Watching “The Diplomat” After Election Night

Paul Allen Anderson analyzes the failures of the liberal dream in Netflix’s “The Diplomat,” in light of Donald Trump’s reelection.

By Paul Allen AndersonDecember 15, 2024

• Television

• Politics

NETFLIX DROPPED THE SECOND season of The Diplomat (2023– ) on Halloween. Five nights later, Donald Trump was elected president. Again. The proximity could not have been accidental, no matter what outcome Netflix was anticipating. And while this smart, snappy, and inescapably bingeable foreign-policy workplace drama from showrunner and executive producer Debora Cahn deserves praise as a superior Netflix drama, its timely arrival forces us to ask questions about the liberal fantasy provided by shows like this.

The Democratic Party, David Axelrod opined days after the election, “has increasingly become a smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party, and it lends itself to the kind of backlash that we’ve seen.” College-educated voters of all ethnicities remain a minority in the American electorate, in fact; but they dominate the screen on high-end workplace dramas like The Diplomat. These voters are a necessary if ultimately insufficient pillar of the Democratic Party. But they are plentiful enough to buoy a brainy-yet-pulpy political drama to the top of the Netflix charts—if only out of a collective liberal nostalgia for a world now in eclipse.

The Diplomat is an easy watch in part because of the familiarity of its smarty-pants characters, all of whom have risen to the top on their own manifest merits. At the drama’s center is protagonist Kate Wyler (brilliantly played by Keri Russell), a no-nonsense career diplomat recently made the US Ambassador to the United Kingdom. The setting is new, and Wyler is easily the most impressive female politico we’ve had on a prestige TV drama. But for the most part, the look and feel of the drama is immediately recognizable. The show’s creator and lead writer Debora Cahn previously worked on Grey’s Anatomy (2005– ), Homeland (2011–20), and The West Wing (1999–2006), the latter of which has left a particularly strong mark on the genre. We admire and identify with The Diplomat’s aspirational leads and the avid, hyperarticulate workaholics assisting them. These telegenic and idealistic meritocrats put their personal lives on hold while they save lives, prevent wars, and preserve the “flimsy web of relationships” that keep the world order from imploding on a daily basis. The Diplomat updates The West Wing by featuring a strong female lead and, tellingly, it moves its political world from the West Wing to the English countryside, while evoking Downton Abbey (2010–15) and Netflix’s own The Crown (2016–23). But at its heart is an old formula that works well on the screen—if no longer at the ballot box.

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Kate Wyler might imagine herself as the no-frills, roll-up-your-sleeves, endlessly modest “good American,” but The Diplomat doesn’t exactly see her that way. As the beautiful American ambassador, she is almost royalty herself. In the ambassador’s palatial neo-Georgian Winfield House and the show’s other workplace sets, even the frills have frills. The gardens are gorgeous, the lighting is always flattering, and the grand dining tables are set with the finest tableware.

As pointedly as it evokes Downton Abbey, however, The Diplomat doesn’t show us a basement full of white servants happily polishing the silverware and fighting over who is the most attentive, effectively obsequious, and well-mannered butler. For the most part, the smash hit about an Edwardian estate sentimentalized a feudal harmony between those “in service” and the landed gentry employing and housing them. It’s poignant and a little upsetting that the vast majority of people must live very humbly, Downton Abbey seemed to argue, but isn’t it a wonderful thing that at least a few souls can enjoy inherited wealth and station, follow their passions, and lounge in grand living rooms? Would that the series had spent more time at the pub, where villagers might have argued there was nothing wrong with privilege except that we don’t all have it.

The Diplomat doesn’t indulge Downton Abbey’s Tory fantasies or the opposite view that nothing is too good for the working class. Instead, it replaces the great house’s inherited white aristocracy with an exquisitely well-mannered rainbow of American meritocrats and educated experts who actually deserve their privileged embassy posting. The show shamelessly indulges a career civil servant’s fantasy of noblesse oblige: Wyler serves the greater good as selflessly as any enlightened English lord should, so why not drape her in silken fineries?

The aura of earned merit and noblesse oblige saves Wyler from the tawdry business of begging for, or actively pretending not to be begging for, votes and donations. For all but a few minutes of two seasons, she disavows any interest in holding high political office. The genial Bidenesque president William Rayburn (Michael McKean) offers Wyler a chance to replace the sitting vice president Grace Penn (played with authority by West Wing alum Allison Janney). Penn is a canny and competent political realist who is about to drown in scandal because of her husband’s financial misdeeds and her own complicity in a false flag operation that has cost British lives. The president wants to cut bait and move on to Wyler, a brilliant career diplomat who is a baggage-free unknown back home. As Wyler mulls the chance to wield the massive power of the White House without the messiness of running for office, she is egged on by her charismatic and power-hungry husband Hal (an excellent Rufus Sewell). She spends two seasons considering the offer to take Penn’s place. While she’s trying to put out diplomatic fires, Wyler seems to be engaged in a long listening tour with herself, weighing her feminist principles, her global humanitarian ambitions, and the hard lessons learned from a career in diplomacy alongside a husband who drives her crazy but also turns her on and just so happens to be a brilliant strategist.

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A liberal meritocrat ensconced at a grand estate, Wyler is an excellent diplomat—she listens closely, she follows decorum, she keeps confidences, she accepts compromise, and she cares about the human costs. Hers is the opposite of the authoritarian might-makes-right playbook for diplomacy. Authoritarian strongmen and right-wing populists prefer to swagger and brush aside protocol and manners. Rather than sloughing through long dialogues and working through books and binders of analysis, authoritarians hunger to make policy decisions based on whatever leverage they have. As we know from The Art of the Deal (1987), and indeed his first four years in office, the Trumpian deal is a brutal affair:

The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it. That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you’re dead. The best thing you can do is deal from strength, and leverage is the biggest strength you can have. Leverage is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs. Or best of all, simply can’t do without.

Dominate and humiliate the other party, especially when they can’t afford to walk away or hit you back.

“I play to people’s fantasies,” Trump concluded long ago. “People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do.” The Diplomat plays to people’s fantasies too, albeit fantasies of a suddenly implausible kind. Indeed, the series hits like an elegy or a love letter to a lost world of compromise, protocol, and decorum as Trump’s power metastasizes. Why would an authoritarian-loving regime stoop to traditional diplomatic manners when it has all that political leverage?

The Diplomat moves its elegy overseas, we might say, the better to capture the American liberal’s faded but lustrous glory. Like the show as a whole, Kate Wyler spends far more time with the British prime minister Nicol Trowbridge (an excellent Rory Kinnear) and foreign secretary Austin Dennison (breakout star David Gyasi) than with her bosses, the sketchily drawn American president and secretary of state. The fictional British politicians free American viewers from having to map their every gesture and position onto real-life politicians. Lucky for us, the foreign secretary looks really good when he’s doing good and the ever-aggrieved white prime minister does a rousing impression of a Churchillian call to arms.

At one point, Dennison suggests that “if we titrate the information” made available to the public about a false flag operation that killed over 40 crew members of a British naval vessel, the electorate and his party might not force the prime minister to step down. Political disaster might be averted by instead tranquilizing British voters with a slow and imperceptible drip of the awful truth.

That prescription speaks for The Diplomat more generally. Cahn and her writers’ room have much to say about recent political history, no doubt. But The Diplomat titrates its ideological content, lest its aspirational fantasy tarry too close to domestic realities that high-information American viewers know all too well. A deluxe Netflix cheeseburger can only contain trace amounts of political reality. There are enough real-world references to reward viewers for following the international news but not enough to wake them from the drowsy satiation that follows The Diplomat’s aperitifs, multicourse meals, and political toasts.

In The Diplomat, everything is presented as sumptuous eye candy; viewers snack and then snack some more to escape into a more elegant and refined—if also harried and sleep-deprived—world. Because it’s so well written and features such fine actors playing such meritorious professionals, we are tempted to believe that perhaps this is a show with Important Things to Say. Can it entertain as luxe fluff and also probe the disturbing depths beneath its own gleaming surface? Well, the velvet curtain is far too lovely to pull back too far and the romantic roundelays are far too diverting. The show knows that most of us would rather watch a scripted drama like this than 28 Days in Mariupol. Keri Russell’s prior series, the justly celebrated The Americans (2013–18), chose to probe some dark places, not least the lifelong deception of one’s own children and the ongoing traumatic damage to one’s soul, relationship, and family from being an assassin, however righteous the political cause. Being a disappointment to one’s children is a painful enough theme to make any dramatic soufflé collapse.

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While running for president in the fall of 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris noted that “in many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man.” “[T]he consequences of putting him back in the White House,” she added, “are extremely serious.” Kate Wyler is nothing if not a serious person. When she first arrives at her new ambassadorial residence, Wyler scoffs at its grandeur and its retinue of American and British staff and household employees. They line up to meet her at the estate’s entrance in an echo of Downton Abbey. The house manager proudly informs the new ambassador that “the only private garden in London larger than Winfield is Buckingham Palace.” Fresh from Kabul, Afghanistan, the no-nonsense American responds with an exasperated “Oh, for God’s sake.” She is a serious professional used to being involved in top diplomatic maneuverings. She reflexively refuses to play any merely ceremonial role. “I am not Cinderella,” she declares in the first episode, at least until her (Bill) Clintonian husband convinces her to smile for the camera, sit in a horse-drawn carriage, and wave like a princess.

Wyler is often at war with her glamorous political surroundings and, by extension, with the dramatic series in which she is the central character. A fair amount of the power of The Diplomat derives from its rendering of Wyler’s ambivalence. Since the show wants us to identify with Wyler as our righteous, no-nonsense proxy, her ambivalence to the surrounding luxury threatens to become contagious. Taking a page from the Obama-Biden years, she presents herself as part of the responsible cleanup crew for the wanton destructiveness of the American empire during the Bush era. When she served in Kabul, she especially wanted to assist Afghans who had made sacrifices to help the United States. Too many of them have now been abandoned by the empire and left to fend for themselves against Taliban members who have promised retribution and vengeance. The minor theme is a cold splash of reality that slightly offsets the warm froth, but the plot point is never developed. The Diplomat sequesters us instead in an aspirational world of shiny embassy offices, meeting rooms in grand estates, and resplendent ministerial offices. It operates like an affluent suburb that has zoned out multifamily dwellings for fear of home values dropping and otherwise being overrun by hourly wage laborers. No poor people in tattered clothing appear on-screen in The Diplomat lest the show’s awkward marriage of liberal righteousness and baronial luxury come under question.

When the CIA’s London bureau chief and the president’s chief of staff want to take fuller advantage of a potential new source inside Iran, the ambassador makes a stirring protest on behalf of her expertise. “I spent a decade building a reputation […] such that when I say something, people fucking listen to me. I have none of that here.” The source will be exposed and killed by the Iranian regime if the CIA presses him for more. Letting that happen is unacceptable to the ambassador because diplomacy itself will be part of the collateral damage. “It is a flimsy web of relationships, but sometimes it holds. Do not tear it. Do not be an infinitely ravenous American,” she implores. So, this time, her superiors listen to her.

“You can’t approach working people like missionaries and say, ‘We’re here to help you become more like us,’” Axelrod fumed after the election. Trump’s electoral success and its downballot consequences, on this view, were less about conservative policy promises, contrasting progressive ones, high grocery prices, or the global backlash against incumbents post-pandemic than they were a backlash against “a kind of unspoken disdain, unintended disdain” coming from “a smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party.” Shorn of all the real-world political factors, a related and altogether unintended disdain perfumes the moral atmosphere of The Diplomat through Wyler’s superiority and ambivalence about power politics. She wants to do good but without meeting voters where they live. She is a liberal internationalist who refuses to be “an infinitely ravenous American.” Wyler wants it known that she doesn’t share the endless American appetite for power. In fact, she barely eats at all and has poor table manners when she does.

Alongside its idealistic tribute to effective diplomacy, the show plays to viewers’ fantasies and some of our “infinitely ravenous” aspirational appetites. Sure, we will never spend a night as an honored guest at Winfield House or any great country estate, but we are free to dreamily imagine ourselves as part of a new gentry of righteous meritocrats who thrive outside the slop of actual politics. As a workplace drama, The Diplomat lets us once again dream the impossible dream: a great job with a generous clothing allowance, a storied and elegant workplace full of meritorious professionals who “fucking listen to [us],” and, all the while, a reasonable rate of return for our 401(k) accounts in a world stabilized by countless unthanked diplomats and public servants.