President Dies, Allison Janney Is President

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from the Season 2 finale of “The Diplomat,” now streaming on Netflix.

Season 2 of “The Diplomat” has finally dropped, as promised, just days before the most consequential election of our lives.

Debora Cahn, the show’s creator, wrote this season way before Kamala Harris became the Democratic candidate for president, so whatever you’ve seen on “The Diplomat” concerning a Biden-like president and a female VP isn’t a reflection of those events. When Hal Wyler (Rufus Sewell), husband to the American Ambassador to the United Kingdom, played by Keri Russell, insults that VP (Allison Janney) — saying that the only thing she’s accomplished is wearing white, or that the White House doesn’t even like her enough to stick in the back of photographs — he’s not referring to Harris. So keep that straight. And vote!

There is some backstory to the making of “The Diplomat” that goes a long way to understanding where the show is coming from. I had some wine — truthfully, a lot of it, with tons of ice — with Cahn and Russell when I was interviewing Russell for the Variety cover story published two weeks ago, and we got pretty deep into it.

Cahn, whose mother was in the Holocaust and rescued by American soldiers in Europe when she was 8 years old, started thinking about a show like “The Diplomat” after Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, and Donald Trump began his disastrous term.

“I was struggling with the question of, how is it possible that the most intelligent, most experienced candidate that’s ever run didn’t win?” Cahn says. “And a big piece for me was, what do you do after a president has torn up every treaty and shit on every alliance? And how are we going to function in the world when that much of our global strength has been squandered because of the destruction of treaties and alliances and the degradation of institutions and the crumbling of public respect for the rule of law?”

So Cahn, who spent years writing for “The West Wing” and “Homeland,” made a date with an ambassador to have lunch to talk about these things in Washington D.C. in March of 2020, but on the day of the meeting, there was this “bad cold” going around, and it was canceled. That was, of course, COVID. At first, Cahn felt that the project would be dead in the water because of the lockdown, but then it turned out that all the ambassadors were stuck at home too and happy to talk.       

“So Tony Blinken was really easy to get on the fucking phone,” Cahn says. “Everybody was easy to get on the phone. Tony Blinken has a very similar family history to mine, and Marie Yovanovitch, who also comes from an immigrant family. All these people were sitting around happy to talk. It was the Trump Administration — there were a lot of people I really respect who were out of work.”

Cahn talked to 40 ambassadors about what they were planning to do when Trump was gone. “‘What are you going to do when this is over?’” she asked. “‘What are you going to do when somebody else is in charge and the State Department has hopefully survived? How would you repair our reputation in the world?’ I mean, I take it all very personally because of that 8 year old.”

Both Cahn and Russell have enormous respect for the State Department and the work that they do. “All politics aside,” Russell says, “‘The Diplomat’ is a love letter to the State Department. And in those dark years, those people were fired, those people were shut down. So this is a love letter to them and the Foreign Service and what they do. They serve an incredible function of our country and in our government.”

Cahn says, “And no matter what a political presidency is doing, they’ve got to go out… 

 “…and be out there, public-facing,” Russell says.

Cahn says, “No matter who it is, they have to go out and say, ‘We are here to work with you.’” 

 “That’s right,” Russell says.

 “We’re here to promote democracy around the world,” Cahn says. 

One of the fun parts of playing Kate Wyler, for Russell, is humanizing these brilliant, larger than life statesmen and women. Kate is based loosely on Jane Hartley, the American Ambassador to England.

About Hartley — and, by association, Kate Wyler — Russell says, “She’s at that heavy-hitter meeting, because she can hang. Like, she’s legit. And that’s exciting. These people are forming world policy. They’re dealing with these world personalities. These are the players of our world. And it’s fun to think that these people still get embarrassed and messy and complicated and have bad relationships and are insecure. Like, that’s what’s fun, and that’s what our show’s trying to do.”

So it would have been enough to end Season 2 of “The Diplomat” in the last moments of the penultimate episode where Hal is pinning Kate to their bed, doggy-style, in his boxers so that she literally can’t get to the phone to call Washington and tell them she doesn’t want the job as vice president of the United States, because she wants Grace Penn to have it. It would have been a perfect ending to a perfect season to have Hal whispering in Kate’s ear while she’s trapped under his weight, that it was not Iran or Russia or that buffoon British Prime Minster Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) or that untrustworthy old Tory Phillipa Roylin (Celia Imrie) who was ultimately responsible for the explosion on the British ship that killed 40-something seamen, but instead her new hero — her new crush! — Penn, the current American vice president.

But because Cahn’s “The Diplomat” is an extraordinary ride, rather than simply a great one, the show went one step further. After much flip-flopping about whether Grace Penn is a monster for blowing up the ship or a hero for saving all of mankind, Hal and Kate conclude together that the U.S. government should be the ones to decide. And so Hal goes off to CIA headquarters to call the Secretary of State (Miguel Sandoval) to tell him of Grace Penn’s “shenanigans” (as real-life politicians and news anchors like to call the crazy things our elected officials do in our name), while Kate confronts Grace Penn on the back lawn of the ambassador’s manse, and tells her that, yes, she, Kate, does want to fight for the job of VP, and, “newsflash” (as Russell likes to say): You’re a terrorist.

It’s at that moment that Deputy Chief of Mission Stewart Hayford (Ato Essandoh) comes running across the lawn waving a cellphone, saying that Hal is on the line and it’s urgent. And this is the crazy, brilliant, totally unexpected ending that we now have to live with until Netflix decides to drop Season 3: Hal tells Kate that he didn’t speak to the Secretary of State after all, but instead went straight to the president (Michael McKean), who, upon hearing the news of Grace Penn’s treachery, got so upset that he died — he fucking died! — which means…

Wait, there are now dozens of Secret Service people pouring out of the house and down the stairs and across the great lawn, running towards Kate and Stewart and Grace Penn, because Grace Penn — who is Kate’s newly sworn enemy — is now, Hal explains over the phone, the president of the United States.

When I was writing my story a few weeks ago, Russell, who happily spoiled this ending for me, said afterwards, “Isn’t that’s so good?? Isn’t that so good? That’s how it ends!”

I spoke to Essandoh about this last scene, and he told me that when the script for Episode 6 came out, that last scene on the lawn was redacted. “So we get to the read-through,” he says, “and they’ve now put the entire script out. And they say, ‘Hey, don’t read ahead — just enjoy the spoiler when it happens.’

“So when we get there, I turn the page and I see what’s happening and everybody gasps. But I stood up, picked up the script and threw it across the room.” He laughs. “You know that feeling when you’re in the theater and you hear, ‘No, Luke, I am your father’? It was one of those moments.”

But what about Grace Penn? How can that monster be president?

When I likened Grace Penn to Cruella de Vil over drinks, Cahn began wringing her hands. She had not meant to make Penn a villain. “I think that there are objectively bad people out there,” she says, “and I’m prepared to…”

Russell says, “…call them out.”

“But I don’t want to write about them,” Cahn says. “I feel like it’s been done. Just like I don’t want to write about infidelity — that’s been done!” (She’s referring to Hal and Kate, whose problem is not sex and jealousy, but morality.) “We’ve seen the movie,” she continues, “we’ve watched the TV show — the stories about evil leaders and corrupt, venal heads of state, all of that exists. To me it feels a little bit like a cop out.

“What if they’re all good,” she then asks, “and they all have good values and they’re all doing their best for their country, and we’re still in the motherfucking shitshow that we’re in now?”

 “Yeah,” Russell says, “Yeah.”

“What if this is what you get when the good people are doing their best work? I believe that actually is what happens. I don’t think it happens because the bad people got the big jobs — I just think it’s really hard to get it right. So the hope with the Allison Janney story was, Yes, you go into it and you believe that she’s the bad guy. And then hopefully you learn that you would have made the same decision in that situation.”

What is that situation? There’s a scene in the finale in which Grace Penn picks up a slab of cold burnt wood from the fireplace at the prime minister’s home and, under duress, lays out for Kate on a big map why she ordered the hit on the British ship: If Britain hadn’t come together over a national tragedy like that, and Scotland had gained its independence — which was in the works — then the British base that houses the only nuclear submarines preventing Russia from easily nuking the United States by sea would have been shut down, and all of our lives, and the lives of the people we love, would have been in grave danger. So for whatever reason, Grace Penn decided to save us all without telling the president or anyone else but the people she enlisted to help. When she’s finished schooling Kate on these matters, she wipes her charcoaled hands on the train of her long black dress and slides away.)

But what about Hal? Doesn’t he go off and tell the president about Grace Penn because he thinks that she’s bad?

Cahn says, “Who cares if she’s bad? He wants Kate to be in power.”

Because he wants something for himself?, I ask.

Cahn says, “Why are those things mutually exclusive? Does he want what’s best for her? Yes. Is what’s good for her also good for him? Yes.”

Russell says: “There’s a part of him, of course, that’s power-hungry. But I’ve done tons of interviews with Rufus, and he always says he doesn’t play it like it’s a competition, ever. He plays it like he loves Kate, and he believes in her, and that’s what he wants.” Then Russell says something that she says often in different contexts. “People are complicated. No one is twisting-their-mustache bad.”

What about Donald Trump?, I ask.

Russell says, “That bad guy is great to his kids,” she says. “I believe he loves his kids.”

Tiffany?

“The photographed children,” she says.