The Diplomat, a taut and popular Netflix thriller which first aired in April 2023, returns to the screen for a second season on 31 October. It is cute timing for a drama based on American foreign policy, just five days before the United States votes for its next president, choosing between a feel-good but flimsy campaign by Vice-President Kamala Harris and the brooding restoration of the Republican Party’s loose cannon-in-chief, former president Donald Trump.
The first season of showrunner Debora Cahn’s tale of a US ambassador in London entertained audiences and won plaudits for Keri Russell’s performance as the titular envoy, Kate Wyler. It was not a meticulously researched, doggedly accurate portrayal of the way foreign policy is executed: The Financial Times was at its most po-faced when it lamented that the show “spurns the opportunity to provide a considered look at international relations in favour of a generic and improbably-plotted yarn”. The Guardian’s world affairs editor Julian Borger was in similarly not-angry-just-disappointed spirits, sighing that The Diplomat “carries on a long tradition of shows that put a foreign policy focus in the title, and then veer completely off into something that has nothing or little to do with actual diplomacy”.
In other news, The Crown isn’t a documentary, and Peaky Blinders takes some liberties with the history of Birmingham in the aftermath of the First World War. Anyone who expected eight episodes of brow-furrowing exposition on international relations and geopolitics was bound to be disappointed, but that same person also would have walked away without a commission from Netflix. Yes, The Diplomat presented some inaccuracies, foreshortenings and improbabilities, but it was a drama, and one with ambitions for a mass audience. That it reached Netflix’s global top 10 for four weeks, with 173.46 million hours of viewing, suggests it got something right.
The show’s second season comes into a world perhaps more intense than the first. The relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom is currently very much in the headlines, especially since the election of a new Labour government in London, though the stiff, stilted Sir Keir Starmer bears little resemblance to his fictional counterpart, Nicol Trowbridge (played with unbounded Machiavellian relish by Rory Kinnear).
Worth noting is the arrival of a female vice-president, Grace Penn, in the shape of West Wing legend Allison Janney, just as the real-life female vice-president hopes to take that last leap for women in American politics to the Oval Office. David Gyasi’s black foreign secretary, Austin Dennison, now mirrors incumbent David Lammy, born in London to Guyanese parents, though Dennison’s crackling, flirtatious chemistry with Ambassador Wyler may be more intense than the relationship between Lammy and the real United States envoy Jane Hartley.
While American politics may be front and centre as The Diplomat returns, it suffers from a high-profile international situation it could not hope to reflect or absorb: in reality, the major stories are the ongoing war in Ukraine, Israel’s military operations in Gaza and the ever-present and challenging relationship between China and the West. Viewers will have to take a conscious step into an alternative reality, although season one’s background of a looming confrontation with Iran in the Persian Gulf, the murky involvement of Russian mercenary groups and recriminations from events in Afghanistan will seem piquantly familiar and authentic.
The narrative is not all high-minded foreign affairs. The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes described the first season of The Diplomat as “highly bingeable” and “soapy”, which is neither wholly unfair nor wholly derogatory. One of the highlights was the dynamic of the ambassador’s marriage to fellow Foreign Service officer Hal Wyler, an excellent and moody Rufus Sewell: having served as ambassador to Lebanon, he was adjusting, or trying to adjust, to the status of spouse and the combination of sharpness, exasperation and love between Russell and Sewell was convincing and compelling.
Skulduggery trumps skuldrudgery
Equally, political skulduggery, if well scripted, is always a rich seam for thrillers. In a sense the context is secondary, simply set dressing to provide plausible colour, whether it is the high-stakes, quickfire sparring of The West Wing or the discomforting pseudo-reality of paper company Wernham Hogg in Ricky Gervais’s and Stephen Merchant’s note-perfect The Office. So, the interplay between Vice-President Penn and Ambassador Wyler, the delicacy of Anglo-American relations and the ongoing storms of the ambassador’s marriage all promise absorbing drama played out by first-rate actors.
Making drama out of diplomacy is hard. David Mitchell and Robert Webb played it for laughs as British diplomats in the fictional Tazbekistan in BBC2’s Ambassadors (2013) and produced a well-crafted and clever comedy but it was not expected to offer hyper-accuracy. The BBC/Alibi series The Diplomat, which aired a mere seven weeks before its Netflix namesake and rival, was praised for its depth and sensitivity, with Sophie Rundle especially good as Laura Simmonds, British consul in Barcelona. But it also drew criticism for a lack of reality in the lead character’s role, and was inevitably overshadowed by its big-budget American counterpart.
The BBC has entered these lists before. In 1998, Russell Lewis, whose screenwriting credits included The Bill, Taggart, Between the Lines and Kavanagh QC, created The Ambassador, which starred Pauline Collins as a newly appointed British envoy to Ireland. The first series was broadcast in January and February 1998, in the midst of multi-party talks in Northern Ireland which would lead to the concluding of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement that April.
Collins gave a sympathetic performance as Harriet Smith, establishing herself in her new role while dealing with the death of her husband in a car bomb attack meant for her; Denis Lawson was reliably excellent as John Stone, ostensibly the commercial attaché at the embassy in Dublin but in reality the Secret Intelligence Service’s head of station with whom Smith has a long history; and the inevitable and inimitable T.P. McKenna made an appearance as Taoiseach Healy, all twinkle and menace in a performance heavily influenced by real-life former Irish prime minister Charles Haughey.
Diplomats have otherwise tended to be supporting characters. The first season of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing introduced British ambassador to Washington Lord John Marbury, Roger Rees in a scenery-chewing performance as an eccentric aristocrat who nonetheless possesses deep foreign policy wisdom. Oddly, the greatest prevalence of fictional ambassadors seems to be in science fiction: in the Star Wars universe, Queen Padmé of Naboo, Senator Bail Organa and Princess Leia are all portrayed as accredited diplomats, as is Spock’s father Sarek in Star Trek.
(Sharp minds may recall that Gregory Peck’s character in 1976’s The Omen was the United States ambassador in London, but his diplomatic skills were largely irrelevant when faced with the Antichrist.)
In reality, diplomats are rarely colourful, outlandish figures at the forefront of the action. More often they are cerebral, deliberate but rather bloodless figures like Sir David Manning, Tony Blair’s man in Washington after the Iraq War, or Lord Ricketts, ambassador to France in the 2010s. There are very good reasons for this: foreign policy is largely the result of slow, detailed, painstaking negotiation and compromise, splitting differences, trading one word for another. It is not inherently a dramatic process, even if the outcomes can be ground-breaking.
Successful writers and showrunners understand that political drama is set against a background of politics rather than using it as its principal theme. This has been true from Michael Dobbs’s dazzling House of Cards and Danish classic Borgen through CBS stalwart Madam Secretary and ABC’s Designated Survivor to The Diplomat itself. Even The West Wing, for many the liberal dream of high-minded public service, relied more on a superb cast and pin-sharp dialogue than its earnest examinations of foreign interventionism, the influence of evangelical Christianity and immigration policy.
The Diplomat will stand or fall on the quality of the writing from Debora Cahn and her team, and the ability of its thoroughly bankable stars to turn those scripts into compelling drama. It will undoubtedly show an idealised or simplified version of how international politics works, and real diplomats and politicians will shake their heads and explain why it’s not like that. Audiences, however, understand that television drama and the news are separate beasts and treat them separately. While global events may sharpen our appetites for presidents, prime ministers and ambassadors, in the end we are always looking for the same thing: a believable and engaging portrayal of human behaviour.
Image top – Netflix
