Keri Russell's Political Drama Is Just Getting Warmed Up

This post contains spoilers for Season Two of The Diplomat, which is now streaming on Netflix.

Few shows in recent memory have as good a handle on what they are as The Diplomat. That's particularly impressive when you consider that the series — starring Keri Russell as Kate Wyler, a veteran State Department operative thrust into the job of America's ambassador to Great Britain, in what is secretly an audition to replace the sitting vice-president — is often trying to be multiple shows at once: a knotty political drama, a screwball romance, a taut spy thriller, and a comedy of manners. Some of these individual pieces naturally overlap with one another, while others are placed together very carefully by the show's creator, Debora Cahn, so that all improbably feel like part of the same appealing whole.

That impressive command of tone and genre is present throughout much of the Netflix series' second season. Keri Russell continues to give one of the most charmingly versatile performances on television, in her element whether Kate is frantically trying to fix a busted zipper on her pants before a big meeting, doubting the trustworthiness of husband Hal (Rufus Sewell), or watching British Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) nearly kills his former advisor Margaret Roylin (Celia Imrie) with his bare hands. The story continues to take wild twists and turns, the supporting cast works well off of Russell, and, in a West Wing reunion with Cahn, Allison Janney turns up near the end of the season — as Grace Penn, the seemingly outgoing veep Kate has been drafted to succeed — to remind you what a smashing fit she is with this kind of story. The show remains at crackerjack entertainment.

I just wish there was more of it.

When I sound the alarm about the damage done by ever-shrinking TV seasons, The Diplomat is the kind of show I'm talking about. Its first season was only eight episodes, already on the brief side, but juuuuust barely long enough to properly establish its major players, its stakes, and the main parts of its complicated story. With the new season, eight episodes have contracted down to only six, and in the process the show at times feels as harried and overscheduled as Kate so often is throughout her various misadventures.

This manifests itself with The Diplomat in ways big and small, with both character and plot. Let's start relatively small, with the resolution of the cliffhanger from the end of Season One, where Hal, Kate's top aide Stuart (Ato Essandoh), and Stuart's aide Ronnie (Jess Chanliau) were all in the vicinity of a car bombing, their fates Theoretically left up in the air during the 18-month gap between seasons. But the cliffhanger was a classic case of what TV writers and producers sometimes refer to as “schmuck bait” — a story that will only generate suspense for people who can't stop for even a moment to think about what's happening. Kate's uneasy marriage with Hal, and her uneasy professional marriage with Stuart are two of the series' core relationships. Hal is central to much of the main conspiracy plot about who was responsible for bombing a Royal Navy ship, while Stuart — who has been assigned by White House Chief of Staff Billie Appiah (Nana Mensah) to sand off Kate's rough edges and make her more acceptable political material — is the prime driver of the VPOTUS storyline. And the first season devoted only slightly less time to Stuart's on-again, off-again secret romance with CIA station chief Eidra (Ali Ahn) than it did to Kate debating whether and when she should finally kick Hal to the curb.

Ronnie, on the other hand, barely qualified as a character, distinguished largely by their stylish suits and ties (the character, like Jess Chanliau, is non-binary), and to a lesser extent by their frequent references to how various events were playing out on social media. There was no chance that Hal or Stuart were going to die, because they were too important. That made Ronnie the obvious victim, but also a disappointing one, because the show hadn't done nearly enough with them for their death to matter

Alex Bailey/Netflix

Any attachment viewers had to Ronnie came from a combo of Chanliau's screen presence and the fact that there are so few non-binary characters on TV, a medium which has an unfortunately long history of killing off queer characters for the sake of the straight characters' emotional growth. There's lots of rushing everywhere. Cahn has written for episodic network dramas like West Wingand Grey's Anatomyas well as serialized cable shows like

Homeland and she's smartly designed this show to reflect the best of each. While there are major ongoing stories about the bombing and Kate's jarring political ascent, there's usually a Summit of the Week structure that creates satisfying conflict to be resolved within each hour, even as things keep escalating with Trowbridge and friends. But the big shifts in the larger arcs have to come with dizzying speed, so that one moment, Kate and British foreign secretary Austin Dennison (David Gyasi) suspect Trowbridge of having orchestrated the bombing plot, and the next they realize he's innocent of that crime but may have committed manslaughter on Margaret Roylin. Between the limited number of episodes and the binge structure, things often happen too rapidly to fully register. It's entertaining because the actors are so good, the dialogue so snappy, and the overall plotting so inventive. But the whole is often less than the sum of those impressive parts, because — as the reverse of far too many other Netflix shows — it has much more story than it has episodes. Just look at Janney's arrival in the season's final third. She absolutely owns the screen, and makes a fine verbal sparring partner for Russell. In something of a role reversal from Janney's days as West Wing press secretary CJ, here it's Grace Penn who is the veteran who has to explain how things work to Kate, like a masterful scene where Grace uses a map to explain how much more complicated a situation is than Kate assumes. But within the space of two episodes, Cahn has to squeeze in multiple reversals in how the two women feel about one another and their apparent professional rivalry, plus a pair of bonkers developments in which we find out that 1)

Grace

. This, by the way, was the plot point Russell was alluding to in our interview that inadvertently came close to overlapping with real-life politics, since it was written and filmed long before President Biden ended his re-election campaign and Vice-President Harris began pursuing the presidency in his stead.

Trending Stories These are all tremendous ideas for the kind of sugary treat The Diplomat wants to be, and generally is. But as a horde of Secret Service agents sprinted onto the back garden of Kate's ambassadorial estate to protect the newly-promoted President Penn, it was hard not to feel like I'd consumed this all too fast and gotten an ice cream headache. Or, at least, like the season was only just getting started when another hiatus of a year or more began. At six episodes,