A outstanding factor about Netflix’s newest restricted sequence hit The Diplomat is that on the finish of it, a diplomat makes a speech about how diplomacy by no means works.
His level is that the niceties of diplomacy are simply window-dressing for the actual work. But by that time, we’ve seen this for ourselves, as a result of we’ve watched our hero, Keri Russell’s beleaguered ambassador, tear by means of one well mannered facade after one other in her quest to do her job.
Unlike the cliché you may anticipate, nevertheless, Russell’s character, Kate Wyler, isn’t being damaging as a result of she’s a maverick iconoclast doing it her method. Rather, she is battling to get something executed in any respect. As the newly appointed US ambassador to the UK, Kate has to navigate not solely an unfolding worldwide army disaster however a brand new job that comes with a completely stacked deck of how to undermine her, from deadening protocols and hierarchies to garden-variety sexism. (Not to say the fixed manipulation from her wheeling-and-dealing husband.)
It’s a placing portrait of an overachiever who’s realized to masks however not fairly conquer her personal impostor syndrome. Kate, by all rights, must be striding by means of the corridors of energy with confidence. Instead, she repeatedly struggles to say and even consider in her personal primary company, at a second when her efficiency may imply the distinction between fixing a world disaster or embroiling everybody in a nuclear battle.
Kate sees herself as “an emotional support dog,” and acts accordingly
Created by West Wing alum Debora Cahn, The Diplomat takes pains to remind us of the well-known aphorism that the perfect leaders are individuals who don’t need to be leaders, somewhat than these for whom management is a self-serving means to a power-grabbing finish.
The tacit query this sequence poses in response that makes it each so fascinating and so bizarre is that this: What does it appear to be when that fabled perfect chief is a lady? What if her lack of ambition isn’t as a consequence of altruism or selflessness, however somewhat having her sense of company virtually solely eroded by years of institutional sexism and misogyny? What if she is aware of from expertise that even in energy, she’s not going to get to be greater than a pleasing, competent face for different folks’s objectives?
For this conceit to work, The Diplomat should let its protagonist be a bedraggled, chaotic catastrophe whose self-worth is at all-time low (who additionally has a preternatural ability for this sort of work), and it does. Thrust into the middle of a world political fiasco, Kate bites and snaps her method by means of a marathon first week on the job, becoming a member of a parade of dissociated, messy TV antiheroines. One spends the whole thing of the present’s eight episodes determined for somebody to brush her hair.
Prior to being abruptly assigned the British ambassadorship, Kate was getting ready for a a lot completely different diplomatic position in Afghanistan, one which appeared to her each much more pressing and much more well-suited to her no-frills temperament. Now, she has to tiptoe round a number of US and British companies at loggerheads with each other, all whereas battling a number of fronts at residence, particularly her outrageously manipulative husband, Hal (Rufus Sewell), and her nagging self-doubt. Her objective — to uncover the actual perpetrator behind the bombing of a British plane provider — appears to maneuver farther away with each play she fumbles on this new panorama.
We’re used to seeing this sort of harried feminine character in roles the place their shortcomings both don’t intrude with their bigger position or else play out privately, secretly, till they change into bigger than our heroine can deal with and threaten her public facade. Not so with Kate Wyler: Her dysfunction comes within the type of her rejection of conventional diplomatic abilities, which coexists together with her intelligence and sharp instincts for the job at hand. Even as she proves diligent and competent on the precise work of doing her job, Kate stays morose, cloaking herself in a protecting facade of cynicism, brazenly satisfied of her personal irrelevance. “I’m an emotional support dog,” she insists early on.
Kate’s disorientation, and her conviction that she doesn’t belong in that position, is so nice that it initially prevents her from understanding what her position is even speculated to be. It doesn’t assist that, with out her consent, she’s tacitly auditioning for one more position for which she additionally hasn’t been prepped: vice chairman.
To an uncommon extent, Kate’s impostor syndrome is really justified. Media retailers misreport that her husband, not her, is the brand new British ambassador. Her boss begins making an attempt to fireplace her after lower than a day on the job. Her complete position looks as if a mistake and a fluke. She’s been getting ready for a task in Afghanistan, not the one she’s abruptly thrust into, all of the whereas anticipating that her husband, not her, would be the one granted the showy, high-profile place. Even worse: Her husband most likely backchanneled the entire plan to make her veep so as to acquire energy for himself. Even her potential position as vice chairman is meant to be a handy entrance for another person to get one thing higher.
Her company, each in her official position and in her home life, is perpetually undermined by everybody round her. She tries to divorce her husband; he lies so as to delay the wedding. She tries to resign; the president refuses her resignation. She says no, repeatedly, to being thought of a candidate for the vice presidency — a plan she solely came upon about after it had been within the works for over a month. Everyone round her proceeds with the plan as if she has no say in it in any respect. At each flip, folks press her into claustrophobic social conditions and actually into claustrophobic attire. Even the ambiance undermines her: At a tense celebration, as she dances a tense dance (which her husband has dragged her into) whereas carrying a hasty updo, the band performs Corinne Bailey Rae’s “Put Your Records On,” subtly encouraging her to “let your hair down.”
Kate’s inside discombobulation impacts the complete tone of the present she’s in. The Diplomat presents as a deeply bizarre, tonally off-balanced present that appears to be combating to take care of its equilibrium in each scene. Sometimes this unevenness turns cheeky and intriguing, and different occasions it’s a pure prepare wreck; usually, it’s each on the similar time! When Kate rages in opposition to the deep manipulation and coercive management of her husband, it’s framed as comedian reduction. Initially, nobody in Kate’s workers respects her or believes in her; she stalks round, irritable and uncooperative at each flip, giving them few causes to begin. Random aspect characters set themselves up as pawns on her chessboard with out their roles within the recreation being clear. Her personal husband actively plots behind her again and regularly brazenly undermines her, casually and smugly.
The secretary of state “wants to know she’s not eating off her husband’s plate,” however then later that’s precisely what she does, coming behind Hal after each meal and selecting at his scraps, which he methodically selects and leaves behind for her. Like all the pieces else about Kate, her relationship to meals displays her distorted view of herself as somebody who solely expects and deserves a shard of her husband’s mirrored glory. Even after the president has praised her good work, she deflects and insists he solely desires to listen to from her husband, not her. Kate spends episode after episode being self-deprecating about her look, her skills, her self-image, her sidelined place inside her marriage.
All of this uncertainty and self-obliteration taken collectively makes each episode an intense train in psychological exhaustion, as if Kate’s psychological and emotional destabilization has seeped into the narrative itself.
It additionally leads to tiny explosions. Kate, when she fights again, lashes out with impulsive violence, whether or not it’s punching her husband within the face after studying he lied about their divorce or making an attempt to placate Britain’s bellicose prime minister by proposing that Britain bomb Russia. The latter transfer undermines her alliance with the British overseas secretary and dangers, nicely, cataclysmic world battle, however even worse, it mimics what her self-serving husband would do. Even her “bold” strikes appear to end result from her entrapment in Hal’s shadow.
What retains all this from being merely bleak and wearying is that regardless of all of this, Kate is superb at her job, even when she clearly doesn’t consider that she’s glorious. Her frustration at being handed over, dismissed, and condescended to as a lady in her career will get subsumed in her bigger self-hatred, which manifests in refined however fixed methods. She’s realized to do the entire deep-voiced, ball-busting Elizabeth Holmes factor, certain, however she will’t carry herself to take compliments with out instantly deflecting them. She is aware of tips on how to assert herself in textbook methods inside the context of her job (don’t let folks push you round; put on fits, not attire; converse authoritatively), however in the case of self-reliance, she usually falters.
It’s unclear what the extent of Hal’s manipulations have been over the course of her marriage, nevertheless it’s clear that they run deep. His controlling habits over time has impacted her means to rely on her judgment as an alternative of falling again on his steering and recommendation, even when she is aware of from lengthy expertise that he’s possible working an angle, that he can and can undermine her for his personal functions. It’s Hal, in fact, who throws her off stability most of all; Sewell performs him easy and sleazy, simply earnest sufficient to reel within the viewers together with Kate till the ultimate penny drops. But Kate is aware of higher; or at the very least she repeatedly tells everybody round her that she is aware of higher, as if she’s making an attempt to persuade herself.
The Diplomat’s power lies in Russell’s means to persuade us that Kate is each a reliable foil for worldwide terrorists and a perpetual dupe by the hands of her personal husband. The present’s writing undercuts this theme by being flat extra usually than refined; nonetheless, Hal by no means misses a chance to feed her self-doubt with petty criticism, insistent advice-giving, and outright manipulation and mendacity. When she suggests, repeatedly, that he sit again and hear as an alternative of making an attempt to take cost, he retorts that he by no means wanted to do this “because I thought it was a dumb idea.” The distinction is evident. Kate has realized to weaponize listening out of necessity, as a result of she’s so regularly talked over by Hal and males like him. By the season’s cliffhanger ending, his incapability to face down could nicely jeopardize his destiny together with hers. It could possibly be a lesson realized too late, or within the nick of time.
Yet controlling relationships are cyclical, and Kate and Hal appear to have been on this codependent ouroboros for a few years. Escape for Kate may necessitate an explosion of far greater proportions than she’s allowed herself to this point. It may catapult her ultimately out of her melancholy and doubt — or at the very least permit her to eat off of her personal plate.
