Better Late Than Never: The Diplomat

 

In the era of Difficult Men Onscreen, there have been very few actresses who have been as essential to the era of Peak TV than Keri Russell. There have been several performers who were there pretty much at the start – Alison Janney, Edie Falco and  Elisabeth Moss are the most prominent pioneers who were there at the start of the era and have worked in a  consisted fashion to this day. But I’ve had a fondness for Russell because I was there pretty much from the start of her career.

If you were a teenager in the 1990s you remember how important Felicity was to a lot of people in the 1990s and how much of an impression she was for helping briefly launch the WB into critical prominence and to launching J.J. Abrams into the stratosphere. Both the series and she earned Golden Globe nominations and she took the Best Actress in a Drama – the only major award the network would ever win.

After the series ended, she stopped working for nearly three years, then slowly returned to movies, most famously in Waitress. She worked in the independent films than returned to TV in a failed comedy with Will Arnett called Running Wilde. That failure was the best thing that could happen to her because two year she landed one of the most iconic roles in TV history, that of Elizabeth Jennings a Soviet sleeper agent in 1980s D.C. in The Americans, arguably the best show of the 2010s.

Russell’s work was unique among female characters in Peak TV – unlike almost every other series in TV, the wife in the marriage was more aggressive partner while her husband Philip had all the doubts about his mission. Matthew Rhys deservedly received much acclaim and credit for his incredible work on the series but Russell was his equal in every possible way. There have been almost no women like Elizabeth Jennings in TV history, certainly no maternal figures. It wasn’t exactly a travesty Russell never got an Emmy to go with her three nominations  -  she lost to Tatiana Maslany, Moss for The Handmaid’s Tale and Claire Foy, and there were a lot of other extraordinary performers she was nominated along side during those years – but I was disappointed she never won.

Again after leaving a role of lifetime (and now married to Rhys) Russell again took a departure from acting . Both times one of her returns was a J.J. Abrams film) Russell’s presence alone should have been enough to draw me in to The Diplomat when it debuted very early this past year and the nominations from the HCA this summer should have been enough. But now that the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice have not only nominated Russell but the show itself as one of the Best Dramas of 2023, I decided to break one of my old rules and watch a show of the year just past while there was time to get on board. As always with Russell’s work, I’m grateful for it.

Russell plays Kate Wyler, a career diplomat who is expected to be shifted to Kabul to reestablish relationship with Afghanistan when she finds herself named Ambassador to the United Kingdom. This is a job Kate does not want in the slightest. A British ship has been attacked in the Arabian Sea and forty sailors have died. The President has asked her to go to England on what she believes is a handholding mission to the Prime Minister. (I don’t know if Rory Kinnear is deliberately trying to play Boris Johnson, but I know why Michael McKean has been cast as the President.)

Kate is bitching every single step of the way, particularly because she does not want to do photo ops and act like a woman. Her husband says she hates women (more on him later) but it’s more like she’s good at her job and the fringes of it do not serve her well. Kate has spent her life in intelligence and does not want to make friends, which is good because there are very few people who like her. This includes the Secretary of State, who the moment he learns she’s been appointed does everything he can to slow walk her credentials so he can fire her.

The thing is Kate is not the problem. It’s her husband. Hal Wyler is himself a former ambassador and its apparent from the moment we meet him he has, like Branch Rickey said about Leo Durocher, a man with an infinite capacity for a bad situation worse. Hal will tell you that he is trying to help save the world and will no doubt tell you that the ends justify the means. Kate has her own set of stories and she knows that half of the State Department loves him for his showmanship and the other half hates him just as vividly.

It doesn’t shock us that Kate and Hal are on the precipice of divorce at the start of the series; we’re honestly shocked that it hasn’t happened earlier at this point. Hal has not been unfaithful or even a bad husband; Kate just can’t take his act any more. You can hardly blame her when Hal is ‘abducted’ by Iranian intelligence at the end of the first episode for a meeting to tell him that Iran is not involved with the attack in the opening of the series. Kate spend the second episode certain that Hal is the one who activated a backchannel and remains sure of it no matter how much proof she gets. When she learns that Hal in fact did do this, she is infuriated at Hal and Hal is absolutely unrepentant. By the time she learns this the Prime Minister and the President seem about set to declare war on Iran and you honestly think Kate would just as soon be parachuting over Teheran than trying to deal with her husband.

What she has only recently learned is why she has been posted to London in the first place. The Vice President is involved in some kind of scandal and is going to resign. Kate has been sent to London – more importantly under the purview of Stuart Heyford, a Democratic powerbroker – to vet her for the job of being Vice President. It’s pretty clear that Hal was one of the people who has been recommending her for the job ; despite everything he clearly knows she’s perfect for it. “The people who don’t like the trappings of power are the ones you want to use it,” he tells Stuart at the end of the first episode.

Russell is sublime as she gets to play another prickly powerful woman, but this time working for U.S. interests instead of trying to subvert them. (Though I’m pretty sure that all of the lines about her working in intelligence among the CIA and State are also Easter eggs for those of us who loved her on The Americans.)  There’s also the bonus that Russell is having more fun playing Kate Wyler; Elizabeth Jennings was a total badass but she didn’t crack a lot of jokes.  As Kate, Russell gets to play someone who is a state of comic annoyance at the world, the diplomatic situation, having to be a woman and her husband, usually some combination of all four at once. In a wonderful scene, to prove her husband was behind something she tells the diplomatic corps: “I’m going for a walk,” storms to the elevator, walks down the thoroughfare with a coat looking like Olivia Pope and then stops in front of a deli and tells her guard she needs to use the bathroom. It is there she calls intelligence and gets to use a unique form of bathroom humor as well as the repercussion when Stuart learns of it.

Just as brilliant is Rufus Sewell as Hal Wyler. Sewell has been nominated for every award but an Emmy this past year for his work and his work is as good as Russell’s but even more fun. Sewell is a brilliant British actor who has been working constantly through the era of Peak TV, most notably on the Amazon series The Man in the High Castle. But it has been his fate to be play dark dour characters, something that he does extremely well. Here he’s clearly have the time of his life as a man who may be the smartest guy in the room and will never miss a chance to not only remind you of that but to tell everyone else they aren’t. Watching him every time he’s on screen I’m reminded of a line about a man who could strut sitting down. There’s also a genuine amusement to so much that happens around him. When he’s taken prisoner at the start of the second episode, he engages in polite conversation with the Iranian ambassador and his reaction to the agent who tells him he now can’t kill a military general is priceless. But you also get a clear message of his carelessness; as Kate reminds him when his ruse his revealed, this could very well end up with source being executed and he doesn’t seem to care that much – which is frankly terrifying for someone who works in intelligence. Kate wants to divorce him at the end of the second episode and its only when he reveals that she’s being vetted for VP that she shuts up – but we know this won’t be the end of it by a long shot.

I have watched my share of Netflix series over the years and while many of their dramas are superb, The Diplomat is the first one aimed for adults in a while that remembers that it can also be fun while its doing so. I never got that sensation from Ozark and The Crown, for all its brilliance, has very little room for levity. Considering the stakes should be higher, there’s a lot of entertainment to be mined from Kate trying to be an intelligence officer rather than a diplomat and just how much work it is to handle her. There’s also a fair amount of entertainment involving Stuart and his relationship with the State liaison Eidra Park – who he happens to be sleeping with and who neither want anyone to know about. The series also has a superb guest cast including Miguel Sandoval as the Secretary of State and Celia Imrie, who is playing a genuinely charming character as opposed to the brilliant one she played on Better Things. (Though we already know there’s steel beneath that Mary Poppins exterior.)

The Diplomat has received a huge amount of acclaim from both critics and audiences, not merely for Russell alone. Having just watched two episodes I’m more than overjoyed that it’s been renewed for another season. Hopefully this will lead to Russell finally getting the Emmy she’s deserved for nearly twenty five years – and perhaps the show itself will get there too. We’ve needed a good drama about intelligence since Homeland left the air in 2020. Come to think of it, that earned another teen icon the Emmys she couldn’t get for her first legendary role. Claire Danes should remind Russell of that when they are at the after-parties this January.

My score: 4.5 stars.