Note: The following story contains spoilers from “The Diplomat” Season 3.
“The Diplomat” has always been a portrait of the foreign service-driven marriage between Keri Russell’s Kate and Rufus Sewell’s Hal Wyler, but the third installment of the Netflix political drama especially zeroes in on their crumbling union in the midst of international turmoil.
“Every time the two of them aren’t on screen, you want them to be on screen, even though the other people in the cast are just to die for,” series creator Debora Cahn told TheWrap. “A lot of people have said that they see their own marriage in that relationship, which is a little bit heartbreaking, but I kind of get it … we just wanted to go deeper.”
While their marriage has been on thin ice in the first two seasons, it’s put to the ultimate test when Hal strays from his plan with Kate and tells the president that VP Grace Penn (Allison Janney) was behind the attack of the British warship that sent Kate to London in the first place, prompting the president to have a heart attack and die, making Grace the new president. The Season 3 premiere picks up in the wake of that chaos, and while Hal is certainly not in Grace’s good graces, he ends up being Grace’s pick for VP over Kate.
With Kate having lost out at her chance to become VP — which Russell praised Cahn for writing as “amazingly embarrassing and fantastically depressing” — Kate is relegated to being “her husband’s wife” as she takes on the role of Second Lady. It was this shifting power imbalance that drew Cahn to focus on relationships in the foreign service.
“In every relationship, you go through periods where you feel like people are making sacrifices for each other — they’re not necessarily as obvious as ‘I’m completely putting my career on hold for yours,’ but those questions come up all the time,” she said. “It’s really nice to be able to kind of get into the nuance of what it’s like on both sides — we’ve seen what it was like for Hal in the first couple of seasons when he was in that position, and so it’s nice to be able to see the shoe on the other foot.”
“It’s not black and white — there are moments when you’re like, ‘No, no, I get it — that person should go do that special job, that’s the right move,’” Russell added. “You’re still mad about it at times, and you can still act bratty about it sometimes, and it can be devastating other times … there’s a real roller coaster of the up and down of it.”
While Russell notes the turbulent political world and shifting alliances feels current and might feel especially relevant to civil servants, the struggles Kate and Hal face, both in their marriage and their careers, will also resonate with many viewers at that stage in their lives. “I’m watching a lot of my friends go through that — there’s divorces, there’s job changes, there’s existential questioning of careers and outside forces, government shifts, and all of those things feel very real to me with even my friends,” Russell said.
Despite Hal and Kate having had their fair share of screaming matches after Hal irreversibly messes up their plans in some unforeseen way, Season 3 kicks up the volume as the couple is on full display to the country — and the world — giving the audience a well-rounded look into the pressure points that boil under Kate’s skin and led the couple to their breaking point.
“When the audience has been through the basic contours of what the relationship is, being able to see certain conflicts come up again in a different context, being able to see how the fight is similar, but how it’s not similar to what you’ve seen these two go through before … and the things that they can escape, and the changes that they see, that they need to make and can’t, that’s really the privilege of being able to do a story that you’re telling for eight hours, 10 hours, 20 hours,” Cahn said, praising the TV medium as a vehicle to portray those nuances.
With Kate and Hal joining the White House in ways they might not have foreseen, “The Diplomat” Season 3 introduces “West Wing” alum Bradley Whitford as First Gentlemen, Todd Penn, offering a “West Wing” reunion for Cahn and Janney, as well as another frequently dysfunctional couple for Kate and Hal to play off of in a dynamic Cahn calls “delicious.”
“There’s something wonderful about having gone through a lot of conflict with one relationship and then watching that couple see conflict in another relationship,” Cahn said. “There are moments when Kate and Hal look at Grace and Todd and think, ‘Wow, that’s really dysfunctional,’ which is just a great place for us to see them, because we spend so much time pathologizing their relationship.”
The pairing of both couples also makes for top tier comedy in the series, notably in Episode 6 when the couples hunker down in Amagansett. “Getting those four actors together, it’s just insane,” Cahn said, joking that she got Janney’s Grace and Whitford’s Todd for Russell and Sewell for Christmas. Plus, the shenanigans are just getting started, with Janney and Whitford already upped to series regulars for Season 4.
“The Diplomat” Seasons 1-3 are now streaming on Netflix.