A outstanding factor about Netflix’s newest restricted collection 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. However 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 one well mannered facade after one other in her quest to do her job.
Not like the cliché you may anticipate, nonetheless, Russell’s character, Kate Wyler, isn’t being damaging as a result of she’s a maverick iconoclast doing it her means. Somewhat, she is battling to get something executed in any respect. Because the newly appointed US ambassador to the UK, Kate has to navigate not solely an unfolding worldwide navy disaster however a brand new job that comes with a completely stacked deck of the way to undermine her, from deadening protocols and hierarchies to garden-variety sexism. (To not point out the fixed manipulation from her wheeling-and-dealing husband.)
It’s a hanging portrait of an overachiever who’s realized to masks however not fairly conquer her personal impostor syndrome. Kate, by all rights, ought to be striding by the corridors of energy with confidence. As a substitute, she repeatedly struggles to say and even imagine in her personal fundamental company, at a second when her efficiency might imply the distinction between fixing a global disaster or embroiling everybody in a nuclear battle.
Kate sees herself as “an emotional assist canine,” 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, relatively than these for whom management is a self-serving means to a power-grabbing finish.
The tacit query this collection poses in response that makes it each so fascinating and so bizarre is that this: What does it appear to be when that fabled supreme chief is a lady? What if her lack of ambition isn’t attributable to altruism or selflessness, however relatively having her sense of company nearly fully 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 nice, competent face for different folks’s targets?
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 one of these work), and it does. Thrust into the middle of a global political fiasco, Kate bites and snaps her means by a marathon first week on the job, becoming a member of a parade of dissociated, messy TV antiheroines. One spends everything of the present’s eight episodes determined for somebody to brush her hair.
Previous to being abruptly assigned the British ambassadorship, Kate was getting ready for a a lot completely different diplomatic function 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 businesses 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 purpose — to uncover the actual offender 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 one of these harried feminine character in roles the place their shortcomings both don’t intrude with their bigger function or else play out privately, secretly, till they turn out to be 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 expertise, which coexists along with her intelligence and sharp instincts for the job at hand. At the same time 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, overtly satisfied of her personal irrelevance. “I’m an emotional assist canine,” she insists early on.
Kate’s disorientation, and her conviction that she doesn’t belong in that function, is so nice that it initially prevents her from understanding what her function is even purported to be. It doesn’t assist that, with out her consent, she’s tacitly auditioning for an additional function 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 fireside her after lower than a day on the job. Her total function looks like 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 with a purpose to acquire energy for himself. Even her potential function as vice chairman is meant to be a handy entrance for another person to get one thing higher.
Her company, each in her official function and in her home life, is perpetually undermined by everybody round her. She tries to divorce her husband; he lies with a purpose 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. Everybody 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 sporting a hasty updo, the band performs Corinne Bailey Rae’s “Put Your Information On,” subtly encouraging her to “let your hair down.”
Kate’s inside discombobulation impacts your 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 keep up its equilibrium in each scene. Generally this unevenness turns cheeky and intriguing, and different instances it’s a pure practice wreck; typically, 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 employees respects her or believes in her; she stalks round, irritable and uncooperative at each flip, giving them few causes to start out. Random facet 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 overtly undermines her, casually and smugly.
The secretary of state “needs to know she’s not consuming off her husband’s plate,” however then later that’s precisely what she does, coming behind Hal after each meal and choosing at his scraps, which he methodically selects and leaves behind for her. Like all the things 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 needs 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 ends in 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 international secretary and dangers, effectively, cataclysmic world battle, however even worse, it mimics what her self-serving husband would do. Even her “daring” 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 imagine that she’s wonderful. Her frustration at being handed over, dismissed, and condescended to as a lady in her occupation 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 easy methods to assert herself in textbook methods throughout the context of her job (don’t let folks push you round; put on fits, not attire; communicate authoritatively), however relating to self-reliance, she typically falters.
It’s unclear what the extent of Hal’s manipulations have been over the course of her marriage, however it’s clear that they run deep. His controlling conduct over time has impacted her skill to rely on her judgment as an alternative of falling again on his steerage and recommendation, even when she is aware of from lengthy expertise that he’s doubtless working an angle, that he can and can undermine her for his personal functions. It’s Hal, after all, 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. However 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 skill 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 typically than refined; nonetheless, Hal by no means misses a possibility 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 pay attention as an alternative of making an attempt to take cost, he retorts that he by no means wanted to do this “as a result of I believed it was a dumb thought.” The distinction is obvious. 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 lack of ability to face down could effectively jeopardize his destiny together with hers. It might be a lesson realized too late, or within the nick of time.
But 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 would catapult her finally out of her melancholy and doubt — or at the very least enable her to eat off of her personal plate.
