Keri Russell, Rufus Sewell, Allison Janney, Rory Kinnear and David Gyasi in The Diplomat/Netflix

By Peter M. Boehm

November 12, 2025

As a former career diplomat who has spent parts of his life in locations as varied as Havana, Washington and Berlin, I can understand why diplomacy is constantly being misjudged by producers and directors who assume that because the backdrops are cinematic, so is the action.

In reality, while I can say that I’ve been in close calls as a diplomat, most of the action I’ve seen has involved nothing more kinetic than words, telephones, email, industrial quantities of coffee and knowing when to turn the tables…in a dinner conversation.

So, when the series The Diplomat surfaced on Netflix in 2023 and a journalist asked me to comment on the first season, I said I thought it was an “enjoyable fantasy.” I had the same opinion a year later when Season 2 appeared.

As I write this, I’ve just finished watching Season 3, and interestingly, I found it less far-fetched. Given the state of the world, including the machinations of the Trump administration, the “that’d never happen” factor that I scoffed at in Season 1 is far less prevalent, and I don’t think it’s the script. The melodrama of world affairs has finally made The Diplomat more plausible than reality.

(Spoiler alert: I will be very free with spoilers — I’m a senator, not a TV critic).

The cast has remained the same: Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) as the smart, driven American ambassador to the United Kingdom; her brilliant, scheming, and unabashedly sexist husband Hal (Rufus Sewell); duplicitous British Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear); suave Foreign Secretary Austin Dennison (David Gyasi) who has more than a passing personal interest in Kate, and Machiavellian Vice President — then President — of the United States, Grace Penn (Allison Janney, here married beguilingly to former West Wing colleague Bradley Whitford).

In her daily adventures, Kate is supported by loyal Deputy Chief of Mission Stuart Hayford (Ato Essandoh) and CIA London Station Chief Eidra Park (Ali Ahn) who are in a clandestine romantic relationship. At the end of Season 2, it seemed that ambassador Kate, by then the toast of London and indispensable foreign policy brain, was about to become vice president of the United States.

The third-season plot follows a nimbler tempo than the previous two. Global events triggered by an explosion on a British aircraft carrier and a secret sunken Russian nuclear submarine off the UK coast carrying a new super-weapon have led to covert mutual finger-pointing with respect to responsibility for the crisis, the gaming of solutions and the requisite plotting for power advantage both between London and Washington and within the two governments.

The volatile Kate/Hal relationship — listing from the weight of years of personal and professional bilateral baggage, including the “Star is Born” tension between Hal as the elder statesman and Kate as the rising star — is conspiratorial, witty, effervescent and always entertaining. Still, there may be real-life diplomatic couples whose ambitions and power games do battle this publicly, but believe me, if there are, they’re in Ljubljana, not London. I do not think this has changed in the real world since I left active diplomatic duty.

This season, the various heads of government are depicted with egos and hubris so mind-bending that they manifest almost as untreated personality disorders. This is one of those elements that seemed implausible in season one, and is much less so now.

UK Foreign Secretary Austin Dennison (David Gyasi) and US Ambassador to the UK Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) engaged in a full, frank and relatively plausible discussion in Season 3 of The Diplomat/Netflix

At the same time, creative conceits are liberally indulged in the series.

For instance, Ambassador Wyler spends little if any time at her desk or meeting with staff. Her spouse is involved in most important discussions and decisions. Her office is not soundproof, which is odd given her frequent meetings with CIA Station Chief Park. (In my experience, the verbal exchange of top-secret information always took place in a physically and electronically secured room). Her security detail is omnipresent, even helping her with hard-to-reach zippers. Sensitive security matters are routinely discussed in front of her household staff at the official residence of the U.S. ambassador, Winfield House.

She visits Prime Minister Trowbridge and Foreign Secretary Dennison and vice-versa with relative ease, eschewing established diplomatic practice. Most unrealistically of all, no one ever harangues her about office expenses, travel claims or human resource issues. One managerial moment does occur when DCM Hayford offers the startling observation that competence should be prioritized over interview skills when selecting someone for a job (see our own Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade report on the foreign service for elaboration on this point).

As in The Diplomat, ambassadors do find themselves in unusual security situations. Watching Kate hunkered down in an embassy van trying to get though a protest, I recalled my own experience huddled under a blanket in an SUV in Lima, Peru, en route to meet the opposition leader and future president. My security detail consisted of armed men all a head shorter than I, which made for an amusing image on the Peruvian national news that evening.

Kate has a direct line to the top in the White House so avoids dealing with her nominal boss, a marginalized secretary of state in the mold of Elihu Washburne or Rex Tillerson. With Hal serving as vice president in DC — the job they had both expected her to get — and her increasingly seen as “Second Lady” in name only (since she elected to favour her career title and stay behind in London as ambassador), Kate begins the sort of torrid affair that the security and logistics of real diplomacy make all but impossible with MI-6 agent and sometime-UK cabinet nuclear advisor Callum Ellis (Poldark heartthrob Aidan Turner), who happens to have all the information on the sunken sub and its Poseidon weapon.

While their banter is among the show’s best features, chances are that in real diplomacy, an ambassadorial affair with a local intelligence operative — especially one whose status as an operative is known to her, robbing her of even the mortifying alibi of a honeytrap — would get her a one-way ticket back to Foggy Bottom.

Still, these are the twists that make the series entertaining while still sufficiently tethered to authentic diplomatic culture to keep a professional hooked. The dialogue is crisp and witty, throughout all the plot twists and turns. Diplomatic life is at once glamourized but also shown to be tough, with high performance expected under unyielding working conditions. This is helpful, soft-power exposition for a profession whose most important work happens out of the public eye.

It also offers an alternative view of America at a time when the country’s most powerful bully pulpit has been requisitioned by nonsense. The America on display in The Diplomat far more closely resembles the America I knew as an actual diplomat in multiple postings there.

As CIA station chief Eidra Park, who identifies herself as a “young, tiny Asian American woman at the top of one of the most baldly paternalistic arms of the US government,” says, “the US is the world’s best bulwark against authoritarianism” but also notes that “the world forgives us when they need us, and that doesn’t take long.”

For me, these statements serve as an affirmation of American exceptionalism but also of hope. Globally, the historically much relied-upon US bulwark is starting to creak. A series like The Diplomat, while still serving as an enjoyable fantasy, can also underscore the need for effective diplomacy, regardless of who is practicing it and under what circumstances.

Senator Peter M Boehm is a former ambassador and deputy minister. Among other assignments during his diplomatic career, his service included postings in Cuba, Costa Rica and as Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the Organization of American States in Washington, DC. He also served as Canada’s Ambassador to Germany, and as Canada’s Sherpa for several G7 Summits.