For a while there, it was hard to watch shows set in Washington, DC. In my first post for this site, I wrote about the strangeness of rewatching Scandal in 2021. I’d jumped into it thinking it would be the soapy melodramatic thriller I remembered, but quickly realized that the world had changed too much for me to enjoy it uncritically. What struck me forcibly as I worked my way through it was how oddly the plotting seemed now, when conspiratorial thinking is the internet soup du jour. Scandal was written in a pre-Trump, pre-Q-anon environment and the audience is meant to enter into the fun of imagining an insane political world where vice presidents stab their husbands and the government is behind mysterious plane crashes in Iceland. Somehow, it’s hard now to find that so fun, considering how many relatives we all have who would read those plots as entirely plausible.
One slightly exaggerated truth is that people who move to DC are generally inspired to do so by either The West Wing or House of Cards. When I moved to there in 2017 my DC-based stories were already having trouble keeping up with the reality of life in that strange metropolis. Depictions of DC tend to fall into three categories: shows that depict a fantasy ideal of governance (The West Wing, Madame Secretary), shows that depict DC politicking at its grimmest and most conspiratorial (24, House of Cards, Jack Ryan), and shows that look at DC slant and, through satire, sometimes see it the most clearly (Veep).
As I acculturated myself to a place filled with transplants, it became clear that many of them had moved there to make a lot of money, make a difference in the world, gain a lot of power, or some combination of the three. And all of them came there thinking they were going to be in a real-world version of The West Wing, Veep, or House of Cards. People who moved to DC to make a difference were the ones who had seen every episode of The West Wing, who had the theme song as their ringtone and still went into work every day thinking they could change one small thing that might make the world better. People who loved House of Cards, who saw in it some greater truth about the corrupt heart of American politics, tended to work on K street, carry $1000 briefcases, and continually try to convince their bosses to let them rep the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. People who moved there loving Veep tended to just be there for the nihilism, the absurdity, and the incipient alcoholism. All this is to say, Hollywood chooses to make shows about DC that it thinks represent whatever fantasy people are currently having about DC. In that way they can be a strange sort of bellwether for the mood of the country, as telling in its way as those Gallop “confidence in institutions” polls.
Two relevant shows have recently hit Netflix to extraordinary viewership numbers, The Night Agent and The Diplomat. Both debuted at number one on Netflix’s highly obtuse rankings system and have remained in their top lists. The Night Agent is now their sixth most popular show of all time, though it was not reviewed very well by critics and I personally found it a bit wooden. The Night Agent is conspiratorial in its mindset, filled with moles, double agents, kidnappings, and assassinations. Key elected officials and their staff are guilty of nefarious doings and at times it all reads like a less poetic House of Cards or a less Iraq-war obsessive 24. It shares a moral compass with a show like Jack Ryan, which believes that some of our foundational systems (the military, the CIA, the FBI) have remained pure enough to overcome the corruption in the more transient political realm. Interestingly, The Night Agent makes an effort to acknowledge the conspiratorial atmosphere its characters are living in; at one point, some Q-anon bozos are used as a red herring before the more solid villains can show up. But still, the popularity of this show feels like a continuation of the same old same old vision of DC as a land where secret corruption lurks in every seat of power and only noble individuals on the run can keep the spirit of American democracy alive.
On the other end of the spectrum is The Diplomat, which is mainly set in London but retains a focus on American politicking. The Diplomat stars Keri Russell as Kate Wyler, who has been tapped to be ambassador to Afghanistan but ends up being diverted to the UK instead. As ambassador to Afghanistan she could have used her decades of Middle East diplomatic experience to try and repair a deeply damaged relationship; as ambassador to the UK she’s expected to wear tea-length dresses, ride in carriages, and bring her own art collection to grace her new mansion’s walls (her predecessor took the Pollock back home with him). Kate doesn’t have an art collection but she does bring along a meddlesome husband, played by Rufus Sewell. He’s a former ambassador who seems to have been instrumental in Bosnia at some point. The age differential/timeline doesn’t quite work, but he’s clearly meant to be a Richard Holbrooke-esque figure. Kate has to deal with the aftermath of the bombing of a British warship, an act clearly meant to implicate Iran as the culprit. Kate is more of a professional diplomat than anyone expected to see in this largely ceremonial ambassadorship (there’s clearly a reason the show is called The Diplomat and not The Ambassador) and that throws an American wrench into some ongoing British machinations.
There’s a lot to like about this show. There’s a wonderfully Shakespearean back and forth between Kate and her soon to be ex-husband Hal; Sewell has played Petruchio in a modern version of Taming of the Shrew and he brings the spirit of that character to this role. You half-expect him to call out “C’mon and kiss me Kate!” Their scenes are delightfully screwball, that sweet descendent of Shakespeare’s goofiest comedies, reaching a dizzy height during a marital spat when Kate tries to brain Hal with a tree branch. The show is largely about relationships: working, personal, and the intertwining of the two. At one point Hal gives a pseudo-heartfelt speech to a room of MPs and career civil servants, exhorting them to “talk with terrorists… talk to everyone!” because you have to have hope that those conversations could lead to some small change. The Diplomat believes in diplomacy just like The West Wing believes in elective democracy. It believes in its conversations, in the potential inherent in people getting in a room and talking it out for days, weeks, months. When a sweet flirtation develops between Kate and the Foreign Secretary, they tell each other in the language of their profession. When Kate doubts her efficacy in a role she’s so decidedly unsuited for he says, “Perhaps you’re just a decent person in a time when decency has lost its hold on the public imagination,” and he’s right; they fall in love because they both are.
Watching this show, especially in contrast to shows like The Night Agent, feels like a return to the days when we all rated our trust in institutions quite high. In 1999, when The West Wing premiered, 77% of Americans surveyed told Gallup they had either Some, Quite a Lot, or a Great Deal of confidence in Congress and 79% in the Presidency (and that’s right after the Clinton scandal). In 2022, those numbers were 43% and 51%, respectively. I’m not breaking any news here in referencing those numbers (Newspapers, 53%) but a show premiering in 1999 was able to speak a different kind of language about American politics than a show premiering today. To speak in the same earnest register is impossible, because decency has indeed lost its hold on the public imagination. But The Diplomat has a trump card in Keri Russell. You believe in her character and you believe in her beliefs. Kate functions as the audience proxy and Russell’s skill in portraying her ropes you into her mission from the jump. Her character makes you want to believe in political institutions again, even if you’re not sure you can. There’s still a fair share of machinations, conspiracies, and people getting kidnapped by rogue states, but they are presented almost as a set of future stories these people will tell at cocktail parties while they try to butter up new potential allies, not events that fundamentally undermine our ability to trust in the concept of democrat government.
In 1533, Hans Holbein the Younger painted a double portrait of Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, two French diplomats. The two men stand surrounded by symbols of their power and position. At their feet is an anamorphic skull best viewed on a second look when, having walked away from the painting and prepared to turn the corner, you turn and see the death’s head looking steadily back at you. An ambassador has always been a figure poised between power and peril, sometimes forging bonds between nations, other times giving all of themselves and accomplishing nothing much at all, sometimes paying the ultimate price. The Diplomat wants to celebrate that tradition and it presents a vision of DC politics that, while still fantastical, is at least, at its root, full of hope.