‘The Diplomat’ Season Three Review: Scenes from a Marriage

There’s an extraordinarily written and performed scene in the fourth season of FX’s The Americans in which Keri Russell’s Soviet-spy-cum-American-housewife Elizabeth Jennings and her husband, Philip (played by Russell’s real-life partner Matthew Rhys), argue over Philip’s interest in the self-improvement group EST. At first, Elizabeth pretends to understand why the group appeals to Philip but ultimately concedes that she believes it’s a capitalist scam. In a matter of moments, what initially seemed like a mundane marital spat brings years of botted-up resentments into the open.

A similar roiling tension simmers beneath the surface of every argument between U.S. Ambassador Kate Wyler (Russell) and her husband Hal (Rufus Sewell) in The Diplomat, who suggest lobsters slowly being boiled alive. The Netflix series is soapier and less cinematically textured than The Americans, but its palace intrigue and interpersonal subtext—and its intermingling of the two—is nearly as thrilling to unpack.

Last season’s preposterous cliffhanger, in which Vice President Grace Penn (Allison Janney) is unceremoniously given a promotion after the commander in chief croaks during a Zoom chat, felt more Veep than House of Cards. The new season, however, moves The Diplomat back toward the poli-thriller side of the spectrum by homing in on the minutiae of the backroom dealings that dictate the outcomes of both domestic policy and international alliances.

But at the heart of season three, even more so than the show’s previous seasons, is the politics of Kate and Hal’s marriage. A former ambassador who feels helplessly henpecked, Hal is cocky, impetuous, and stubborn, and Kate sees it as her responsibility to keep him in line, even after Grace chooses him to be her VP. Much of the eight-episode season revolves around Kate and Hal managing the complicated logistics of what she coins a “public marriage, private divorce.”

These dynamics are artfully mirrored in the show’s other fraying relationships: Grace and her husband, Todd (a delightfully dry-witted Bradley Whitford); Kate’s deputy, Stuart Heyford (Ato Essandoh), and his ex, C.I.A. station chief Eidra Park (Ali Ahn); and, of course, the entire North Atlantic Alliance. During a tense, deftly scripted dinner scene in the season finale, “Schrödinger’s Wife,” Todd—perhaps restlessly acting out as an “increasingly insignificant househusband married to a supernova”—needles inept U.K. Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) over his miscitation of the uncertainty principle, deliciously setting off a chain reaction of micro-aggressions across the table about the secrets to a successful marriage.

In the previous episode, “PNG,” Kate picks fights with her new lover, Callum Ellis (Aidan Turner), recognizing in him the ego and subterfuge that she believes poisoned her relationship with Hal—before finally realizing that she might be the problem. Earlier in the same episode, Eidra plainly and succinctly sums up the global balance of power when she says, “The world forgives us when they need us, and that doesn’t take long,” which perfectly parallels Kate’s beef with the men in her life, whom she feels weaponize her to fix the messes they’ve made.

The Diplomat is still chockfull of cliffhangers designed to keep you clicking “next episode” into the wee hours of the morning, and a mid-season time-jump feels a bit jarring, if necessary. But the series retains its sobering depiction of the geopolitical machinations that keep the globe spinning, and, like The Americans, it understands that the political is almost always personal.