The Diplomat (Season 2)
If you're representing the interests of 300 million Americans whose healthcare is failing, whose planet is burning, whose future mighty get a little bit better or a little bit worse based on what you do in the course of a day, it's best to look like the care of your trousers wasn't more than you could manage.
It's tempting to describe The Diplomat as one Reddit commenter did: Emily in Paris for people who liked the-west-wing. Part of the fascinating tension of both shows is your inability as a viewer to quite tell how in on the joke the showrunners are, and I suspect your enjoyment of this particular season—six episodes long—hinges on whether you rue or relish the prospect of turning your brain off.
I think this is a better season than the first, with the romantic melodrama mostly banished to the sidelines, though I truly could not care less about the will-they-won't-they between the DCM and the CIA station chief. The extent to which actors in this show seem to be performing in entirely different productions cannot be overstated: Rory Kinnear returns and gives what I think is a particularly great performance as a conservative PM who is not, in fact, as dumb as everyone thinks he is. Allison Janney shows up for the final two episodes to essentially play C.J. Cregg—which I state not as a complaint but as a fact, and makes sense given Debora Cahn's initial work as a writer on The West Wing. Her following up The West Wing with a stint at Grey's Anatomy is a good summation of this show's strengths and weaknesses.
No better encapsulation of this show exists than the final twenty minutes, in which:
- Allison Janney first delivers an incredible, powerful monologue about realpolitik and nuclear warfare, selling herself as wise and vicious and, above all else, competent;
- Five minutes later, the president has a heart attack and dies offscreen because someone gave him bad news.
The thing with shows like this is that if you want comic relief and slapstick, you need to sequester it to either throwaway lines or a C plot where it doesn't infect the Actual Stuff Going On. The West Wing was (usually) smart about this; Mad Men was always great about this; The Diplomat wants you to believe that Keri Russell can manage geopolitics but has to use a paperclip in lieu of a button for her pants.