The Diplomat is good company when Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell are making each other’s lives difficult. The politics need more scrutiny than the series gives them, but the prickly relationships earn another episode.
The Diplomat is an enjoyable political drama whose strongest reason to keep watching is Keri Russell. As Kate Wyler, the new US ambassador to the UK, she gives the business of talking to people a welcome sense of effort and impatience. The series wants diplomacy to be entertaining without pretending that the people conducting it leave their private troubles outside the office. It succeeds often enough to recommend, provided the appeal lies in the difficult people doing the negotiating.
Debora Cahn’s writing makes conversation the main event, with characters continually trying to establish what someone else means and what they stand to gain. Russell is good at keeping those exchanges from becoming demonstrations of cleverness: her Kate seems to have work to finish. The dialogue moves quickly enough to make the professional vocabulary manageable. There is satisfaction in following an argument between people who understand the job, even when the programme has simplified the job to help us follow it.
Rufus Sewell’s Hal, Kate’s husband, supplies the more troublesome conversations. We laughed at their squabbling, because Russell and Sewell make it sound like an argument that has been going on for years. They suggest two people who know which remark will annoy the other and cannot quite resist making it. The chemistry gives the workplace plotting a personal cost that the international manoeuvring sometimes struggles to establish. A private disagreement can hold our attention without another explanation of why the situation matters.
The cinematography credited to Philipp Blaubach, Julian Court and Giorgio Scali keeps all that talking easy to watch, particularly when conversations continue on the move. The polished images lend the offices an importance the writing occasionally takes for granted. Production designers Jeff Tessler, Curt Beech and Chris Roope give the officials convincing places to work, without making the surroundings more interesting than the actors. That restraint helps a drama in which a change of expression often deserves more attention than the set.
The editors, including Agnès Challe-Grandits, Gary Levy, Ken Eluto and Matthew S. Nickelson, give the exchanges enough pace to stop the explanations feeling like homework. They also help the series move between official business and domestic friction without repeatedly starting again. The music credited to Nathan Barr, Dimitri Smith and Marcelo Zarvos encourages that forward motion, although the extra urgency sometimes feels unearned. The pace remains engaging even when the reasons for concern are vague.
The weakness is the politics. David Gyasi plays Foreign Secretary Austin Dennison and Rory Kinnear plays Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge, but the British side too often exists to give Kate someone to outthink. That makes her competence easy to enjoy and the international dispute harder to believe. The changes of tone also ask us to become anxious about circumstances the programme has just encouraged us to find faintly ridiculous.
Political thrillers need to make the consequences of a bad decision feel real, and The Diplomat is inconsistent about that. Its fluent conversations and actors are enough to carry an evening, though a taste for office melodrama will help considerably. Try it for Russell and Sewell; do not expect them to teach a reliable course in diplomacy.
