Newsletter | The Diplomat: You Won't Get Wholly Attaché-d To Keri Russell's Netflix Drama

This column was originally published as part of our newsletter The Daily Show on April 27, 2023. Subscribe here. (We're awesome about not spamming your inbox!)

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KERI RUSSELL is back. And I’m thrilled and thankful. Five years after brilliantly and beautifully playing one half of a couple of KGB spies — along with Matthew Rhys — deep undercover in The Americans, she’s now back on our screens in Netflix’s The Diplomat. In this eight-episode thriller, she plays the role of a newly appointed US ambassador to the UK, who still hasn’t left behind her get-things-done attitude from her previous posting in the Middle East. This new job is also the testing ground for her potential bump up into another, more significant role in the government.

Besides Russell, there are other big names attached to this series: Debora Cahn, a writer and producer on The West Wing and Homeland; Rufus Sewell, from The Pale Horse and so many other memorable roles; and Rory Kinnear, who previously also played a TV prime minister in Black Mirror; and the creepily good Celia Imrie from The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel film series, The Bridget Jones film series, Calendar Girls, Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie, Finding Your Feet and Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again.

But, how do I put this diplomatically? The Diplomat’s sum isn’t greater than all of its parts.

While it promises to allow us a peek into the little known workings of international diplomacy and the glamour that covers the grime of politics, it doesn’t deliver. We follow Kate Wyler (Russell), a black suit-loving career civil servant, who alone can prevent the world from going to war again, after a British aircraft carrier is bombed in the Gulf. She will find the solution to tensions between the UK, the US and Iran, which is suspected of carrying out this act of war. Nevermind that she’s got no ambassadorial experience at all. The Diplomat reminds us that American bullish bluster is still alive and well. So, of course, any inexperienced American — much like the bevy of international beauty queens past, present and future — can broker world peace.

The path for Kate seems clear but the obstacles in her way don’t seem to be (about) learning the tightrope walk of international diplomacy — she seems to ignore and disregard every bit of advice given to her by her staff and subordinates. The real hurdles are an angry, populist British prime minister (Kinnear); and Kate’s husband Hal Wyler (Sewell), a recently decommissioned diplomat and former ambassador with greater political ambitions than being the supportive spouse. Within the first week of taking up the job of US ambassador, they both trip her up: one threatens the enemy with “hellfire”, the other makes moves that might get her fired.

In The Americans, Russell and Rhys’ relationship was the real story at the heart of six superlative seasons. The tensions within their enforced marriage, the realness of having children, being parents to them, and their loyalty to their home country seem to be the butterfly flapping its wings that could cause a tornado on the other side of the world. In The Diplomat, the distrust between the Wylers (Russell and Sewell) feels heavy-handed and false. I can’t entirely stomach the idea of them being married and still distrusting each other so much. But they are on-track for a divorce, which might never happen. It feels like Kate spends most of each episode either trying to muzzle Hal, domesticate him or shut him down. It seems impossible for him not to constantly move-and-shake instead of simply picking out art for the wall of the ambassador’s residences. Kate was a good wife to him, but Hal sucks.

The gaping plot holes and handholding makes it feel like the writers and showrunners haven’t read a newspaper or watched a news channel in the past decade. And who can blame them? News media outlets all over the world have been muzzled, domesticated and shut down quite successfully. But Keri Russell blooms and grows like a lotus from the muck; she finds the many softer notes within the one-note annoyance of her character. While Kate Wyler could easily be just an ambitious, bitchy career woman — not a bad thing at all, by the way — Russell manages to make something so much more than that of the role. As do all of the actors too. If I’m very annoyed at the end of binge-watching eight episodes in one evening, it is because of the final episode, which has a minimum of three cliffhangers — and none that make any sense at all, even within the logic of the show. Hopefully, The Diplomat’s next season will maintain this same crackling pace, the good acting, the moving between indecipherable politicking and familiar rom-com tropes — but this time, with much, much better writing.