We rate Alex Graves as a director who keeps complicated television attentive to the people doing the talking. The Diplomat suits that approach, even when its prickly relationships are better examined than its politics.
Fi1m perspective
When Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell make each other’s lives difficult in The Diplomat (2023), the programme has us. We enjoyed their prickliness enough to want another episode. It is a useful introduction to Alex Graves, whose attention goes to the actors and to the feelings beneath complicated dialogue. We rate that approach: a conversation needs to hold our attention even when we are not persuaded by everything being discussed.
His early feature, The Crude Oasis (1993), was one he wrote, produced and directed, but sustained television work became the main business. The West Wing (1999), Aaron Sorkin’s series, gave him 34 episodes to direct as well as producing work. That was a substantial apprenticeship in handling a busy ensemble. His preference for long takes makes sense in dialogue-driven television, allowing performers to maintain momentum rather than repeatedly breaking up their exchanges.
The later credits include six episodes of Game of Thrones and seven of Foundation (2021), alongside a substantial amount of pilot directing. Large ensembles and complicated settings recur in his work. His attention to the emotional story beneath technical language gives us a reason to follow him between genres. We are more interested in what he can get from performers than in the size of the fictional world around them.
On The Diplomat, the important collaboration is with creator Debora Cahn; Graves serves as both director and executive producer. The programme gives him intimate character work within public settings, and his interest in watching actors suits it. Russell and Sewell’s difficult exchanges are where we find the strongest reason to stay. There is a temptation to credit a director only when a sequence is conspicuously elaborate, but making a conversation worth listening to takes care too.
The reservation is that The Diplomat gives its politics less scrutiny than they need, and lively relationships cannot settle that problem. We would not hold Graves solely responsible for the weakness, or give him sole credit for the acting. Start with the programme if an evening of prickly company sounds promising, rather than expecting it to settle your questions about government.
Biography
Alex Graves is an American film and television director, producer and screenwriter. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he attended the University of Southern California film school and began his career directing the features The Crude Oasis (1995) and Casualties (1997).
Graves directed numerous episodes of The West Wing (1999–2006), for which he won two Primetime Emmy Awards, and later worked on series including Game of Thrones (2011–2014), Shameless (2011), House of Cards (2013), Homeland (2014–2019), The Boys (2019), Altered Carbon (2018), Foundation (2021–2023) and The Diplomat (2023–), directing ten episodes of the latter and serving as executive producer.
