TV Shows

‘The Diplomat’ Review: Keri Russell Toplines Netflix’s Smart and Diverting Political Drama

The eight-episode series from creator Debora Cahn centers on the newly installed American ambassador to Great Britain.

In a January interview with The New Yorker, Netflix executives referred to the company’s ideal programming as a “gourmet cheeseburger,” a partial intersection of quality and commerce that didn’t quite seem to align with most of the brand’s latest output.

After a somewhat fallow period, Netflix has had a strong recent run with The Night Agent (doubtlessly a cheeseburger, probably not gourmet) and Beef (doubtlessly gourmet, probably not a cheeseburger), but it’s the streamer’s new drama, The Diplomat, that comes closest to feeling like the elusive gourmet cheeseburger to me.

Airdate: Thursday, April 20 (Netflix)
Cast: Keri Russell, Rufus Sewell, Ato Essandoh, Ali Ahn, David Gyasi, Nana Mensah
Creator: Debora Cahn

The Diplomat is easily accessible and quantifiable. It could be a spinoff from Homeland or Madam Secretary, and I can imagine a dozen networks and services where The Diplomat could feel on-brand.

It’s a pure star vehicle for Keri Russell and, if we’re comparing The Diplomat to other shows, as a portrait of a marriage that’s intensely collaborative, probably to a toxic degree, it has hints of FX’s The Americans.

It has some of the beach/airplane-read appeal of The Night Agent, only with a bit more talkative nuance and performance depth, but not so much that viewers looking for a fast-paced eight-hour escape will be alienated.

Created by Debora Cahn (an executive producer of Homeland), The Diplomat begins with an explosion on a British aircraft carrier in Middle Eastern waters. The attack, initially unclaimed, kills dozens of British sailors and escalates the possibility of global conflict. But with whom?

Russell plays Kate Wyler, who has spent her life in the military and foreign service and is days away from a new high-stakes posting in Kabul when she’s summoned by the president (Michael McKean, in a juicy guest role) to serve as ambassador to the United Kingdom. It’s normally a boondoggle assignment given to glad-handing fundraisers, lots of tea parties and ribbon cutting, but in this situation it could be far more critical. Kate thinks the president really wants her husband, Hal (Rufus Sewell), an internationally recognized foreign policy expert with ambassadorial experience, but Hal’s renegade attitude has burned a lot of bridges, particularly with the ambitious secretary of state (Miguel Sandoval). Plus, various powerful people have their eyes on Kate for a bigger job and are eager to see how she performs in this spotlight.

Soon, with Hal as a reluctant ceremonial spouse, Kate is in London under the watchful eye of so-called kingmaker Stuart (Ato Essandoh), learning the ins and outs of an unexpectedly complicated gig that includes careful management of the British prime minister (Rory Kinnear) and foreign secretary (David Gyasi), as well as the occasional odious gala and photo shoot. It’s the story of a woman thrust into a job she doesn’t want, with responsibilities she isn’t qualified for, which may make her the perfect woman for the job.

The series is superb at exploring the context of diplomacy. Cahn’s background as a writer-producer on The West Wing serves her tremendously well when it comes to illustrating elements of protocol in ways that are at once expositional and dramatic. The show is deeply invested in the optics of a position that, in a different moment, might be all optics. It’s a job at the intersection of politics and hospitality, so Kate has to learn day-to-day lessons on how much power she does or doesn’t have, which people she’s allowed to call directly, what intermediaries are acceptable and just how many simple things can instigate an uproar.

Everything in The Diplomat gives the impression of being thoroughly researched and accurately reproduced — production designer Chris Roope’s re-creation of locations like ambassadorial residence Winfield House and the American embassy in London is exceptional — without ever letting accuracy supersede entertainment.

It’s a balance that isn’t always as well achieved in the show’s overall, driving narrative. The aircraft carrier bombing, with the responsibility to respond and the question of whom to blame, is quite literally the stuff of a dozen West Wing episodic plots, only it’s stretched here to eight hours, requiring a series of red herrings and redundant misadventures that I tired of around episode five or six.

I also never warmed to the show’s glib approach to the “real world,” wherein the semi-generic instigating event has to exist alongside references to the intelligence failings that led to our 2003 invasion of Iraq, oblique references to an unpredictable recent president who jeopardized our international standing and the not-as-clever-as-they-think-it-is situation with an old and possibly doddering president who selected a younger, female vice president only to begin to question her qualifications for succession.

In lieu of exactly nailing its plot, though, The Diplomat completely nails its relationships, a rather important thing given that diplomacy is, after all, relationship-based.

It all starts with Russell’s Kate, a thoroughly considered and expertly played character who may be a fish out of water, but is the smartest darned fish going. Russell and the series are committed to Kate’s messiness, whether that’s explored in an entire episode centered on her increasing dishevelment as she travels back and forth around the world trying to avert a catastrophe, or in little details like how bathroom breaks play a bigger role in The Diplomat than any show I can remember. The Diplomat has an impeccable understanding of genre tropes, and it isn’t above a total She’s All That staircase glamour reveal or a delightfully goofy fight scene if those conventions can be tweaked to tell us new things about Kate and her strengths and weaknesses. Russell fiercely captures Kate’s discomfort and her intellect in a way that never lets viewers forget how simultaneously right and wrong she is for the situation into which she’s been thrust.

Speaking of believability, Russell and Sewell, boasting one of those American accents that’s perfect at room temperature and melts away completely under pressure, have the right chemistry to sell this marriage of complementary ambitions and accommodations, one in which the sex might be good, the conversation better, and the whole union a recipe for disaster. Russell and Gyasi have their own instant chemistry that’s simple and visceral and a good contrast to the Kate-Hal union.

The Diplomat is a series in which the two characters with the most superficial power are white men — Kinnear and McKean present as bumbling oafs, but quickly give their characters surprising and efficient depth — and it’s left for everybody else to negotiate their place either at the proverbial table or in a back room. That process of negotiation is conveyed visually by the show’s quartet of directors — Simon Cellan Jones, Andrew Bernstein, Liza Johnson and Alex Graves — in the way the camera dances between characters and flits through cramped hallways and expansive ballrooms. Yes, the series might be, on the surface, about characters trying to prevent World War III, but my favorite hour was a bottle episode, kinda, focusing on the ins and outs of a high-profile lunch at which everybody has a different agenda.

The substantive, clever and playfully profane dialogue make it so that extended scenes with characters like Kate, Ali Ahn’s CIA chief of station, Nana Mensah’s White House chief of staff and the great Celia Imrie as a notorious power broker taking the measure of one another are the best and most tense in the series. Essandoh is excellent as the man entrusted with connecting all these political pieces, Henry Higgins to Kate’s Eliza Doolittle one moment, ineptly baffled the next.

I like shows of this type most when they have the confidence to actually be about protocol and procedure without narrative lily-gilding, and The Diplomat offers plenty of protocol and procedure to go around. The series leans a little more than I would like into the perfunctory and escalating thrills of the plot, reaching a contrived cliffhanger that I’m weirdly confident will be poorly resolved. At the same time, I want to see how it’s resolved because The Diplomat makes it clear that Kate and the audience still have a lot to learn about this world. Who doesn’t enjoy a good cheeseburger?

 

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www.hollywoodreporter.com
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