Keri Russell's political drama is just heating up

This post contains spoilers for the second season of The diplomat, which is now streaming on Netflix.

Few shows in recent memory have as good a handle on what they are The diplomat. That's particularly impressive considering that the series – which stars Keri Russell as Kate Wyler, a veteran State Department official who secretly takes on the job of American ambassador to Britain to replace the sitting vice president – is often exhausting It's supposed to be several shows at the same time: a tricky political drama, a crazy romance, an exciting spy thriller and a comedy of manners. Of course, some of these individual pieces overlap, others are put together very carefully crafted by the show's creator, Debora Cahn, so that they all feel like part of the same engaging whole.

This impressive command of tone and genre is present throughout much of the second season of the Netflix series. Keri Russell continues to deliver one of the most charming and versatile performances on television – she's in her element, whether Kate is frantically trying to fix a broken zipper on her pants before a big meeting or questioning the trustworthiness of husband Hal (Rufus Sewell). or watching British films Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) almost killed his former advisor Margaret Roylin (Celia Imrie) with his bare hands. The story keeps taking wild turns, the supporting actors work well alongside Russell, and in one West Wing Reuniting with Cahn, Allison Janney shows up late in the season — as Grace Penn, the seemingly outgoing Kate chosen to replace her — to remind you how well she fits this type of story. The show remains great entertainment.

I just wish there were more of them.

When I sound the alarm about the damage caused by the ever-shortening TV seasons, The diplomat is the type of show I'm talking about. The first season only had eight episodes, which was pretty short, but juuuuust barely long enough to properly lay out its key players, its stakes, and the main parts of its complicated story. With the new season, the eight episodes have become just six, and the series feels at times as rushed and over-scheduled as Kate so often is in her various misadventures.

This is expressed with The diplomat in large and small ways, both in character and in plot. Let's start relatively small, with the resolution of the cliffhanger from the end of the first season, in which Hal, Kate's top advisor Stuart (Ato Essandoh) and Stuart's advisor Ronnie (Jess Chanliau) were all in the vicinity of a car bombing, their fate remaining theoretical on the air during the 18-month break between seasons. But the cliffhanger was a classic case of what television writers and producers sometimes call “jewel bait” – a story that only generates suspense for people who can't pause for a moment to think about what's happening. Kate's difficult marriage to Hal and her difficult professional marriage to Stuart are two of the series' core relationships. Hal plays a central role in much of the main conspiracy over who was responsible for the bombing of a Royal Navy ship, while Stuart – tasked by White House Chief of Staff Billie Appiah (Nana Mensah) – is Kate's rough edges sanding them down and making them more acceptable political material – is the main driver of the VPOTUS storyline. And the first season devoted only slightly less time to Stuart's on-again, off-again romance with CIA station chief Eidra (Ali Ahn) than to Kate debating whether and when to finally kick Hal to the curb.

Ronnie, on the other hand, was hardly suitable as a character and was characterized primarily by her stylish suits and ties (the character, like Jess Chanliau, is non-binary) and, to a lesser extent, her frequent allusions to the sequence of various events posted on social media. There was no chance that Hal or Stuart would die because they were too important. This made Ronnie an obvious victim, but also a disappointing one, as the series hadn't done nearly enough with them for their deaths to matter

Alex Bailey/Netflix

Viewers' attachment to Ronnie came from a combination of Chanliau's screen presence and the fact that there are so few non-binary characters on television, a medium that unfortunately has a long history of killing queer characters in favor of straight ones. emotional growth. There is a lot of activity everywhere. Cahn has written for episodic network dramas such as West WingAnd Grey's Anatomyas well as serialized cable shows like

Hometown and she has cleverly crafted this show to reflect the best of everyone. While there are always big stories about the bombing and Kate's shocking political rise, there's usually a summit-of-the-week structure that leads to satisfying conflicts that need to be resolved within an hour, even if things involve Trowbridge and friends keep escalating. But the big changes in the larger storylines must occur at dizzying speed, so that one moment Kate and British Foreign Secretary Austin Dennison (David Gyasi) suspect Trowbridge of planning the bombing, and the next moment they realize he was involved in the crime is innocent but could possibly have committed the manslaughter of Margaret Roylin. Due to the limited number of episodes and binge structure, things often happen too quickly to fully grasp. It's entertaining because the actors are so good, the dialogue is so snappy and the overall plot is so inventive. But the whole is often less than the sum of these impressive parts because, unlike far too many other Netflix series, it has much more story than episodes. Just look at Janney's arrival in the final third of the season. She absolutely owns the screen and is a good verbal sparring partner for Russell. In a kind of role reversal in Janney's time as West Wing Press Secretary CJ, here is Grace Penn as the veteran who has to explain to Kate how things work, like a masterful scene where Grace uses a map to explain how much more complicated a situation is than Kate realizes. But over the course of two episodes, Cahn endures several reversals in the two women's attitudes toward each other and in their apparent professional rivalry, plus a few crazy developments in which we find out that 1)

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. This, by the way, was the plot point that Russell alluded to in our interview, and which inadvertently almost overlapped with real-world politics since it was written and filmed long before President Biden ended his re-election campaign and Vice President Harris began seeking the presidency in his place.

Trending stories These are all great ideas for this type of sugary treat The diplomat wants to be and generally is. But when a horde of Secret Service agents stormed into the back garden of Kate's ambassadorial compound to protect newly promoted President Penn, I couldn't help but feel like I'd eaten it too quickly and gotten a headache from the ice cream. Or at least as if the season had just begun as another break of a year or more began. In six episodes