In Debora Cahn’s political drama The Diplomat, Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) is an ambassador juggling tense international relations with a strained marriage to political star Hal Wyler (Rufus Sewell).
Like the first season, Season 2 immerses viewers in the world of diplomacy between the United States and the United Kingdom through its use of savvy political dialogue and new power players making game-changing moves. That’s where TV writer and consulting producer Eli Attie (Billions, House, The West Wing) comes in to advise on all things politics.
A onetime staffer in Al Gore’s presidential campaign, Attie has worked on Seasons 1 and 2 of The Diplomat, leaning into his White House expertise. He’s Cahn’s go-to resource for questions about what really goes on in the halls of power.
For those who are fascinated by the ambassadors, intelligence members, and behind-the-scenes dealmakers, we’ve got you covered. Read on for a primer on the real-life protocols and important titles in Season 2, as well as the basics of who does what in the interest of whom in Season 1.
We’re all aware that the US vice president’s main responsibility is to be ready to assume the presidency at a moment’s notice should the commander in chief become incapable. The VP also serves as president of the Senate and casts the deciding vote in the event of a tie. But what else falls under their duties?
“You’re the person who has to attend the funerals and the ribbon cuttings and do the dirty work of the government in some ways,” Attie tells Tudum. “It’s not a particularly glamorous job, though it seems from a distance like it is.”
The veep also serves as an adviser to the president, which is why Vice President Grace Penn (Allison Janney) was such a formidable character in Season 2. After all, she orchestrated that naval bombing without President Rayburn’s (Michael McKean) knowledge.
“She makes these incredibly selfless, risky decisions for something that she believes is warranted and patriotic and the right thing to do and knows that it may blow up in her face and end her career,” Attie says. “It’s a job in which you don’t really get to put yourself first, and she seems to have embraced that role.”
Austin Dennison (David Gyasi) becoming the prime minister if Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) had stepped down could have been a very real scenario, since the UK government doesn’t have a line of succession the way the US does.
“The cabinet ministers in the United Kingdom are members of parliament to begin with,” Attie explains. As a leader within his party, Dennison was “someone likely to ascend to that role.”
However, it all falls apart when he loses the parliamentary whip, who’s similar to the whip in the US Senate. “The whip is in charge of gathering votes within the party and even sometimes from the opposition party for a particular bill,” says Attie.
Following the deadly explosion at the end of Season 1, multiple agencies join the investigation, including the UK’s very real Ministry of Defense, which is similar to the US’ Department of Defense. While the British system operates under the belief that “these are the monarch’s armies and country,” Attie notes, both UK and US agencies oversee the planes, ships, and soldiers of their respective nations.
In the event of a major security threat such as a car bombing involving a member of parliament, a diplomat and two foreign service officers, the defense secretary is “the person who huddles with the prime minister” — the same way the US secretary of defense would meet with the president.
Kate and chief of the CIA London station Eidra Park’s (Ali Ahn) whiteboard chat in Episode 1 is quick and efficient compared to the effort it would take to set up a SCIF, or a sensitive compartmented information facility. This is basically a room “where there’s just no possibility of eavesdropping and everything is secure,” according to Attie.
The area would have to meet the director of national intelligence’s security standards for processing, storing, or discussing sensitive intel. “The most sensitive conversations that an ambassador would have, you try to do in this information bubble so that it just can’t be penetrated — because one piece of that information could sink a ship,” Attie notes.
Nope! The character is fictional, but mercenaries like Lenkov do exist in real life.
“One of the things that’s really fun about The Diplomat writers’ room [is] we all read and follow these stories in the news, and everything becomes a version of a composite, rescaled to our story,” Attie shares. “There are these people [that] have militias, they have capabilities, they’re for sale, and it’s just a shadowy part of foreign policy that we touch on in various places in this series.”
Typically, the current set of politically appointed ambassadors would be asked to resign by the incoming president, with the exception being those in “super sensitive areas like China and Russia,” says Attie. This is done to prevent burnout on the job. “You let them serve a full term, and usually not longer than that,” Attie says.
Since ambassadors serve at the pleasure of the president, they can be called back at any time. If the president doesn’t like a certain diplomat — a position Kate finds herself in with President Penn at the end of Season 2 — they’re between a rock and a hard place.
As president, “you just move your pinky, and they’re out of the job.” So, what could that mean for The Diplomat’s US ambassador to the UK? “If I were Kate, I’d probably be working on my résumé,” Attie quips.
Kate and Dennison’s chemistry is off the charts in the political drama, which begs the question: Could they plausibly date in real life?
“That’s such an unprecedented thing that I don’t think there’s any particular protocol other than it would be highly inappropriate and frowned upon,” Attie says of an ambassador-foreign secretary romance. There’s an “incredible simmering tension between them” that isn’t acted upon due to their current positions.
“I love that that’s always there and doesn’t even need to be spoken of explicitly,” says Attie. But if word got out about this sizzling dynamic, there “would be all kinds of problems.”
As the ambassador to the UK, Kate is representing the US, specifically President Rayburn, in the longstanding alliance between the two countries. Her new gig may hold the same title as ambassador to Afghanistan, where Kate thought she’d be headed, but the jobs couldn’t be more different. “There’s a big layer of fluff, if you will, especially in these kinds of Paris and London postings where it’s easy for years to go by where the only real points of friction tend to be dry trade agreements,” says Attie. “It’s not the same as going to Kabul, but she ends up with something on her plate that’s at that level. And part of the fun of what Kate has to do — the plates she has to spin — is that she needs people with conflicting agendas to listen to her, be swayed by her, and not resent her. It’s a very tricky job she has.”
Hal, Kate’s husband, was a prominent diplomat in his own right, though he now jokes he’s in the “wife” role. That said, some people just can’t help but get involved. “Sometimes he comes across as a little less overtly resistant to the fluff and open to the notion that you have to do it, whereas Kate seems to recoil at it more,” Attie says. In thinking about Hal, the writers’ room was instructed to read about the late Richard Holbrooke, a onetime US ambassador to Germany and a seasoned, career diplomat. The Obama administration gave Holbrooke this glowing review: “Few have left such a towering legacy as a face of America to the world.” Attie says the late former ambassador “was someone who was willing to break a few eggs but in the service of trying to change history. Some people might say, in the case of Richard Holbrooke, he was trying to change history and make sure he was in the history books, too.” Sounds like our Hal.
By now, hopefully we all know what the president does (“leader of the free world,” yada yada yada). But does President Rayburn –– a well-intentioned, silver-haired commander in chief who’s worried about being perceived as too old to be effective –– feel a little close to the current resident of the White House? “You could argue that in a certain way,” says Attie. “You could step back and say, ‘Oh, there are some parallels: older white guy, a sort of affect that you might say is similar.’ It was probably five or six people, and [Deb] just made it her own.”
It becomes clear in Episode 1 — when Billie Appiah (Nana Mensah) reveals her plan to turn Kate into the next vice-presidential candidate — that the president’s chief of staff has a lot of sway. “Certainly in the vast majority of White Houses, the chief of staff can have an enormous amount of power, arguably more than a cabinet member,” Attie says. “You think about the big four — treasury, state, attorney general, defense — and these are incredibly prominent people. But if you’re the president’s person, the chief of staff, you can whisper in the president’s ear. Simply by proximity to the president, you would have to say the chief of staff certainly rivals a major cabinet secretary in terms of power and influence.” Not to mention the fact that many in this role handle issues before the president even knows about them. “We see this in the show, too,” says Attie. “There’s an element of managing the boss that has to be done. There have been chiefs of staff who have been more powerful than the president.”
The secretary of state is the country’s top diplomat, the president’s right-hand person on foreign affairs, so theoretically all ambassadors around the world report to them. But Kate isn’t appointed by Secretary of State Miguel Ganon (Miguel Sandoval) and, to put it kindly, doesn’t exactly run her actions by him. “As is often the case, she was put in there right by the president, and that’s his prerogative,” Attie says. “Ganon could make Kate’s life miserable and maybe destroy her. What I love about their relationship is that it evolves over the episodes, and there are layers you don’t expect. I don’t even know I would go so far as to call him an adversary, as much as a complicating power center.”
In the political drama, Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge — who, Attie admits, shares a few non-hairstyle similarities to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson — juggles asserting his own power and protecting his country’s important alliance with the US. “All politics are local,” says Attie. “At the end of the day, Trowbridge needs his slice of the electorate in Britain to keep his party in power and keep him in power. Just like Rayburn needs it in America. As close as America and England are and will always be, the local political agendas of the two leaders will always be different.” Sometimes presidents and prime ministers line up politically, as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair mostly did. Other times, as with Joe Biden and Johnson, it’s more complicated. “They’re still going to work together and be allies, but there are going to be all kinds of complications and tension because their politics are very different.”
What we call the secretary of state in the US is called the foreign secretary in the UK. And, frankly, pretty much everywhere else. (Jokes Attie, “We’re the only country with a weird title like secretary of state. I don’t even know what that means.”) The fact that Foreign Secretary Dennison at times appears to completely disagree with his boss, Prime Minister Trowbridge, is not at odds with the position. “Don’t forget you’re always trying to build coalitions and to think of politics with your appointments,” explains Attie. “When John Kennedy was president, he picked a Republican to be his secretary of the treasury, and it was a little bit like reaching out. You hope it works out and people are loyal to you and you’re building a good team, but you can easily end up with people in the ranks who really have very different thinking than you. There are a lot of shotgun marriages in putting together an administration.” As far as whether a foreign minister has ever looked as good as Dennison in a suit? We’re not fact-checking and we’re not complaining.
It’s not unusual for an ambassador’s deputy chief of mission, like Stuart Hayford (Ato Essandoh), to stay on the job between ambassadors. (Lucky Kate.) “[An ambassador] can be appointed and essentially be told that [they] have to keep the people that are already in place,” says Attie. Nor is it unusual for an ambassador’s deputy chief of mission to school their new boss in the ways of the ambassadorship. “Someone like Stuart –– grooming somebody and doing a bit of a Pygmalion routine –– happens all the time and is a bit of a requirement of the job,” says Attie. “It’s a very powerful job.” But would a deputy chief of mission weigh in on policy while also weighing in on dresses? “He’s a political person, ultimately. But if on a Wednesday someone’s throwing a cocktail party and they have to come up with a toast, that’s all he’s going to do that Wednesday.”
As the chief of the CIA station in London, Park may answer to the headquarters back in Langley, but she sometimes also overlaps with the ambassador’s office. (And no, we’re not just talking about Eidra and Stuart’s romance.) “Eidra is hard substance and intelligence gathering, whereas Stuart is managing every aspect of the ambassador’s job. They meet in a place of urgent substance,” Attie says. “There’s a sense of a common mission in that they’re supporting one country and one administration. Eidra is trying to support [Kate’s] work because her boss across the pond is running in the same direction as the people who put Kate in her job.”
OK, now you’ve got the inside scoop. Burn this dossier before British military intelligence finds it.
Seasons 1 and 2 of The Diplomat are now streaming.
