SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from The Diplomat Season 3.
Debora Cahn had more than a few tricks up her sleeve for Season 3 of The Diplomat.
The latest installment, which premiered Thursday on Netflix, picks up just moments after the Season 2 cliffhanger when the President dies after Hal (Rufus Sewell) informs him of Vice President Grace Penn’s involvement in the bombing of a British aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. In his defense, Hal says he was merely informing the President that he had a rogue deputy, which he did.
Except, that rogue deputy is now President of the United States. The one shred of good news is that this might finally be the moment Kate (Keri Russell) ascends to the VP position, if only to keep Grace in check. That last hope is squandered when Grace instead taps Hal to serve as her second-in-command.
That decision, and the aftermath as they try to determine whether they should ever tell their British allies the truth, sets the stage for Season 3. It makes a thorny problem even harder to unravel for these characters, who Cahn actually thinks are all pretty good people, at least in theory.
“The idea that there are corrupt leaders and venal politicians, I think, may well be true, but it has been so well covered in film and television and storytelling in fiction that for me, it’s more complicated to look at: We would like to think that they’re bad, but what if they’re not and it’s just that complicated? What if you have to deal with a situation where good people have gotten us here?” she tells Deadline. “So the story continues to encounter somebody who our heroes think is bad, and then learn that our heroes would have done the same thing in that position.”
In the interview below, Cahn dives deeper into her process for creating The Diplomat and weighs in on some of the biggest Season 3 themes.
DEADLINE: I feel like it is pretty apt timing that we are having this conversation on the first day of the government shutdown. So let’s start with: What enticed you to write a show that has you digging so deep into the machinations of the federal government’s civil service?
DEBORA CAHN: As soon as I finished writing on The West Wing, I knew that I wanted to do something that was about the same population of Americans who work for the government, but looking at it more from a foreign policy lens. What I think Aaron [Sorkin] cracked the code on in The West Wing is: how do you talk about [the idea that] people work for the government, and they’re decent people, and it’s still a shit show. They don’t get it right all the time, and the problems don’t all get solved. That can be the case even when we really like the people who are doing it. I think my experience working on that show and talking to experts who came in, who had experience in the fields, whatever their party affiliation was and whatever iteration of the government they had worked in, I always looked at them and thought, ‘They’re so smart, and they’re such good people, and they’re giving so much of themselves.’ Working on Homeland, I had a similar experience where we interviewed people from the CIA, we interviewed people from the State Department, people who were involved in diplomacy, people who are from the military, and every single one of them, I was like, ‘Oh my god, another one who’s incredibly intelligent, ton of experience, a good person, devoting their life to serving the country,’ and yet we still look at the world and think, ‘this is a total f*cking disaster, and the things that this country is doing in the world are a total disaster.’ So trying to figure out how those things happen at the same time and the simple idea that the world is a complicated enough place that we can be smart and have good values, and the people who we’re dealing with from other countries can be smart and have good values, and we can still wind up bombing the crap out of each other. So how does that happen? That feels really complicated. How do you take two sets, or sometimes 10 sets, of people from 10 different countries and unwind a problem without killing each other, even if everybody is a decent human being?
DEADLINE: How do you research for this show? And how much are the scenarios you’re writing about inspired by or reflective of real actions taken by the U.S. government?
CAHN: Almost every scenario that we represent is based on something that we’ve heard from somebody in the field. So there are a lot of stories that we hear or that we observe playing out on the news that are so crazy that we can’t put them on TV, because they seem implausible or cartoony, and that’s not the show that we’re trying to build. We’re not trying to do like, ‘Oh my God, look how f*cked up this situation is. It’s insane.’
Before I studied the field, I didn’t really have a sense of what the moves were. So I would look at foreign policy decision makers and feel like I didn’t know how they spent their day, but was also sort of willing to ascribe the success or failure of global policy to a couple of people in these jobs. We don’t know what the power actually looks like. We don’t know what the moves actually are, and so it’s hard to understand why they succeed or fail. I think the thing that struck me the most about meeting with ambassadors and getting to know what they do is that there are a lot of them, and they’re all over the world. In some circumstances, it’s purely a ceremonial position, and in some circumstances, they’re really responsible for what our behavior is in a war and peace situation. The foreign service calls itself ‘the other army,’ and that’s a term that I really like — the idea that there’s this whole army’s worth of people who go out and only use conversation as a weapon. I like the idea that global conflicts are in the hands of a lot of people and not everything is solely a presidential decision. The government is a big place, and there are a lot of people who can help, and there are a lot of people who can affect change, and there are a lot of people that can slow disaster. Now, it’s unfortunate that thousands of them were just fired. So there are quite a lesser number of people who can take their intellect and experience and slow disaster, but they’re still out there.
DEADLINE: There is a moment in the new season where Kate mentions that two recent U.S. elections were impacted by foreign interference. Moments like that keep the show feeling very grounded, even as the characters and the scenarios they are in are largely fictional. How do you balance that, and when do you decide to infuse some current political commentary into the show?
CAHN: I think the basic ground rule is…for the most part, we don’t talk about people who are alive [as] having a major influence on the action of our story. We aren’t trying to comment directly on what’s going on, but we are trying to be in the foreign policy headspace that the country is in. We’re also managing the fact that we write a story, and it doesn’t go on the air for about two years. So even if we wanted to be commenting on what’s going on, I don’t feel like we’re in a world where I can say, ‘In two years, it’s going to look sort of similar to what we’re seeing right now.’ Things are changing quite quickly. What are the ideas that we’re wrestling with right now? What are people who are on the inside in foreign policy wrestling with right now? What are the mega ideas, and how can we grapple with those in the world of our characters? So the area of the questions are the same, but the details are not.
DEADLINE: It’s funny you say you’re writing too far in advance to predict. Last year, Season 2 premiered weeks before the presidential election in which Kamala Harris stepped into the Democrat candidacy in the eleventh hour. It felt very prescient of you to have Grace Penn ascend to the presidency, given the moment we were in.
CAHN: I think what it comes down to is we spend a lot of time talking to people who know so much about the field that they can see what’s coming. We don’t break news ever. This is a point that we always make when we’re talking to experts in the field. I don’t want to reveal anything that hasn’t already been in the news [or] is not common knowledge among people who do a lot of reading. But they know what’s going to happen if we’re on the road that we’re on. So it looks like we’ve anticipated events, but those events are just the natural conclusion of the path that we were on.
DEADLINE: Over the course of three seasons, these characters have effectively been trying to untangle the same problem. How have you approached pacing, and why have you chosen to really slow down this plot to dig into it the way you have?
CAHN: We started this series with an incident on the aircraft carrier, and we have moved into this submarine problem. I did not expect to be so focused on maritime vessels of destruction, but apparently I’m interested in them. The reason that we don’t get very far with it is…what I wanted to build was a single event that’s so complicated that anytime we as an audience feel like we understand it, there is a new wrinkle. As soon as we feel like we have encountered somebody bad, we learn about why they made their decisions and why, in a similar circumstance, we might do the same thing. The idea that there are corrupt leaders and venal politicians, I think, may well be true, but it has been so well covered in film and television and storytelling in fiction that for me, it’s more complicated to look at: We would like to think that they’re bad, but what if they’re not and it’s just that complicated? What if you have to deal with a situation where good people have gotten us here? So the story continues to encounter somebody who our heroes think is bad, and then learn that our heroes would have done the same thing in that position. So, as time unfolds, we’re understanding different perspectives from our side on what happened, and putting ourselves in the place of being able to understand more than one position on the same decision from our side, from people that we respect.
[It] takes a lot of time to build a common understanding of the vocabulary of the field. Where are aircraft carriers, and what are they doing, and why are they there? What’s the domestic American opinion? What’s the Senate position? What’s the White House position? What’s the British position? What’s the opposition position on the British side? So if you rush through those things, among other things, you just get sh*tty storytelling. You are forced to take something that is extremely complicated and simplify it enough that you can explain it fairly quickly and move on. I think we’ve all seen lots of stories where, for very good reasons, storytellers are trying to take something that’s infinitely complicated and reduce it to something that is fairly quickly digestible, so that the story can continue. But then you tend to end up with [a story] like, ‘Well, these people are good, and these people are usually us, and those people are bad, and it’s usually them,’ and the conflict moves forward from there. I did not do that.
DEADLINE: How do you plan your endings? Do you start there and work backward to ensure a cliffhanger?
CAHN: Every season, I go into the writers room on the first day, and I say ‘this, in the broadest strokes, is what I think we’re doing, and this is what we’re driving toward, and this is where we are now. Let’s figure out how we’re going to get there and tell an interesting story on the way.’ The ending point has changed every single time. In the first season… I tried to tell a lot of story and couldn’t get through it in a way that felt like it had integrity, that felt like it could adequately represent the nuance of the situation. So I took the amount of story that I was going to put in the last two episodes, and they became all of the second season. The whole season used to be Episode 7 and 8 of Season 1, and that meant that I had to find a different ending to Season 1, which we did. In Season 2, again, we knew where we were going, and we knew we wanted to do something that was going to change all of the status relationships in the show. We didn’t know exactly how we were going to play that out. I had what I felt like was sort of a cheesy idea for how to do that and was looking for a less cheesy idea and didn’t find one, and then ended up having to take the cheesy one and turn it into a non-cheesy version of itself. Kate has sort of taken on an enemy. She meets Grace Penn. She thinks Grace Penn is amazing, and then she realizes that Grace Penn is a flawed character who shouldn’t be in a power position. She tells her that she shouldn’t be in a power position and that she wants to take her down, and then three minutes later, that person is elevated to leader of the free world. What do you do when you’ve just told your boss you think they’re evil and then they get a big promotion? So the unfolding to the end of where we landed with Season 3 continued to evolve through the writing and filming and even editing of the end of the season, because we want to stop the story in a place that feels satisfying in terms of what’s come before, but also interesting in terms of what will come in the next season. It’s hard to tell how much revelation you need and how much change you need and how much farther you need to go into the process of change to feel like you’ve both wrapped up one story, but you’ve created some interest in the one to come. You don’t want to stop in a place [where] we went to some place interesting and then we sort of relaxed and got a cup of coffee.
DEADLINE: More specifically, how did you plan the end of Season 3? The entire season you’re kind of questioning whether Kate really is overstepping only to get to the end and wonder if she might’ve been right.
CAHN: We are always trying to keep ourselves in a position where we buy every argument. I don’t want to create a situation where I think Kate is right and Hal is wrong or Grace is wrong. I want to create a situation where I don’t know whose side I should be on, and I kind of get both. Usually, what happens is we build a scenario like that, and then ride through Kate’s point of view, because she’s how we experience the show and the world. So we’ve come to a place at the end of Season 3 where she thinks they’ve done something that’s basically evil, and we will go from there. But that’s her point of view. It’s not obvious that it’s everybody’s point of view.
DEADLINE: Kate has a really interesting arc this season, particularly in her relationship with Hal. She goes from nearly divorcing him to begging for his forgiveness, right before she finds out he’s sort of betrayed her again. What were the conversations about her arc this season and whether she was ultimately right to be so upset about Hal’s ascension to VP?
CAHN: Inside any long term relationship, it can be difficult to keep track of what proportionally is the size of a problem, because sometimes there are big mistakes made on one side or the other or both, and sometimes there are little irritations in an interaction that build up and feel like they are consequential and determinative of what the relationship should be in the future. So the ultimate question at the end of that road is, should the relationship still exist, or should it stop existing?
She’s been arguing with Hal and with herself for two seasons about whether or not the marriage should exist, and she reaches the point where she decides that it shouldn’t and that she has personal and professional problems that will be solved by the ending of the marriage. This is a season where she gets to test out that theory and figure out if the things that were frustrating her in her relationship with Hal were because of him, because of their dynamic, or because of herself. Is it her who’s bringing this problem to the relationship? So changing who you have the relationship with isn’t going to fix anything if you remain constant and you are the problem. So, that’s the dynamic we’re looking at.
DEADLINE: There is a lot of broken trust by the end of the season, and much of it revolves around people with varying security clearances. How have you used that as a device to help insert friction into some of these relationships?
CAHN: So there’s the security clearances, there’s the standards of the professional hierarchy, and then there’s the standards of the relationship. So there’s information that that they’re not able to share. Everybody sort of figures out what the rules about that are going to be, but then the rules never quite hold up when they meet every situation. You can say, ‘Well, if I don’t know about this, that’s professionally fine, and therefore it’s not going to hurt my feelings.’ But you can’t control what the feelings are that are going to come when that actually unfolds. So I think it’s something that is under constant negotiation, and we use the show in using that idea of like, ‘Well, you had security clearance and you didn’t have security clearance,’ or ‘The circle was small, and you were brought into this circle and somebody else was not.’ We’re sort of using that as a proxy…in a relationship, you establish what the ground rules are, but then the ground rules change as you interact with new situations, and you want to be in an honest relationship, but you don’t necessarily want to say every thought that goes through your head. Some things are better left unsaid. Then you find out later on that maybe that wasn’t the right choice, and it would have been better just get it out in the first place and not saying it created even more bad feeling.
DEADLINE: In the finale, Kate ultimately convinces Trowbridge to pour cement over the Russian sub. She does it at the behest of both Hal and Callum, who are adamant that Trowbridge has a soft spot for Kate and may even be attracted to her. Given the season also includes her affair with Callum and her devolving relationship with Hal, it seems she doesn’t quite know what to make of her own desires or others’ desires toward her, or how either of those things fit into her professional ambitions…what are you making of that at this point in the series?
CAHN: I think she, like everybody, male or female, wants to believe that they are behaving professionally and being experienced exclusively professionally. But that’s not how people interact, and it’s a show all about how relationships can cause or end a war. So making personal connections with people can save the world. So we like to believe that there’s sort of a non-messy version of that, and it turns out that there isn’t. It always makes me laugh when I meet somebody new in the field of diplomacy, and they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, well, my spouse was in at the Foreign Service Institute with me. That’s where we met.’ Or, ‘We met at my first job. It was his second job.’ So everybody wants to be experienced in a purely professional way, but they’re putting their everything into their work, and when your everything is in it, your everything is in it. She doesn’t want a personal relationship with the Prime Minister, but the fact that she is a person who is able to quickly form relationships with powerful people has made her successful in her life.
