Amid an international crisis in The Diplomat, Keri Russell juggles her high-profile job as ambassador to the UK and a turbulent marriage. Russell’s new star role is in keeping with her cleverness and versatility, writes Cat Woods – even if the show struggles in its early episodes.
The Diplomat: Season 1
Keri Russell has seemingly been in everything, everywhere all at once in recent times. From Cocaine Bear on the big screen to Extrapolations on streaming, she’s been flexing her multi-genre adaptability in style. However, not since her Golden Globe Award-winning role as the titular character in Felicity, which ran over four seasons between 1998 and 2002, has Russell played the solo lead role in a series. As Kate Wyler in The Diplomat, her subtle, intelligent approach to portraying complicated women is more than welcome.
However, it takes at least four episodes for The Diplomat to fully utilise Russell as its foundational character. The first few episodes are clunky, with the creators seemingly unsure if they’re making a comedy, a divorce drama or a political intrigue. Once her tiresome and manipulative husband Hal is shunted to a background character and Kate becomes the sole protagonist, there’s a snappiness to the dialogue, a nice cadence to the story and we can appreciate the growing alliance between Kate, Stuart (Ato Essandoh) and Eidra (Ali Ahn).
Over the last decade, Russell’s film and TV credentials have steadily accrued and she has explored genre films, arthouse and political dramas. The latter proved to be a natural fit for the clever, versatile actor. As Elizabeth Jennings in six seasons of The Americans, Russell gave us a complicated woman and one with conflicted motives and agendas. She gave us, in short, the type of woman we need more of on the small screen: defiant and vulnerable, sexy and nurturing, a seductress, an assassin, a spy, and a suburban wife and mother.
The Diplomat allows her to call on the shifty, dualling loyalties she battled with in The Americans. Her conflict is not between Russia and her US-born children, though. In The Diplomat, she is battling imposter syndrome. While the US President (a thinly veiled version of Joe Biden) and her newly appointed staff are pushing her to accept the role of Vice President of the US, Kate is fearful that her broken marriage, plus the divorce she plans, will not augur well for a public figure.
Creator of The Diplomat Debora Cahn has crafted a character in Kate Wyler who is suitably conflicted, intelligent, prone to self-doubt and yet, when thrown in deep water, she is a woman who swims. A long-time international ambassador, most notably to Afghanistan, she is thrown into choppy water when the US government recruits her as the US ambassador to the UK right as an international crisis is taking place. Her husband sees an opportunity to regain some of the attention he once held as a distinguished diplomat, and he’s not above conjuring up catastrophes to gain some of the spotlight.
This is Kate’s story, though. She swears, she meets with the US President with her hair in a tangled mess and tells him that he’s vulnerable to manipulation due to his old age (“do people like you?” he responds), and she baulks at a wardrobe of stylist-picked outfits that clash with her desire to simply wear a black suit and be done with choices. She’s exactly the woman—flawed, human, intelligent and not interested in double-speak—that we want to see in the White House. And Parliament, frankly.
Veteran writer and producer Cahn has precedent for delivering complex, intriguing characters and storylines in Homeland, Grey’s Anatomy and The West Wing. Partnered with brilliant, brave actors who love rocky emotional terrain, Cahn is in her element. Homeland‘s Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) is still incomparable as both hero and antihero. Though viewers sided with her, we were sometimes as confused as Mathison was about her motivations for relationships or secretive missions. Cahn’s expertise is in making US politics and its allied security organisations sexy, thrilling and accessible to an international audience that doesn’t necessarily understand its specific protocols, structure and governance systems beyond the basic levels of command.
What we get in the first few episodes of The Diplomat is a version of good guy-bad guy in which the US and the UK are the noble, upstanding authorities of justice while Iran and Afghanistan are the baddies. Hypodermic needles, abduction, spying? Thankfully, by episode four, the shenanigans have dialled down and the intrigue and complicated alliances, false flags and social media trickery designed to bring international diplomats to the table dominates the plotline. And the divorce debate which threatens to sabotage the biggest job opportunity Kate has ever been given.
It’s not necessary to have a Masters of International Relations to enjoy The Diplomat. Over eight 50-minute episodes, Wyler’s journey from minor player to media-magnet political star involves a lot of salty swearing by Russell, which is always enjoyable. She’s equally good with physical comedy as she is with poker-faced, solemn situations.
It’s smarter and sassier than a lot of what’s streaming now, and though the first few episodes might have viewers hovering their trigger finger over the exit button, The Diplomat deserves to be given time to flourish and prove its depth and curious machinations. Even more so, Russell deserves to be seen and appreciated—despite the rocky beginning to the series, this is her star vehicle.
