‘The Diplomat’ Creator On Season 2 Premiering During The 2024 Presidential Election

• News
• 0 Comments
• 0 Likes

Share to Facebook

Share to Twitter

Share to Linkedin

Allison Janney, Rufus Sewell, and Keri Russell in 'The Diplomat' on Netflix.
PHOTO BY ALEX BAILEY/NETFLIX

When Debora Cahn worked on the Showtime hit Homeland, she and the team behind the CIA drama series attended Spy Camp before each season. They learned about the issues that keep the highest of government officials up at night.

It was there that Cahn, who created the Netflix hit The Diplomat, first met an ambassador named Beth Jones, the woman who would inspire Keri Russell’s character, U.S. Ambassador Kate Wyler.

“She walks in the door and she looks a little bit like your kindly librarian and then she starts talking and it is mind-boggling what comes out of her mouth,” Cahn said in an interview just before season two premiered. “She’s on a plane and she gets off and then the plane explodes but she still has to go to the meeting with the warlords to have a negotiation. We called her a superhero in a pantsuit. I have books of notes from Spy Camp and on a page from the first time that I met Beth, it says underlined, ‘She is a series!’ I started focusing more on ambassadors after that.”

The series details the divisiveness and inner goings-on in politics that the average citizen is never privy to. This interview took place before Donald J. Trump won the 2024 presidential election and I asked Cahn how she felt about the second season premiering amidst such a divisive political climate in this country.

“This season is coming out at an interesting time. We wrote most of it two years ago and started filming it so long ago,” Cahn explained, adding that two Hollywood strikes caused five months of shutdowns. “It’s taken a long time for it to come out. The world has caught up with us more than it was supposed to.”

MORE FOR YOU

Election Betting Odds: Trump Hits 99% On Polymarket, Kalshi As More Election Results Come In

Election 2024: Harris And Biden Congratulate Trump, Discuss Peaceful Transfer Of Power

Elon Musk Says He’s A Global Top 20 ‘Diablo 4’ Player, And It’s Actually True

Photo of Debora Cahn by Presley Ann/Getty Images for Netflix.
Getty Images for Netflix

Cahn continued, detailing her creative process. “The notion is always to be in the headspace of the country’s thinking about foreign policy and the country’s thinking about who we are in the world and what kind of leaders we have and choose and create. I want to be in that conversation but I don't want to be doing a ripped-from-the-headlines kind of thing. It sometimes looks like we are even though we didn’t.”

Is this series a case of art imitating life or vice versa? Cahn recalls those conversations in Spy Camp when she first met Jones, the woman she would build this series around. “One of my favorite questions that we asked then and that I ask now of the people we speak to for The Diplomat is, ‘What’s the thing that keeps you up at night that I don't even know about? That I don't know to be worried about?’ We talk to people who are in the know and they answer that question and sure enough, they’re looking at something that’s on the horizon and might come down the pike in a couple of years and two years later when it happens we seem fairly prescient but it's because we talk to people who know.”

When developing The Diplomat, Cahn called Jones and was regaled with more stories. Jones also put Cahn in touch with some of her colleagues who offered even more details of their work. “Within five minutes she sent me an email with a list of the names of 40 ambassadors, most of them women, and we talked to just about everybody on the list. There it was; we immediately had easily seven seasons' worth of stories and we’ve just begun to scratch the surface.”

Season two, says Cahn, has an overall theme of, “The call is coming from inside the house.” She then had to figure out how to tell that story. “How do you investigate your host country? How do you investigate your best friend? How do you do that when you share intelligence with them? We share the hardware that the intelligence travels through. It is very difficult to spy on them. We have an agreement not to so solving that problem is difficult, juicy, and fun.”

Season one ended with a literal bang and fans had to wait to find out who survived the blast that would change everything. “The thing that dramatically sets the boulder running down the hill is that a car bomb can ruin a really good divorce,” she laughs.

Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell in 'The Diplomat' on Netflix.
COURTESY OF NETFLIX

The story is centered around Russell’s Kate and her husband Hal (Rufus Sewell), who also happens to be in the same line of work. The two have a tumultuously passionate relationship and are on the verge of divorce when he’s almost killed in the explosion. When Kate thinks Hal is dead, she’s devastated.

“Things like that can take what you believe about a relationship in which you have a fixed opinion and just, as it were, blow it apart and completely upend what you think it is that you want in your life,” said Cahn of the brilliant season one finale. “The question is always if you go through a reframing like that, how long does it last? How long do you have the perspective of somebody who had a near-death experience where you thought you lost somebody forever and you never want to let them go? And then when life comes back, what happens? You hang onto it for a while and then eventually you don’t.”

The fans tuned in to see the fallout of that explosion and were delighted that Allison Janney joined the cast as VP Grace Penn. Season two returned at No. 3 on the Netflix TV charts for the week with 5.6 million views. Per the shocking finale, we can expect to see a lot more of Janney in season three.

Season two asks, ‘What if it is coming from inside?’ and from an ally and not a foe, which is a terrifying thought. “I don’t like writing villains. I think in politics, and definitely in global politics, we spend a lot of time saying, ‘That’s the bad country or that’s the bad leader, and that’s why this bad thing is happening.’ If I’m in a room with five of my American friends we agree on almost nothing.”

Cahn said her aim in creating this series was to challenge political points of view. “The idea that there’s an American point of view or a British point of view, or the idea that there’s the German position on something is ridiculous. I wanted to create a series where we could talk about that and see that play out and also play the same thing on the level of the characters. I’m always looking to have the characters present themselves in a certain way to the other people in the story and the audience and then put them through something that reverses our opinion of them. I don’t ever want to create a situation where one of them is right and one of them is wrong.”

In conclusion, Cahn aims to make the varying positions of her characters understandable and to show that things aren’t always black and white. “One of the joys of having people watch the show has been seeing how they react to those interactions in wildly different ways with wildly divergent impressions of the characters. I don't want to tell a story about something good and something bad. I think the world would be simpler if that were the case but it’s not.”

Follow me on LinkedIn.

Dana Feldman

Editorial Standards

Forbes Accolades