Debora Cahn knows the allure of political intrigue. The film and TV writer has spent the better part of her career exploring the knotty dilemmas and gripping power dynamics of the public sector, as a writer and producer of White House drama The West Wing and CIA thriller Homeland. But Cahn felt there were stories still untold, particularly about the individuals who — often quietly and behind the scenes — bear the brunt of some of the government’s trickiest work, including the building and maintaining of international relationships. “There’s not a long history in television of dramatic thrillers about diplomacy. It’s been tried and has failed in the past. But I have always been a real fangirl of the people who do this kind of work,” she explains. “It just felt like it would be a really great collision of person and place.” 

That collision would become The Diplomat, on which Cahn serves as creator, showrunner, and executive producer. Two seasons in — with a third on its way — the series is a fast-paced tour of the art of diplomacy via a workplace drama set in the halls of the American embassy in London, where the stakes could not be higher. “I wanted to write about the kind of ambassadors who work in crisis zones. We have this idea that diplomats are people who wear nice clothes and they drink martinis in pretty settings, but the reality is it’s often really dangerous work in difficult places,” she says.  

Executive Producer Janice Williams, Showrunner/Executive Producer Debora Cahn

The second season ramps up the tension of the first installment, as United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom Kate Wyler, played by Emmy nominee Keri Russell, must confront the deadly realities of her line of work after an explosion in London impacts those closest to her, including her husband, former diplomat Hal (Rufus Sewell). Amid the fallout, Kate discovers that the identity of the crime’s perpetrator hits close to home, and that nobody in the UK government — or even within her own circle — can be fully trusted. 

While the heart-pounding drama of the season is not based on actual events, working with real-life political thinkers is instrumental to the making of The Diplomat. “The sense of realism on the show is incredibly important to us, and we consult with a lot of different experts — former ambassadors, diplomats, CIA officers — to get the details right,” says executive producer Janice Williams. “There are times when we’re told what the right way to do something is, and we have to choose to do it a different way anyway for dramatic purposes. But we certainly always want to know what these people would do in the real world, and in most instances, that’s what we have them do.” The unique think tank of consultants includes UK civil servant Jonathan Powell, former CIA official Kari Amelung, and former White House staff member and The Diplomat consulting producer Eli Attie. “We have to remember: This is not a documentary, this is entertainment. They’re not going to sit there and watch a very boring [show] about negotiation,” explains Powell. “My job is not to tell them not to do exciting things, but it’s to try and suggest ideas of where they might go.” 

Allison Janney as Grace in Season 2 of The Diplomat

With the arrival of Vice President Grace Penn (played by Allison Janney, who has already received Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations for her performance) this season, Attie was able to pull from his background working as Vice President Al Gore’s chief White House and campaign speechwriter. “One of the points I was always making to The Diplomat writers room and to Debora is that the vice president is, as the old jokes go, the spare tire on the automobile of government. It’s a job without a whole lot of dignity,” he explains. “But the truth is that you are 18 yards away from the most powerful piece of real estate in the world, the Oval Office in the White House.” 

Cahn’s experience in the writers’ room of The West Wing and Homeland also connected her with some of the same political minds she would look to for inspiration for the series’ titular diplomat. “One of the people who came in to speak with us when I was working on Homeland was this former ambassador named Beth Jones. She just very quickly cut right to the chase about the kind of stuff that she would deal with on a daily basis as an ambassador in Jordan or Pakistan. She sounded like an action hero,” remembers Cahn of Jones, who worked in the foreign service for over four decades. “We used to call her a superhero in a pantsuit. She’s dodging bombs while trying to get to meetings with warlords so that she can attempt to negotiate the end of an armed conflict over tea while not getting shot. For Beth Jones, all of these seemingly fantastical stories were just what happened on a regular Tuesday and I thought, ‘She’s a series; she’s a TV show.’”

Director/executive producer Alex Graves, showrunner/executive producer Debora Cahn, Rufus Sewell as Hal Wyler, Keri Russell as Kate Wyler in Season 2 of The Diplomat

The diplomatic Cinderella story Kate finds herself in — forced to embrace the formal side of a job that includes state dinners, garden parties, carefully chosen gowns, and perfectly coiffed hairstyles — rings true to those who have been in her shoes. “When I see the dialogue and the way she behaves, I recognize it as something that we would do,” says Jones. “When Kate is walking down the stairs in the fabulous dress that she’s been told she has to wear for the initial photographs, and she says, ‘How the heck can I wear a dress like this without pockets,’ we were at the premiere and all of the women in the room went, ‘Yeah.’” Russell has relished the opportunity to get to know the figures that live and breathe the work she portrays onscreen. “I have loved my time meeting some of those incredible women,” says the actor. “We spent some time with the real ambassador, [Jane] Hartley, who I adore. Through her, the world has just opened up. It’s such a different version of power.”

Hartley, who served in the same position as Russell’s character for three years, and prior to that served as the US ambassador to both Monaco and France, says the admiration is mutual. “At one point somebody said, ‘Oh, this is based on you.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no, not based on me. Conceived long before I got here.’ But watching it makes me proud, because they’ve done it so well,” says Hartley. “One of the reasons I love it is that it’s a female ambassador to the UK, and I am only the second [American] female ambassador to the UK in two hundred years. I have a daughter. I want to make sure that little girls everywhere are seeing what I’m doing through what Keri Russell is doing and through The Diplomat.”

Camera operator Richard Bradbury, David Gyasi as Austin Dennison, Ali Ahn as Eidra Park, Director/executive producer Alex Graves in The Diplomat

Having spent a better part of her television career wading in diplomatic waters, Cahn’s reverence for civil servants comes through in each multifaceted character she brings to the screen. Her subjects are “people who go into a war zone and say, ‘We’re going to talk this to an end. We’re not going to shoot it or bomb it to an end.’ It’s intense and hard and complicated — and, without question, heroic,” says Cahn. “I feel a lot of responsibility to honor that. And it’s great to see how much the audience has connected with it.”

A version of this story appears in Queue Issue 20.