Why Does 'The Diplomat' Seem So Real?
It isn't easy being Kate Wyler. On the first season of The Diplomat, the newly appointed U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's (played by Keri Russell) struggled to find her footing in the high-profile position, which lacked the grit of the boots-on-the-ground intelligence work to which she was accustomed.
On the show's just-released second season, Wyler seems to be settling in with both her staff (including standouts Ato Essandoh as her deputy chief of mission, Stuart Hayford, and Ali Ahn as CIA station chief Eidra Park) as well as the Brits (namely David Gyasi's Foreign Minister and Rory Kinnear's Prime Minister) in the aftermath of a bombing that not only killed one of her staffers but injured her husband, Hal (Rufus Sewell). But when the attack is tied to a possible attempt to manipulate a campaign for Scottish independence, things get complicated for the Americans and the British alike, and a series of events that feel eerily similar to some playing out in the real world begin to unfold.
Here, The Diplomat's creator, writer, and executive producer Debora Cahn, talk to T&C about how the show develops its stranger-than-fiction stories and why they can end up feeling unexpectedly familiar.
The plot lines of The Diplomat can feel ripped from the headlines. There are moments in this season—not that we’re going to share spoilers—that seem downright realistic. Where do you begin developing the stories?
I sit down at 10 o'clock in the morning and then write until three. The deal I have made with myself is that as long as I write, it can be shit, but it just has to be something; then eventually you shape that into something else. For the first season, I came up with this great run, and when I had written about two thirds of it, I realized there was no way to get through the last third in the two remaining episodes. So, either we were going to be skipping stones over plot to get to the conclusion of the season, or we would have to lop the whole thing off and hope we got a second season. And that's what we did, so what I believed was going to fit into the last two episodes of season one turned into all of season two.
When you’re working on the series, are you able to watch the news and read the paper, or do you need to be without that kind of interference?
I have to let all of it in. We're in conversation with what's going on in the world, and hopefully we're in conversation with where people's heads are at in terms of foreign policy and who we are as a country in the world of other countries. We want to be relevant to what everybody's thinking about and worried about. But I don't want to be talking about this election; that's not what I'm doing. Two years ago, a bunch of stuff was written and eight months ago, a bunch of stuff was filmed, and Keri Russell in a powder blue suit was filmed way before Kamala Harris did a rally in Georgia in the same powder blue suit. We are not trying to do a portrait of these candidates, but I guess we're skating a little close to the edge. The truth keeps catching up with us.
What does your media diet look like?
The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, and the Economist. The good stuff comes from people inside this world—things that that they write for each other. There’s a newsletter called International Intrigue, and here's my favorite quote of the morning. “Facebook had a catchphrase: which was move fast and break things. Diplomats move slow and break things.” That's good! There was another great story that I wanted to steal whole cloth... The Prime Minister of Georgia was disinvited from a reception. That could be a whole episode right there.
Diplomacy is an old-fashioned world. It’s still very much about relationships, which makes it ripe for dramatization.
What feels like kabuki of diplomacy is breaking interactions down into a ton of tiny steps so that things can move in times of intractable conflict. I think the Prime Minister of Georgia being disinvited from a U.S. reception is, in fact, a whole story and I love that. It turns out it was because they had passed a law that's going to give them license to jail journalists, and we're not going to invade Georgia, but these tiny public steps say, “We see what you're doing and we're not crazy about it.” The headline sounds so ridiculous, but it's a language in which these people are sending messages to each other.
What ends up on the cutting room floor?
We had a whole season that couldn't fit in one hour—so, yeah, there's a ton of stuff. There's an odd dynamic with this show that it took us a while to figure out, which is that the whole idea is we want our characters to be people who understand 12 different sides of a question. And then we want them to be different from each other; we want the State Department points of view to be different from the CIA, the White House, the Department of Defense. All those things need to be complicated and dissimilar. Then you take that dynamic and say, okay, well we're talking to another country and so in addition to the American positions there are the British positions. That means we make one little move and by the time you've gone all the way around the block to get every character's take on it, the episode is over. You can't then do the next move. You have to wait and put it off. So, we keep what's on the cutting room floor—tons of plot, tons of intricate cool, interesting plot—and we find that we're one move in and that's it. That's as much as we can handle.
Do you get feedback from the diplomatic community? Are ambassadors weighing in on what you’ve gotten right?
We're asking for it all the time, soliciting as much of that as possible. We want to hear their stories; all the stories in the show that feel the least plausible tend to come directly from people in this business. We also get it wrong all the time. We have consultants who read every script and watch the cuts. If we're getting it wrong, I want to be choosing to get it wrong. Sometimes we need to because we got to tell a story, and it's got to go on Netflix. But at least I want to know that I'm getting it wrong. People were upset when we put Hal and Kate on a private plane. They're like, “We fly commercial.”
What are you most proud of in this second season?
A lot of diplomats come up to us and say, “My parents now understand what I do,” which makes me excited. I’m hoping it makes people want to go into the foreign service, and I’m excited that we have opened a door for an audience to a world that can be opaque. The other thing is that Kate and Hal relationship is a gift to a writer. I thought I was writing an ensemble drama, but as the first season unfolded it became clear that we really wanted to be watching Kate and Hal all the time. The whole idea is that there are so many couples in the foreign service because you're in some foreign place, it's romantic, and you're both doing important work—it’s so hot that of course you fall in love with each other. Fifteen years later, however, it’s a bit more complicated.
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