Diplomacy never works,” a character complains in the new Netflix series The Diplomat. “Diplomacy doesn’t open doors with a twist of the wrist.”
“Diplomacy is 40 days and nights in a Vienna hotel room, listening to the same empty talking points, getting trashed at the minibar,” the character continues. “It’s getting to ‘no’ over, and over, and over. Diplomacy never works. Until it does.”
This mixture of ennui and stubborn hope is instantly recognisable to real-life diplomats, former and current, American and British, who have watched the series with a mix of familiarity, amusement and incredulity.
There is, it has to be said, a fair amount to be incredulous about. Netflix has taken a lot of liberties to keep The Diplomat racing along like a thriller. The first anomaly identified by foreign service officers is the premise that the highly prized London ambassadorship should be given to a young career diplomat, rather than to a wealthy donor as a reward for services to the governing party.
Furthermore, the young ambassador in question, Kate Wyler, played by Keri Russell, flies to London without having to endure a gruelling senate confirmation process. To be realistic, the first three of the season’s eight episodes would be mired in Washington, as the opposing party tries to dig up dirt on the nominee.
The next plot device to elicit a snort of disbelief from the professionals is Wyler’s flight to London on a luxury executive jet. Donald Trump’s ambassador to London, Woody Johnson, did have his own private plane, but he was the billionaire heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune and owner of the New York Jets, so could fly anywhere he wanted, any time. Career foreign services officers, however, fly commercial.
As soon as she touches down, Wyler almost immediately starts holding meetings with the UK foreign secretary and prime minister, interspersed with video calls with the US secretary of state and the president. There are about as many high-level contacts in her first 48 hours on the job as most real ambassadors can hope for in an entire posting.
“I wouldn’t say there’s a huge amount of effort gone into understanding or reflecting protocol: the way the foreign office interacts with No 10, and the way it interacts with embassies,” a British diplomat said drily. “They have played pretty fast and loose with those relationships.”
Even less believable for the experienced observer, however, is the fact that all of the principals, from Wyler to her husband Hal, played by Rufus Sewell, to most of the diplomats around them, happen to be unusually good-looking, with gleaming teeth – even some of the Brits.
“I certainly don’t have a recollection from my own time at the state department of that many people being that attractive,” said Jenna Ben-Yehuda, who spent 12 years in intelligence and policy roles in the US foreign service. “If everybody were so attractive, maybe recruitment would look different.”
But for all the dramatic licence taken with the plot and characters, The Diplomat’s producers made sure they got at least some of the details absolutely right. They persuaded the US and UK to allow them to film on government locations. Several scenes were shot inside the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office in Westminster, including the foreign secretary’s office itself, a rarely granted privilege.
They also got to film inside the knobbly, modernist cube of the new American embassy in Nine Elms by the Thames. But the film-makers were not allowed into the sprawling residence of Winfield House on the edge of Regent’s Park, sold to the US government by the Woolworth heiress, Barbara Hutton, for one dollar in 1946, and where the current ambassador, Jane Hartley, lives.
In its place, they filmed at the stately home at Wrotham Park, in Hertfordshire, and used special effects to make it look as though the BT tower was looming over the trees as it does over Winfield House.
Researchers also quizzed diplomats at the embassy about their lives and work routines. Aaron Snipe, an embassy spokesperson, said: “What I found in talking to them, which made me quite happy as a career diplomat, is that they were asking lots of questions about everything that we do, about who we are, and about the process.”
Some of the jargon made it into the script. When something goes wrong, the ambassador calls for an RSO or regional security officer – the embassy police – a reference few outside the state department would understand.
The set dressers even used Drexel furniture, an old US brand that has been standard issue for foreign service residences for decades, a detail that every American diplomat noted. “These are the small details that are incredibly familiar to all of us,” Snipe said. I talk to the RSO every day, and we have Drexel furniture in our own house.”
Some of the bigger themes ring true as well. The fictional diplomats in the show, like their real-life counterparts in recent decades, expend much of their effort trying to talk their political masters out of bombing Iran. And the US-UK relationship is so deeply intertwined, especially when it comes to their intelligence agencies, sharing both data and hardware, that it becomes very complicated to spy on one another.
Not all of the diplomatic professionals count themselves as fans. Brett Bruen, director of global engagement in the Obama White House, said that The Diplomat was a missed opportunity to show what they really do, instead making them look like a cross between politicians and secret agents.
“What was particularly disappointing is that this carries on a long tradition of shows that put a foreign policy focus in the title, and then veer completely off into something that has nothing or little to do with actual diplomacy,” he said.
Most current and former diplomats however, were ready to overlook the impurities, feeling it was high time that the people who did the talking, rather than the shooting, got to be the heroes.
“We don’t have a lot of examples of diplomacy on the small screen. We have a 100-1 ratio of war stories to stories of diplomacy,” Ben-Yehuda, now president of the Truman Centre for National Policy, said. “You have to suspend a little bit of disbelief but I think it’s time for diplomacy to have its moment under the bright lights, and it’s good for everybody to see that side of US global engagement for once rather than a militarised view.”
