In a world where the CNN breaking news music plays so often that it feels like a trigger, more and more of us are turning to scripted television that tackles real-world issues in a more predictable, less anxiety-inducing, more Hollywood way. That certainly explains the popularity of Netflix's Emmy-winning drama The Diplomat, now entering its fourth season. Even the show's stars seem pleasantly surprised by how much the series has grown.
"It's wonderful that it's grown," Rufus Sewell told Newsweek. "It's not always the case." Keri Russell, ever modest, isn't quite ready to call it a phenomenon. "I know that cool people come up and talk to us, and that's good," she said.
"You want the cool people, the smart people, and they do come up." Sewell admitted the fan base "maybe doesn't skew that young," which Russell happily confirmed. "My parents loved the show," she said. "My grandmother loved it." For creator Debora Cahn, the response has been a relief.
"When you're making something fresh and unfamiliar, it just looks lumpy and weird from your perspective," she said. "You love your lumpy baby, but it's not obvious that anybody else is going to." The series follows Kate Wyler (Russell), a career diplomat managing international crises while her marriage to fellow diplomat Hal Wyler (Sewell) creates plenty of its own. For the cast, the appeal is that the show sits just close enough to reality without swallowing us whole.
"It's just adjacent enough," Russell said. "It's in the world, but it's adjacent." "We can have the catharsis without the personal danger," Sewell added. That feeling is familiar to anyone who grew up on NBC's The West Wing, another political drama that mirrored the headlines of its day.
Cahn, who wrote for The West Wing before going on to Homeland, said the real world shapes The Diplomat "a ton, all the time," even if the writers can't chase the news cycle. "You can't predict what kind of world we're gonna live in on Thursday, nevermind two years from now," she said. "When we were writing Homeland, it was all questions about the war on terror.
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