Cultural Death by Capitalist TV
POST VIA LIBERATION LIT
A few thoughts on Debora Cahn’s The Diplomat — the unmaking of liberatory TV by topical evisceration — TV gutted.
Warning — “spoilers” galore—
The Diplomat is a Netflix political thriller as TV series currently streaming its third season. Why critique it? It’s a political thriller — also comedy, drama, and romance — with some relevance, or staggering lack thereof, to contemporary politics and culture in troubled times. Whatever its yawning lacks in politics, this show is easily in the top tier of current TV series for its narrative qualities, given the restrictive reigning culture. Season by season, The Diplomat generally surpasses most any trilogy of long movies that would be its equal in run time. Movies can feel like short stories compared to the novelistic sweep and detail, sometimes epic, of quality TV series. That said, The Diplomat goes only so far and no farther in bang for your buck and time, let alone in illumination of the contemporary age it portrays.
What The Diplomat delivers is not what one would hope for in any revealing show about the world and its geopolitics but it may be nearly as good as it gets dramatically. This seems strange to say given the amount of fluff and pomp and circumstance in the show. The bar is not high. The very different and relatively recent La Casa de Papel (aka Money Heist) Spanish TV series thriller and the French political riot and uprising movie Athena are lively rough equivalents in their own way, while the Danish political drama as TV series Borgen may be considered The Diplomat’s best quiet counterpart.
The Diplomat focuses on the politics — institutional and imperial — of America and Britain and the domestic politics of an American diplomat couple — and then several additional political couples — their private and public trials and battles waged through seemingly weighty cultural themes, contemporary topics, domestic issues, and bureaucratic scheming and diplomacy.
“The Diplomat is a show about long-term relationships, about marriages between people and marriages between countries and it gets hard to keep that going for a long time, be it a marriage or a military alliance,” series creator Debora Cahn (The West Wing, Homeland) told Netflix. “We change, we grow, the world changes and yet we want these relationships to last. It’s a show about a bunch of good people doing their best to keep their partnerships alive, while trying not to kill each other.”
Unfortunately, for these increasingly desperate political times, The Diplomat focuses on preserving existing power relationships, political and otherwise, rather than much improving the conditions within those relationships. This is far from the kind of political portrayal needed today, where so much of the populace, trapped by oppressive existing structures, is so badly abused, so outraged and unhappy, that they are doing everything they can to dissolve the existing political constraints and forces to create new and liberatory ones entirely. Additionally, there exists great destructive unjustified and confused right-wing populist outrage everywhere, but only in real life, not in the show.
To The Diplomat politics is about maintaining and containing change among high officials, by one formal tweak or another, while simply ignoring the most relevant current crises of the world. There are also little or no problems portrayed of ruling wealth in the form of menacing plutocrats who seem to exist almost entirely outside the scope of the show. There is much posturing and pushing and pulling among high government officials instead about concerns either remote from the concerns of the people, or very narrowly focused. Almost the whole plot of The Diplomat hinges on two passing and purported nuclear crises — the fate of a Scottish nuclear submarine base, and a missing Russian nuclear submarine and nuclear weapon off the coast of Britain — what is the fascination with Britain? ah, yes, it’s as if this show is a study of contemporary monarchy, yet no plutocrats are anywhere to be found. The two minimally examined nuclear plot pretexts seem dropped into the story merely to strain relationships between elite government officials — fires to be put out so that nothing changes — while the deadly troubles of the rest of the world, of the people, might as well not even exist to the American President, Vice President, and top diplomats in this big “political thriller” on Netflix.
The result is micro-drama in a macro-setting, producing yet another apolitical political show, that all-too-common cultural product of empire, a show that appears socially and political relevant but scarcely is. The result is akin to fluffy soap opera with a big budget. But The Diplomat is watchable because the show also offers a deft novelistic examination of skilled professionals in a working milieu interlaced with quandaries of their private lives and relationships. In this way, with intense focus on both the public and private qualities of people’s lives, The Diplomat is able to portray some sense and insight into the full person, the human condition — that complex combination of the public and private both — in great and often compelling detail. A portrait far from as complete as it might appear. Extended workplace matters and extended bedroom and home matters are evoked with a close eye, while the greater social and political, terminal and pressing issues of the peoples are basically written out of contemporary history — let alone dramatized, examined, and illuminated to any great benefit or for badly needed change.
In the first two seasons, Keri Russell stars as Kate Wyler, an American career diplomat unexpectedly thrust into the high-stakes role of ambassador to Britain amid an international crisis. The series delves into the complex interplay between her political maneuvering and personal difficulties. The character is written and played well to pointed comedic and dramatic effect, very classic novelistic. A seasoned crisis manager accustomed to working behind the scenes in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, Kate deals with public scrutiny and escalating global tensions in Britain and America while struggling with her troubled marriage to Hal Wyler (Rufus Sewell) — a former American ambassador to both Afghanistan and Iraq, where he met and worked with Kate and proposed marriage to her, and where she accepted. Hal’s ruthless tactics, destructive wake, and outspoken nature eventually saw him sidelined, after accusing the Secretary of State of being a war criminal.
The Wyler couple’s volatile chemistry drives the show, which tells you how much more this show is a case study of characters — ultimately four couples — in long-term relationships rather than a topical political thriller, despite the many professional political details of setting, plot, and dialogue. Hal’s charm and cunning make him both an asset and a threat, in every way. He is torn between loyalty to Kate and his own restless ambition. In fact, both Kate and Hal are walking dangers to themselves and to others, personally and politically. It’s all very dicey! That is, it’s supposed to feel that way, and often does.
The Diplomat is a melodrama of the American police state, rendered nearly atopical, amazingly enough but this is what one may expect in a de facto police state of a capitalist empire that denies it is a police state. American Empire writ large but rendered vanishingly small. War, war, war is one of the big concerns in the show — avoiding it, initiating it, controlling it, potentially fighting it but the real basis for violent conflict, missile politics, is almost not addressed at all. The empire loves to obscure the real financial reasons for war and myriad other conflicts the better to cloak its vile and brutal actions in noble rhetoric — not least in Ukraine and all across Asia and Latin America, and everywhere else.
How much of the public knows, for example, that the ghastly war between Russia and Ukraine is basically a proxy battle between America and Russia over the flow of fossil fuels, both Ukraine’s and Russia’s, and America trying to shape and control that flow? This actual basis of the war in Ukraine is all-but-never discussed openly by the establishment. American economic hitman type manipulation and interference in Ukraine’s politics, economics, and government leading up to the military war was an attempt to interfere with and cripple Russia’s economy, which is heavily fossil fuel based. Russia responded by invading Ukraine to protect its economy, and America responded to that by secretly blowing up Russia’s Nordstream 1 and Nordstream 2 undersea natural gas pipelines to western Europe, crucial for sales. (America, naturally, denies doing this.) These are all crimes, international crimes, domestic crimes, war crimes, Russian and American, and Ukraine is caught in the middle committing crimes of its own, while America pushes the war to be fought to the last Ukrainian, more than a million dead on all sides of the war already. Meanwhile, also in real life, the politics and economics of the American-Israeli genocide of Palestinians are equally distorted by establishment ideology and proclamations and reporting, going so far as to deny genocide in the first place, let alone American responsibility for it. Ah, the lies of empire, aided, abetted, and ignored by Empire TV.
The Diplomat reveals nothing of this magnitude about international politics, let alone about domestic populist struggles, left or right. At least The Diplomat is not your typical gun-first, gun-slinging, warriors-marching police show or military glamfest, so typical in Empire TV. Much though not nearly all gratuitous militant flourishes of empire are kept just off-screen through each season.
The show is well made, with seemingly higher production values than the somewhat similar The West Wing, where showrunner Debora Cahn began her career as writer and producer. Season two of The Diplomat brought in West Wing alumnus Allison Janney as the American Vice President. She ascends to the Presidency to start season three, and another West Wing alumnus Bradley Whitford joins the show as her husband in a small but humanizing role — Empire TV aging right along with the seemingly ever-aging leaders of the increasingly ghoul-like empire. A refresh of younger faces may be along shortly in real life and in the stories of empire. Or not. Cahn is creator, writer, and producer of The Diplomat and evidently a consummate professional. Which is in some ways a pity, for to be wholly professional in American storytelling is to be wholly captured by the establishment. More comprehensive and illuminating, crucial and powerful stories are to be found among creators of personal and political stories who are pushed far outside the establishment — due to the ideological pressures and mandates of cultural production in empire.
The Diplomat skirts or avoids entirely the current most prominent international catastrophes in Ukraine and Gaza, along with nearly every other real and severe crisis, ongoing. Previous political thriller TV series with at least reasonably high production qualities like The Blacklist and Homeland (for which Debora Cahn also wrote) and The Americans (in which Keri Russell also starred) were far more topical and politically relevant — while being even more falsely propagandistic and skewed by ideology of empire, simply for taking political topics more directly — in being more explicit, more sweeping, more dire about many topics of the day — within the strictures of empire.
Keri Russell and other cast members and the writers prepared for The Diplomat by reading background material, including, in Russell’s words:
…a book called The Ambassadors by Paul Richter. Another film that I found really useful was called The Human Factor, the documentary about the Israeli Palestinian conflict. It’s about all those negotiators who were behind [the Camp David Summit in 2000], who started at this young age within the Clinton administration, which is very apropos to our show.
Rufus Sewell read up on the figure about whom his character is loosely based — once prominent diplomat Richard Holbrooke, former American Assistant Secretary of State, Ambassador to the U.N., and President Obama’s Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, a person sometimes called the last great diplomat. The creator, actors, and writers of the show all steeped themselves in George Packer’s book, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century. So there is significant intent at real world grounding in the show, plenty of research but precious little of the real world is actually revealed.
Screen Rant notes that “The Diplomat‘s creator Debora Cahn was inspired to create the Netflix series after meeting with U.S. ambassadors while writing for the show Homeland,” a show in significant part revolving around the Israeli-American-Palestinian conflict and American “Middle East” politics generally, though badly distorted. It’s not as if it’s possible for a contemporary political thriller to be created in a vacuum of continuous and longstanding political crises, and the creator, writers, and actors of the show know this, but The Diplomat simply opts out of addressing nearly all contemporary crises, except on rare occasion and in passing.
The first season of The Diplomat began airing in April 2023 more than a year after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and six months before the Hamas-Israel conflagration blew up in early October 2023. Season two of the show premiered in late October of 2024, and season three, now, a year later while President Trump has bombed Iran, Yemen, Somalia, and South American ships while feeding the Ukraine-Russia war and the American-Israeli genocide in Gaza and beyond. Trump of course is also committing other depredations in the global reach of empire, such as kidnapping and imprisoning many of America’s own residents and taxpayers — in one racist assault after another against the people and institutions of the country. In other words, Trump has been attacking the four largest continents on the globe — the Americas, Asia, and Africa — and basically none of it appears in this show about the highest ranking government officials in America. The American empire, the capitalist empire, is hinted at but not visualized, let alone the people — battered, killed, and fighting back within and against empire. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was barely alluded to in season one, in a grim remark by Hal that Russia was “busy,” while the American-Israeli genocide of Palestinians has not been alluded to at all in any of the three seasons, let alone referred to as a genocide.
Such is the state of police state American TV. You want truth and reality, you need to go elsewhere. You want lies by framing and omission, you know where to go — plutocrat TV. When you watch American TV, or many shows throughout empire, especially when they delve into politics, you are often forced to admire what they do, how they are made, the professionalism, the effects, the drama, while despising what they are — both on the surface and underneath, in detail and omission, the slants, twists, lies, distorts — basic whitewash for capitalist empire, for the crimes and the basic criminality of empire. The bigger the contemporary political stakes, the bigger the failure in portrayal and omission. So much to admire in formal production, so much to despise in content and lack thereof. It doesn’t need to be this way, except empire makes it so, by propaganda biased and prejudiced rather than illuminating and awakening, and by plutocrat ideology and other force.
The people’s woes, the people’s greatest hopes and possibilities, politically and otherwise, go so often unexplored in Empire TV. No revolutionaries of the real and the possible there. The blacklist continues, unspoken, unannounced, wholly declared. It is of course systematically built in. No wonder the people are so unhappy and restless and aggressive. Their most important issues and pressures and problematic qualities of life go unaddressed in the largest ways on the largest and most predominant screens — unseen, ignored, denied, counter-visualized. Apparently the only great question and story for the plutocrats who control society, politics, and culture in empire is how best to ignore or control the angry populace, to keep them from the throats of the plutocracy. Diversionary depoliticized culture in song, story, sports — or falsely politicized culture — are the great tranquilizers and lobotomizers and dividers of the people — to great pillaging and profiteering effect, for the plutocracy. The old story.
The Diplomat plays its role in empire as a show about empire, no populist place. The Netflix thriller is not thrilling enough to be an exception to the colossal rule.
The show must go on and so it does — in style. To start season one of The Diplomat, unknown “terrorists” blow a hole in the side of a British warship in the Persian Gulf, off the coast of Iran, killing many British sailors. Iran is instantly blamed for the attack. What is a British warship doing in Persia’s Gulf? It’s too obvious. One need not even ask. But let’s answer anyway. Seeking to control Persians (and others), and their vast stores of fossil fuels! and not vice versa — to subjugate the fossil fuel rich people and lands of western Asia and everyone else in the world to the mad profit of Western capitalist empire. Given The Diplomat’s crisis of attack and death on a British warship off the coast of Iran (of course it’s an American ally being attacked near Iran and not America bombing Iran to pieces, inflicting mass death, a neat and typical inversion of reality, part of the steady drumbeat of lies of empire — even if in this case it turns out to be the empire bombing itself as false flag operation to help keep ultimate nuclear control over the globe) the American President personally directs Kate Wyler not to begin her ambassadorship in Afghanistan where she is the leading on-the-ground American expert already and a natural fit. Instead, the President directs her to become America’s ambassador to Britain, a fancy formal posting in which she has no interest or expertise whatsoever. But the President insists, during this time of crisis. And so — Why? Why her?
As with most highly popular (and mixed literary) movies and TV shows, “question engines” often drive the story, along with engines of conflict, paradox, and deepest fears and desires, all the while the plot reverses itself as it moves forward, then reverses itself again, driving through the fabled twists and turns of story to keep generating questions, conflicts, paradoxes, fears and desires to most fully reveal life, society, people in compelling ways. The story reveals that Kate is being groomed — literally, non-fashionista rebel that she is — by the President and his Chief of Staff to be appointed Vice President of America in a few months, when the current Vice President will resign due to scandal — supposedly, due to massive misappropriated funds involving her husband. After many more twists and turns, viewers learn that none of any of this is true. Hidden, ulterior motives reign. Unfortunately not the most politically or culturally revealing motives but dramatic and plot-advancing ones nonetheless.
As it turns out, colleagues of the British Prime Minister attacked their own warship — in a violent attempt to rally nationalistic fervor, propaganda, and support for stopping the secession of Scotland, home to a key NATO nuclear base. They succeeded too well, in accidentally killing dozens of their own sailors in the terror deceit. First thinking Iran, then Russia, then the British Prime Minister himself ordered the attack, Kate, along with other key diplomats and government officials, learns event-by-event in season two that this false flag bombing was originally suggested by her own American Vice President! as a violent and deceitful means to preserve the key nuclear NATO installation in Scotland (which actually exists, HM Naval Base Clyde, commonly known as Faslane, home of Britain’s nuclear armed submarine fleet). And so the international crisis spirals, or is seemingly made to spiral, in very tight political circles that are especially dramatic to the key figures in the know and otherwise involved. The main characters learn of these devious and damaging machinations of Empire and try to contain its secrets. The story genre truly involved in all this is more a cozy mystery posing as epic political thriller. The seemingly macro masked by the micro, a kind of natural imperial sleight of hand for minimizing and hiding its full self, which too many people would find too revealing (the plutocrats) and wholly objectionable (the bulk of the people).
So that’s the very limited topical relation to any major political issue of our times international or otherwise that these high diplomats and the very top government officials, the elite officials of empire, focus on — a scarcely threatened nuclear submarine base in the North Atlantic, potentially putting Britain and Scotland and America at odds — oh my!
So the political drama goes, in its narrow channel. Kate is appalled by the Vice President’s reckless and disastrous approach to politics (as she often is by her husband Hal’s very similar recklessness), and Kate begins to accept that it is for the best that the President has slated her as replacement for VP, even though she had been both resistant and reluctant to eventually assume the role. But then the President dies! And the reckless and Machiavellian Vice President who had wanted to remain in office despite her mass-murderous lawless bombing — and despite Kate as ready replacement, and seemingly also to spite her — becomes President instead, now with nearly unfettered power over both Hal and Kate Wyler, she-who-knows-too-much. Season two ends, and the question is will Hal and Kate follow law and expose the new President?
Of course not! They will rationalize doing nothing for now and try to contain any future damage and danger by staying close to the new reckless, lawless President, who must keep her friends close and her enemies, who know too much, much closer. And so it goes, the writers of the show reveal quite a bit about human personalities and relationships and various kinds of political and personal scheming, but next-to-nothing, or worse, about topical politics or human rights and conditions, let alone prospects for social change.
So, that happened — seems to be the theme of season three of The Diplomat as it sweeps through the public and private relationships of government officials and their lovers and spouses. It’s difficult to think of a single cultural quality, let alone topical political quality, that makes the show worth watching, especially as a purported political thriller. It’s that by now familiar show about professionals being too often unprofessional, though mainly striving not to be. However, to its credit the show approximates a significant literary quality, roughly equivalent to the quality of Victorian novels, the height of the novel, and a height of story, it’s probably fair to say.
The Diplomat is essentially an atopical show, partly posing otherwise, and the cultural dynamics are by now endlessly familiar if not yet to the point of cliché. It’s a tribute to the details of microplot and the seemingly spontaneous inter and intrapersonal moments that the show sustains as much momentum in minor revelations as it does — if sometimes tediously and inadvertently comically. A lot of the time you just chuckle ruefully at what is played up as important — you think, so they’re going to assume that matters that much — when it’s really not so important and you are sighing and scoffing at the show on a regular basis rather than fully going with it in its genuinely comedic, dramatic, and revealing moments. Nevertheless, the show excels in its own ways, and season four is approved to continue this insider’s look at upper echelon bureaucrat melodrama in empire — though, incredibly enough, in a topical near vacuum, while the real world actually burns and threatens to melt entirely down, quite apart from almost anything that occurs in the show.
Almost the entire macropolitical plot of this political thriller revolves around scandals between America and Britain. What is this — 1776? Is a second revolutionary war at hand between Britain and America? This is one of the scoff-worthy and unintentionally comedic elements of the show in its seemingly unintentional vacuity, up to and including the most recent season three finale and cliff-hanger. Oh, how the modern-day monarchists chatter, cluck, and squabble. In minute one, episode one, season one, dozens of British sailors are accidentally killed in what was supposed to be a minor false flag attack against a British warship that was ultimately revealed to be suggested by the American Vice President, now President, with all operational details carried out by British political insiders and Russian affiliated mercenaries — that’s the whole basis of the plot, until season three adds another nuclear twist involving more America-versus-Britain deceit. Should this show instead be called, The Revenge of the British? Upon this thin reed of a political plot all the story tension is supposed to hang — pressures of careers, relationships, and geopolitical effrontery. But between Britain and America — not between the militant capitalist empire and the world it subjugates, for that would require genuinely free culture and art. (White) elites are not to fuck with other (white) elites, but they are happily free to plunder and pillage the rest of the world, especially if non-white. And so the many molehills of the show are transformed into small mountains of political and personal passions and obstacles of diplomacy, at the highest levels of government. Meanwhile plutocrats and the ruling plutocracy along with the people they subjugate are written entirely out of the script and existence, that is, reality.
The hotheaded British Prime Minister constantly threatens to make a colossal stink of everything, while in the real world his political pressuring would be handled across the Atlantic by a few under-the-table threats, if not limited reparations, and that would be the end of that — plot, story, politics. But the show must go on, even if the great crisis of The Diplomat manages to focus only on the diplomatic maneuvering between America and Britain — not exactly the hotspot of geopolitical tension today or ever, not since the War of 1812. The War of 1812 could have passed for the title of this show, rewritten entirely as a comedy of government bureaucrats who take themselves a little too seriously, given the realities of the plot that they are doomed to act within. Things get a bit too cute at times in this melodrama, including with the main characters, Kate Wyler and her husband Hal Wyler — The Wily Ones, another possible show title, belittling but at times more fitting. The show is somewhat sophisticated but far too minor, too cute, topically empty, and badly skewed compared to what it could and should far better be in an ideologically free culture and art. Meanwhile much of the acting and dramatic and comedic tension within the scenes — it’s vivid and well done. The musical score is lively and resonant and at times even clever. Top notch visuals. The Diplomat is a well-funded high quality production of empire.
Alas, Ukraine, NATO, and Russia get barely a passing nod in season three, zero on Israel-Palestine, zero on President Trump’s attacks against the Americas, North and South, Asia, and Africa, zero on domestic issues and on most any actual grave international issue at all. Nothing on climate. Nothing on pandemics. Next to nothing on actual nuclear threats, let alone possible abolition. Fascism rising — little or nothing on that. But we’ve got high diplomacy! International stakes! Between Britain and America. And interpersonal stakes. Among Americans and the British. Why again? Now? One look at the mini supercomputer screen in your hand shows you, if you wish, apocalyptic levels of fascist and omnicidal global horrors shocking humanity like never before. Even Jane Doe in East Podunk, USA, can immediately see and partly comprehend the sheer grotesque and vicious Evil of the Biblical butchery livestreamed from across the ocean in Palestine, but she gets illuminating dramatic shows not about genocide but instead about diplomats dancing around the politics of British-American make-believe acts and squabbles.
So much the worse for Jane Doe of East Podunk and the populace writ large, globally, their appalled humanity utterly shrugged off, written away. Just get away, stay away from the real issues. Go watch and listen to the head-trauma Super Bowl or any other distraction far from changing the basic quality and potential of your life and other lives too often broken apart or destroyed. As a consequence, Jane Doe may see fit, again, to storm the capital of empire when the bigoted fake populists of America next tell her to do so. She certainly sees all the reasons she needs to feel that there is some sort of Evil out there that desperately needs to be attacked. And she won’t learn much of anything fundamental about it by watching The Diplomat, or other manifestations of Empire TV, nor by reading much of establishment lit in general. Let alone learn of opportunities and possibilities for change, and be compelled by them, into actually constructive action.
Just so is the country cultured and decultured, politicized and depoliticized. Apoliticized and disinformed. The Diplomat is a literary soap opera, that is, melodrama, and only incidentally, skeletally, a political thriller despite the advertising and hype and superficial structure. It’s a curiosity of empire, made engaging by a diverse cast, with quality acting, production, and some novelistic flair. The characters show a lot of big heart, for their fellow diplomats in particular, and quick minds and a lot of complex personalities and just enough depravity to keep it somewhat real, to keep the problems coming, far away from basically all the great political topics of the world.
In establishment culture, The Diplomat is a critical darling for a variety of valid and some not so valid reasons, with some minimal criticism:
Hannah J. Davies, The Guardian:
Over two high-stakes seasons, this drama about a US ambassador to the UK who finds herself moonlighting for the president and the entire state department has proved itself to be a rare beast: a political thriller that is frequently excellent, often erudite (a character once referred to another as “the Hecate of Highgate” instead of just calling her a stirrer), but which also requires the total and utter suspension of your disbelief. Question any of it for a second – as I did in the final episode of this third series, when the new US president asks the prime minister whether Chequers is his family’s ancestral seat – and it begins to crumble. But if you file it firmly within the category of spicy geopolitical soap? Boy oh boy, is it good.
James Hibbs, Radio Times:
[The deft characterization and plot] plus the show’s visual splendour and high production value, all add up to a riveting third season, with twists and turns galore, personal drama we can really engage in and political machinations that are thrilling to behold.
Meredith Loftus, Collider:
For as all-consuming as politics can be, there is an element of escapism in the political thriller genre. Instead of trying to keep up with the never-ending news cycle, it’s infinitely more manageable to keep up with the machinations of a fictional show. However, the best political shows reflect the real world through nuanced storylines and compelling characters. In the case of the Netflix critical hit The Diplomat, starring Keri Russell, this remains true — and Season 3 succeeds once again, thanks to its addictive, intense nature….
When political thrillers are done well, they can be as entertaining as they are meeting the moment in history. Where the U.S. previously carried a reputation for being the hero of the free world, The Diplomat Season 3 reckons with its status as a bully. The tag line for this season is “No alliance lasts forever,” and this rings true even into the season’s final minutes. The Diplomat remains as electric as ever, thanks to the depth of its characters, intriguing plot, and ever-changing dynamics. It grabs you for its opening scene and doesn’t let up until its finale
Rebecca VanAcker, Screen Rant:
It’s meaty to the point that it could easily feel overstuffed and yet never does. It bounces between characters and locations with ease, maintaining a jaunty pace while still allowing moments to breathe as needed.
Tonally, it’s light on its feet, switching between comedy, drama, romance, and political thriller elements without ever feeling jarring. It’s serialized, but each episode is still its own satisfying meal, and no character is perfectly good or bad, but rather messy, believable, and incredibly fun to watch.
Martin Carr, CBR:
Audiences will certainly revel in the evolution of these characters as America and the UK continue to lock horns over matters of political policy. But beneath the pomp and ceremony, there is a focus on personal relationships that elevates this drama.
Sherrin Nicole, RogerEbert:
Once again, creator and showrunner Debora Cahn (“The West Wing”, “Homeland”) squeezes the most salacious juice out of political intrigue and emotional fallout. The wit, power plays, and addictive drama don’t disappoint. Especially when domestic troubles—as in family issues—are mixed with the diplomacy, it’s gleeful. Surprisingly, President Penn and the First Gentleman have a real marriage, which might be the first time we’ve seen one in this series.
…Season 3 is fueled by duplicity, disillusionment, diplomatic disaster, doomed romance, and domestic discontent on every level of society and politics. It’s one disaster after another, and that’s what makes the series engrossingly dynamic. Yet somehow it still finds humor in the failures of détente between states and lovers. It’s easy to see why “The Diplomat” is Emmy-nominated; this show deserves the praise.
Alison Herman, Variety:
Season 3 of “The Diplomat” is the first installment of the Netflix political drama to come out since the 2024 presidential election, which means the series is now even more of an escapist fantasy than it already was. Watching Ambassador Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) stalk the halls of the United States embassy in London, earnestly working to satisfy Danish concerns over British oil drilling in the North Sea and gushing over bipartisan treaties as the key to domestic popularity, it’s hard not to think of Elon Musk’s minions laying waste to USAID or trade wars conducted via Truth Social.
…Season 3 goes beyond extending the pre-existing story and meaningfully alters the status quo. Paradoxically, shaking up “The Diplomat” also returns the series to its roots: the tug-of-war between the aspirations of two ambitious people, both straining against the gender dynamics of monogamous heterosexual marriage.
[The show’s] institutionalist worldview, inherited from Cahn’s old workplace “The West Wing,” can grate in light of recent events; a casual mention of the Jared Kushner-negotiated Abraham Accords of the first Trump administration raised my eyebrows given ensuing developments in the Israel-Palestine conflict. It’s also less tenable with Hal working out of the White House, an office with a much broader portfolio than that of a diplomatic mission — including domestic issues “The Diplomat” still largely avoids…
Ultimately, “The Diplomat” doesn’t have much to say about international relations, being too in love with surface pageantry and process to dive into the real power dynamics beneath. Rather, it’s a story about the messy intersection of love, work and the battle of the sexes, with a setting grand enough to heighten both the stakes and the eroticism. In Season 3, “The Diplomat” recommits to this core mission, a pivot that pays dividends.
Who can argue against the establishment?
And how can we not?
Maybe it’s time to lead prominent TV creators by the hand to meet the activists and organizers on the front lines of social change who are pushing mightily, oftentimes at great risk to themselves, to humanize the world rather than to administer to the rampaging beast.
I frequently note that epic stories may help inculcate and expand sanity while acting as great catalysts to change. Stories can also destroy and oppress and deceive. It’s worth repeating: it’s up to today’s artists across all genres to capture and express in stories the myriad and sometimes gargantuan battles against oppression and tyranny, and the fights for great possibilities of change and expanded human rights, to find and follow the stories of protest riots and monkeywrenching, the hacking, the strikes, the boycotts, the slowdowns and all kinds of actions, the desperate plight of the People’s Navy, the sabotage against deadly fossil fuel and military/police infrastructure, the myriad revolutionary forays in culture and society on the streets, in households, online, in independent reporting and progressive organizing, at work, in government, in classrooms, in art itself, everywhere.
These are crucial elements of the great battles for consciousness and conscience, for a humane and livable world, and they need to be vividly portrayed and enhanced in story to help expand consciousness, build it up, and spur action.
The Diplomat, almost like a slice of War and Peace among the gentry, the ruling elite of government masking the rule of capital, dramatizes politics in another world seemingly, as if high above it all, a world that can nevertheless be rocked and wrested from below by the people and by progressive and socialist popular forces for human rights, and must be, including by art and culture, story, and countless social and political actions, both liberatory and topical — all of it liberation lit. The Diplomat at its best approximates the Tolstoyan features of War and Peace, while falling far short of Tolstoy’s later political and human maturation into the anti-empire storytelling of his equally sophisticated short novel Hadji Murad.
In Empire TV, what you get is what you might expect from a capitalist-choked culture — one in which vicious ideological and monetary chokeholds crush ideas and opportunities alike. On the other hand, in anti-empire liberatory literature and culture, there are to be found far greater illuminations of reality and possibilities that truly push both the necessities and greatest possible reaches of imagination, via compelling and vital stories of the age, and for the ages.
POST VIA LIBERATION LIT
A Practical Policy 