For someone who has been responsible for some of the buzziest, most confounding plot twists in the last 20 years of American television, The Diplomat’s creator and showrunner Debora Cahn is surprisingly skeptical about them.
The West Wing, Grey’s Anatomy, Homeland—gripping shows about talented and dedicated basket cases—are all watercooler shows precisely because of their “can you believe it?!” moments, but Cahn considers those big, buzzy surprises “melodramatic and stupid”. On the other hand, “if you’re going to tell a story,” that requires her to “promise I’ll entertain you.” Accordingly, she always incorporates “a little bit of action” into her work.
To viewers of the Netflix smash, “a little bit of action” is the epitome of understatement.
(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)
In The Diplomat’s recently released third season alone, twists keep piling up on themselves, building so much forward momentum that the entire thing threatens to careen off the rails in every episode. (That’s a compliment, by the way!) President Rayburn dies after hearing that his vice president, Grace Penn (Allison Janney), was the architect of the bombing of a British naval carrier. Penn then asks Hal Wyler (Rufus Sewell) to be her vice president, rather than Hal’s wife, the titular diplomat, Kate Wyler (Keri Russell). Those both happen in the season premiere, and things only get twistier as the fiendishly bingeable season unfolds.
The biggest twists include massive betrayals and one equally consequential “wait, what?!” moment.
British Prime Minister Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) goes way off-script, announcing to the world at President Penn’s vacation home on Long Island that the late President Rayburn was to blame for the carrier bombing. Penn and Hal Wyler cook up a retaliatory scheme in the season finale to steal an underwater Russian nuclear drone, because they can. Oh, and Kate and her multi-season slow burn love interest, British Foreign Secretary Austin Dennison (David Gyaasi) don’t embark on an ill-advised but heartily wished-for affair.
Fortunately, in a conversation with The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, Cahn was eager to get into the weeds on the non-event that Kate and Dennison’s long-term flirtation—and one wild, promising declaration—turned out to be.
As she explains, it all goes back to “the initial conception of” Dennison as “the rakish British dude” who would lure Kate away from her already crumbling marriage with Hal in favor of “a great saucy affair”, which David Gyaasi completely upended by imbuing Dennison with too much gravitas to be a believable rake. His Dennison “is a man of great principle, and a person who does not have the latitude in his career to make mistakes”, Cahn says, leading the writers to enrich his impact on Kate by making him not just a potential new partner, but a person who, by example, makes her believe that “she has married a bad man and discovered a good one.”
Deciding to lean into that aspect of the love triangle dynamic among Kate, Hal, and Dennison made the storyline feel bigger than straightforward infidelity and sexual jealousy would; these people have to continue to work together in high-stakes situations no matter what turns their relationships take.
Cahn has observed this thorniness in action—among married couples who are “really passionate about work that’s important,” subtle distinctions between their ethical approaches “can have huge tectonic ramifications for the relationship”—and saw her actors’ chemistry as an opportunity to “let the tension and the heat between Kate and Dennison grow and grow and grow” to a nearly unbearable point.
As any romance reader knows, this is exactly the moment when the love interests should collide, and technically, that’s what happens between Kate and Dennison.
Nobody is likely to forget his emphatic declaration to Kate of his desire “to lick you until you scream” anytime soon, and the pair does enjoy about a minute of enthusiastic kissing and groping on his desk before being interrupted by a loudly ringing phone call coming in on a secure line. A dedicated civil servant’s job is never done, so Kate takes the call, while Dennison makes as dignified a retreat as he can manage. For Cahn, Kate and Dennison’s not-quite-coitus interruptus is actually the fulfillment of her intent “to stay true to the character we had built” with Gyaasi.
The encounter that Kate later describes to Hal as “a swing and a miss” may have had viewers howling in the comments, texts, and DMs, but Cahn is emphatic that “there was something necessary in that relationship about [Dennison] pulling the plug, and not her.” Sure, they’re both available, and have enough chemistry to power a fleet of nuclear submarines, but he is a marriage-minded widower and she is a mess whose first effort at dating after a 15-year hiatus “is a rather humiliating belly flop.”
For someone who made her bones working on standard 22-episode network seasons, whose “favorite episodes were always” the small midseason ones “where they can’t figure out how to use the Scotch tape dispenser”, Cahn is deeply dedicated to and energized by the imperatives and opportunities that distinguish streaming series from their linear cousins.
She and her team approach The Diplomat’s six-to-eight episode seasons “like little movies” produced across “two, sometimes three different continents”, a very time-intensive process that yields the “cinematically rich highs” of “what used to be considered a premium cable drama.”
To honor both her history as a character-motivated showrunner and the storytelling latitude afforded to The Diplomat, Cahn and her fellow writers are always striving to meet their commitment to viewers to respect their time and attention by delivering both the twists they crave with a steady drip of significant character development.
When the marriage of elements is well balanced, it ensures that there’s time to incorporate quirks and odd character traits similar to the ones actual people have.
Trowbridge is absurdly well-educated, but generally doesn’t bother to master details that don’t interest him. He recites multiple stanzas of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra from memory, for example, but doesn’t grasp the distinction between the North Sea and the North Atlantic. As President and First Gentleman Penn, reunited West Wing castmates Janney and Bradley Whitford are believable because of moments like their sniping over the history of shellfish, spooning in bed after a spat, and Todd likening Grace’s torso to “a fresh focaccia” (the oddest, most memorable pillow talk in recent TV history).
That same marriage of storytelling elements also includes juicy betrayals of every size and type, from the interpersonal to the international, which is how The Diplomat’s third season ends with Kate and Hal reconciling, quickly followed by Kate piecing together that the missing Russian nuclear drone has been stolen by the President and Vice President of the United States. The scale of their petty vengeance and opportunism also reveals just how much they resented Trowbridge’s violation of their trust and having to apologize to him.
Stealing a nuclear weapon rather than allowing it to be encased in concrete or to be reclaimed by Russia is a classic example of solving one massive problem with another diplomatic time bomb. What’s going to happen when the U.K. realizes that the drone is missing? It won’t take long for MI6 to figure out that the Americans have spirited it away, and if Russian intelligence arrives at the same conclusion (or worse, think that the British Navy has recovered it), there will be hell to pay.
Twisty? Yes. Messy? Very. And exactly how Cahn likes to put a big cliffhanger to good use, by telling viewers that their perspective “has just incrementally opened up into some new alleyway,” which makes “you think you’ve got it, and then it turns out you just had no idea what was going on.” It’s diabolical, it’s irresistible, and it’s already been renewed for a fourth season.
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