The previous geopolitical thriller to star Keri Russell was one of the best shows of this century. In FX’s The Americans, Russell played a Russian spy in the Washington suburbs during the twilight of the Cold War. The show was about the maneuvers nations make against each other, but it was just as much about the spy game unfolding in Russell’s character’s own home. Russell’s Elizabeth Jennings carried out on-screen espionage alongside Matthew Rhys’ Philip, but the two spooks weren’t just monitoring U.S. officials and killing Soviet dissidents. Each was suspicious of the other half of their fake marriage, and they grew apart as Russell’s character realized Rhys’ was losing his passion for the gruesome work of spying.
It was a role that won Russell several Emmy and Golden Globe nominations—although, disappointingly, not a win—and a slew of new fans who admired her skill in portraying a principled but murderous spy who also held a nuclear family together and served as a fake travel agent by day. (Women who work, right?) When The Diplomat, Russell’s next big TV role, premiered on Netflix five years after The Americans concluded, the similarities seemed immediately apparent: Here was Russell again in a political drama, working to further the interests of her country on the global stage. Only this time, instead of a Russian spy, Russell was playing an American ambassador—not a big leap, as it relates to providing chances to watch Russell weave in and out of trouble on-screen. Fans of The Americans were pleased to be given another vehicle for one of the best actresses on TV to put on a compelling show of wheeling and dealing outside her home while engaged in a contentious dance with her partner inside it.
The first season of The Diplomat was a rollicking, entertaining mess. As a document on how foreign policy is conducted, it bordered and sometimes crossed the line between drama and nonsense. But as a chance for Russell to flex a bit of muscle as an actor, it was great. Her character, Ambassador Kate Wyler, was a skilled diplomat who navigated the corridors of power with precision and grace. It was as if the showrunners had swapped out her old character’s disguises and guns for pantsuits and pencils. The show was not especially concerned with questioning America’s behavior as a superpower, and Kate was easy to root for in a way that Russell’s Americans spy character was not. She was a do-gooder in a big job.
The Diplomat’s newly released second season follows Kate as she hunts for the truth around a false-flag attack on a British warship. Russell is still a consequential foreign-affairs operative, and she is still in a messy spousal relationship, this time with former Ambassador Hal Wyler, played by Rufus Sewell. Hal calls to mind Rhys’ character in The Americans as both a source of stability and a potential undermining force of Russell’s character. Together, Kate and Hal are a diplomatic yet dysfunctional power couple, reshaping the rest of the world as their own falls apart.
But in this run of six episodes, Russell gets to do what she rarely got to do in her most famous role: act like a regular person. Make mistakes on the job. Get outsmarted by savvier players. Show the kind of emotion that Elizabeth Jennings either never had at all or had squeezed out of her during a brutal, abusive upbringing in the KGB. This is the second series in which Russell has tried to save the world. It is the first one in which she almost blows it up—not literally, although her failings this season do relate to U.S. nuclear vulnerabilities.
There’s still plenty of statecraft and tradecraft in this season: Kate moves a key witness around to safe houses and facilitates an interrogation. She confuses and misdirects British intelligence officers. She gets involved in a potentially disastrous (for American–British relations, that is) plot to depose a prime minister. She sets up a surveillance sting against a head of state. But where Season 2 gives Russell room to stretch her wings is in how it lets her take a character in directions she could not in either the first season of The Diplomat or any of the six seasons of The Americans in which she played a spy. After all, an American ambassador to the United Kingdom has different levers of power to pull than a Soviet agent in the United States. Elizabeth Jennings did not have a lot of scruples about, well, anything. She was mission-driven, and she was a spy, and those two facts justified anything. “Do you have children?” a secretary memorably asks her in The Americans’ third season, as she’s about to die from poison that Elizabeth has just forced her to ingest. Elizabeth says yes, and the doomed woman asks her why, then, she kills innocent people. “To make the world a better place,” Russell’s character tells her. Pressed on how killing this woman would improve the world, she does not give an inch.
Kate has the same North Star in The Diplomat, but understandably, U.S. ambassadors would have a hard time running around murdering people and stuffing limbs into suitcases themselves. Their battlegrounds are meeting rooms and ornate hallways. The solution upon running into an adversary in the British government is not to execute that person. (Presumably, doing so would get an ambassador recalled.) Constrained by both her moral compass and the nature of the job, Kate has to survey an entire global chessboard, rather than take things one mission at a time.
In Season 1, Russell’s ambassadorial character did carry herself with roughly the same level of seriousness as her secret agent in The Americans. But the events of Season 2 lend themselves to Russell showing off a tender side of Kate that feels novel. A car bombing that nearly killed her husband at the end of Season 1 brings her to an immediate state of vulnerability. She gushes when she learns of an office romance between the CIA operative in her office and her deputy chief of mission at the embassy. (“It is the cutest fucking thing I’ve ever heard,” she tells her CIA pal, blessing the potentially thorny workplace relationship.) Kate is also sloppy with her own affections and exhibits an undeniable sexual chemistry with Austin Dennison, the British foreign secretary played by David Gyasi. One of the season’s best moments comes when Hal persuades a recalcitrant Dennison to do a favor to the American delegation. He seals the deal by reminding Dennison that he was about to have sex with Hal’s wife, the American ambassador, before Hal himself got blown up on the streets of London. Dennison acquiesces; some men still have honor. Whether it is ultimately productive for the ambassador to have such a relationship is a question the show explores.
It is a little jarring to watch Russell play a character who makes such glaring mistakes. She was not an antihero in The Americans, nor was she much of one in The Diplomat’s first season. We are used to watching her solve problems, not make them. But the fun of the latest run of episodes is not that they will help you understand world affairs, nor is it that the mystery the show cooks up is all that captivating—instead, the second season of The Diplomat works because it drops the best possible actress of this genre into a different kind of fight from the ones she so commonly waged in her most iconic role. Russell still uses deception and manipulation to achieve her objectives in this show, as she did as a Soviet spy, but her current character finds that work more difficult. Perhaps it is because everyone knows that an ambassador is trying to work them, while people do not know that a good spy is a spy. And when a prime minister or vice president catches on to her moves, she needs to find a solution more complex than feeding them poison.
Credit : slate.com
