Spoilers follow for the second season of The Diplomat, all six episodes of which debuted on Netflix on October 31.Â
Another season of The Diplomat is here, which means another opportunity for this show to try to convince us that a woman in her 40s has never heard of bobby pins and that this complete unawareness of practical living is a good thing. She’s too busy Making Tough Decisions, tapping international leaders’ cell phones, and thinking about how sad it would be if Europe slid into chaos like the Middle East to understand how to put her hair in a bun. Girls just want to break international law while failing at basic human hygiene, you know?
This is the problem with The Diplomat, yet again: It relies on girlbossing and neoliberal tropes to make a generic soap opera about political squabbling seem exciting and urgent. At least it’s consistent! Despite fewer episodes, Kate’s focus expands beyond the U.K.’s position on the world stage as she inches closer to the vice-presidency, and American imperialism and Allison Janney come into play in the most exhausting ways possible. Here, four more things The Diplomat does that I never want to see on TV again.
1.
The complicated marriage to the roguish husband
The Diplomat has always been half about international politics, half about the on-the-rocks marriage between Kate Wyler (Keri Russell), the American ambassador to the U.K., and her husband, Hal Wyler (Rufus Sewell), the former American ambassador to Lebanon. The switch in their dynamic, with Kate in an official position of power and Hal as her plus-one, causes much of the tension of the first season. Hal is not the titular diplomat, but he thinks he can still act like one, and after the Wylers postpone their divorce to present a stable front for Kate’s job, he badgers Kate with unwanted advice and goes behind her back to engineer situations ostensibly for her benefit. Hal’s a lot, but he loves Kate, and the show keeps asking us to judge whether all his shenanigans are worth it. Yes, he defies Kate’s ethics by courting donors without her knowing, but he has also experienced enough in the game that rival politicians trust him with their secrets, which they don’t yet with Kate. Marriage is hard, The Diplomat tells us, because it’s also diplomacy, and it becomes even harder to navigate when one member of the marriage is a wild card, like a politician with a direct line to the president. This is a comparison the series then bashes over viewers’ heads until it loses its potency.
Despite Kate insisting over and over in season one that she is the ambassador, not Hal, the two operate as a package deal in season two. They have to defend themselves to her U.S. Embassy employees, who blame them for the explosion that killed a member of their team, and Kate describes their staffers as “our kids.†Despite the near divorce, Hal gets jealous when he finds out Kate almost slept with the U.K. foreign secretary, Austin Dennison (David Gyasi), because he sees it as a personal betrayal and a sign that Kate might be more committed to a British agenda than an American one. When Kate waffles on putting herself up as a candidate for vice-president, Hal accuses her of shirking her own ambitions because she worries what too much power will do to his ego. The Diplomat scripts the couple’s arguments with Hal shrugging at Kate’s ethical concerns about her job and Kate seething at Hal for acting like “a man with no moral compass,†vague confrontations that are probably meant to serve as larger interrogations of American influence — how people like Hal and Kate more often get things done with secret meetings, backroom deals, and quid-pro-quo schemes instead of public negotiations — but rarely feel as pointed as they should. (The most we get is Kate observing of her growing alliance with the conservative U.K. prime minister, Nicol Trowbridge, “I think we have this idea that we’re gonna make friends with bad guys and bend them to our will, and, really, we’re just friends with bad guys.â€)
This cycle becomes ingrained in season two: Hal does something out of bounds, Kate is annoyed by it but cleans up after him, he gives her a talking-to about the realities of their profession, and she grits her teeth and decides to do things his way. If The Diplomat’s larger point in centering this marriage is that serving American interests is like having the worst partner in the world, that would be amusing! But it’s probably not, since Hal is more often than not right about how the world works, even when he’s massively fucking up. The season’s final reveal that his latest secret plan to secure the VP spot for Kate ends with the president’s death will probably be redeemed somehow in season three, because this show isn’t brave enough to heel-turn Hal into a genuinely bad guy.
2.
The Middle East as a place where bad things naturally happen — and the West as not
This one’s a sequel to one of my major gripes with The Diplomat’s first season: how the series uses brown people’s pain for its white protagonists’ character development. Kate talked about the people she and Hal left behind in Afghanistan as a way to signal how regretful she felt about American policy. But the series didn’t care to even show those people; we only knew their pain under the Taliban or other authoritarian leaders as an influence on Kate. In season two, The Diplomat takes this casual racism a step further with Kate constantly referencing the Middle East in comparison to the “normalcy†of the western world. Living in Lebanon and Afghanistan was supposed to have made Hal and Kate more empathetic and resourceful, but their descriptions of that region are either traumatized or patronizing.
When Kate learns of the London explosion, she misidentifies where she is as “Beirut,†and when she meets with a British government official who says naval bombings with shady intentions have occurred “how many times in the Gulf … more than once,†she doesn’t object. Both scenes imply that the Middle East is a place where violence is to be expected but Europe should be peaceful and pure. When Kate and Hal argue about whether Americans should help overthrow the British prime minister, Hal says, “This isn’t Kabul,†as if a coup is to be expected in the Middle East but is unacceptable elsewhere. In a rare light moment, the couple joke about bribing government officials and organizing illicit schemes and how much cheaper both would be in Afghanistan, because it’s so funny that Afghan currency is so cheap (probably due in part to the U.S. government freezing billions of dollars meant for the country’s people). Hilarious! At one point, Kate’s colleague Stuart (Ato Essandoh) complains of her and Hal, “The Wylers are so fucking cool. They talk to terrorists and hug warlords and drink llama blood.†It’s meant to be sarcastic, but it sums up how The Diplomat treats that region of the world and its people: as exoticized props.
3.
The public can’t handle the truth
Recent political shows have settled into a mode that suggests the proletariat is, well, dumb — think of how The Regime depicts the populace of its unnamed country cheering for Kate Winslet’s mustard-fetishizing autocrat. At least The Regime suggested people become that way after years of authoritarian rule! The Diplomat, in contrast, loves the concept of democracy but sprints down the same “Ugh, people†road this season. Kate gushes over and over about how her new girl crush, the vice-president, is so much smarter than everyone else and how sad it is that the world will never know her brilliance and sacrifice. It’s a cheap way to make a character seem special while excusing any morally questionable actions they make because we’ve already been told they know better.
When Kate realizes the British people support an extrajudicial killing of a Russian mercenary on their soil, she’s shocked and says she thought things were “different here†compared to her bloodthirsty home country. When she learns the British prime minister is planning to cover up that murder — as well as the fact that a naval explosion that killed dozens of sailors was ordered by members of his own administration — she’s aghast and vows to take down the whole cabal. But once American vice-president Grace Penn convinces Kate that truth matters less to the survivors of the dead than revenge, Kate abandons her former position in order to maintain “global stability.â€
One conversation and all of Kate’s morality goes out the window — she’s totally fine with aiding a series of lies that, barely a day or so ago in narrative time, she was about to expose. When Kate eventually confronts Grace about her role as mastermind of the naval attack in the season finale, Grace pulls out a world map, marks it up with nuclear-weapon locations and paths through which Russia could attack the U.S., and embarrasses Kate (who is supposed to have experience with nuclear nonproliferation) with the brilliance of her strategy. Once more, Kate’s sense of right and wrong is easily swayed by one person laying out a complicated, unlikely series of events that Kate hadn’t considered.
At its core, this is a furthering of the false-flag trope, in which soldiers and government agents are sent into war zones or killed by corrupt politicians for personal or agenda gains, as seen in The Terminal List, Lioness, The Night Agent, and Without Remorse in the past few years. However, The Diplomat breaks from those series by saying that lying to people is good, actually, because it’ll keep them subdued and/or safe. Government obfuscation and redaction as worthwhile policy is a wild take for The Diplomat, a show with seemingly liberal politics, to take, but it presents Kate’s self-censorship as one of the most logical things she has ever done.
4.
Allison Janney doing a West Wing reprise
In the series’ first season Rory Kinnear’s casting as the British prime minister immediately locked us into a certain arc: This guy, like so many of Kinnear’s recent characters, was going to be an asshole. Even though the second season walked back the levels of his villainy by pinning the false-flag operation on a rogue underling, Trowbridge is still a racist and sexist jerk whom Kate struggles to work with — and so we’re supposed to applaud when Janney’s Grace Penn paints his desire to come clean as naïve and uses nationalist rhetoric to explain that keeping the story buried is better for everyone’s careers. Kate often seems like a spin on C.J. Cregg, Janney’s character on The West Wing — assertive, witty, disinterested in fashion — and so the series casting Janney to play a foil for Kate felt inevitable. So too does the fact that Janney is doing her typical Janney thing here: the take-no-shit persona also seen in I, Tonya; Spy; The Creator; and Palm Royale.
As the American vice-president, Janney wears a power suit, glares, and basically tells Kate she sucks at her job when Kate tries to talk about a meeting they just had. Admittedly, that last one is pretty fun to see if, like me, you’re hate-watching this show. But casting Janney in this kind of role telegraphs exactly where this story is going to go, which removes an element of surprise from what is supposed to be an urgent and tense series. Even the season’s cliffhanger doesn’t feel that surprising, because of course Janney was going to stick around, just like how of course Hal was only somewhat injured after last season’s bombing cliffhanger. If there’s one thing The Diplomat has suggested in its two seasons, it’s that maybe, like C.J. once so famously said, we’re stupid — for expecting anything different.
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