominate political news.
A lot has changed since the first season, in which Russell’s Kate Wyler, the newly-appointed United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom, is groomed for a position of greater influence by her husband, Hal (Rufus Sewell), a far more divisive ambassador who represented America in negotiations with Iraq and Lebanon. Kate was shaped as a possible running mate for the Biden-esque President Bill Rayburn (Michael McKean), an quixotic moderate overwhelmed by a belligerent Russian administration, but his death via a heart attack left his Vice President Grace Hagen Penn (Alison Janney) in the White House. Despite the obvious comparisons, Penn’s a far more engaged and forceful commander-in-chief than a potential Kamala Harris presidency would’ve been; she’s also shrewd and nasty, which is in opposition to Janney’s role as C.J. Cregg in The West Wing.
The shock that ended the third season was that Penn selected Hal, not Kate, to be her new Vice President, a decision that’s explained by his involvement in the recovery of a Poseidon nuclear weapon aboard a Russian submarine in British waters. The internal outrage isn’t out of virtue-signaling concerns that America couldn’t handle two women in power, but that Penn and Kate were involved in a deception to leave their allies in the dark; Kate, the late President Rayburn, and the loud-mouthed U.K. Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) were all ignorant of a plot that would provoke the Russians were they to find out that their ship was sunk by American drones, who also stole its superweapon. Britain would come off as the scapegoat in this situation, which is why The Diplomat is smart to frame Trowbridge as a narcissistic nitwit in the vein of Boris Johnson. Trowbridge doesn’t have real power, but he has access to information that’s of value, given that most of The Diplomat’s fourth season is set on U.K. soil.
The most significant connection to The Americans isn’t the knotty political subtext, but the exploration of a marriage through the lens of patriotic duty. Kate and Hal are engaging because they share a degree of realness, and don’t desire power; while neither wants to be the public face of the nation, the difference is that Kate is aware that Hal is too good of a spinster to be put in close quarters with the President, whereas he has always believed that she should be in office. Season 4 of The Diplomat is the most intimate because it's contained to secure locations in the aftermath of a crisis situation. Kate and Hal theoretically have the same goals, but the test is to see how Machiavellian Penn really is; this is complicated by the presence of her smooth-talking husband, Todd, played by Janney’s West Wing co-star Bradley Whitford.
The fourth season of The Diplomat is culminated by the best episode that the show has ever delivered with “Warships.” Although the show’s early run may have needed an explosion every few episodes to keep the Netflix algorithm turning, it became a savvier examination of what public gestures do to exacerbate international relations. Rather than a bickering duo trapped in a constant cycle of one-upmanship, Hal and Kate have transformed into two long-suffering public servants whose disagreements come down to a matter of what should be disclosed; there’s a conscious effort to ensure that Hal isn’t as cold, and that Kate no longer has any wide-eyed optimism. The one thing The Diplomat doesn’t have an interest in is the discourse that would follow any of the deliberate breaches in protocol that are committed in nearly every episode.