The former geopolitical thriller from star Keri Russell was one of the best shows of the century. In FX’s The Americans, Russell played a Russian spy in the Washington suburbs during the end of the Cold War. The show was about countries maneuvering against each other, but it was just as much about the spy game unfolding in Russell’s character’s home. Elizabeth Jennings, played by Russell, carried out spying operations on screen alongside Philip, played by Matthew Rhys, but the two spies weren’t just surveilling US officials and killing Soviet dissidents. Both were suspicious of the other half of their sham marriage, and they parted ways when Russell’s character realized that Reese was losing his passion for the gruesome work of espionage.
It was the role that won Russell several Emmy and Golden Globe nominations — though it wasn’t a disappointing win — and a slew of new fans who admired her skills in portraying a principled but deadly spy who also brought a nuclear family together and served as a travel agent. Fake by day. (Working women, right?) When The Diplomat, Russell’s next big TV role, premiered on Netflix five years after The Americans ended, the similarities were immediately obvious: Here’s Russell again in a political drama It works to advance the country’s interests on the global stage. Only this time, instead of a Russian spy, Russell plays an American ambassador, which isn’t much of a leap, as it’s more about providing opportunities to watch Russell get in and out of trouble on screen. Fans of The Americans were thrilled to be given another car for one of the best actresses on television to give a convincing display of wheels and handling outside her home while doing a controversial dance with her partner inside.
The first season of The Diplomat was a fun and entertaining mess. As a document about how to conduct foreign policy, it approached, and sometimes crossed, the line between drama and nonsense. But as a chance for Russell to flex some muscle as an actor, it was great. Her character, Ambassador Kate Weiler, was a skilled diplomat who navigated the corridors of power with precision and grace. It was as if the models had traded in her character’s old disguises and guns for suits and pencils. The series wasn’t particularly interested in questioning America’s behavior as a superpower, and Kate was easily drawn in in a way that Russell’s American spy character was not. She was a great philanthropist.
The newly released second season of The Diplomat follows Kate as she searches for the truth about a fake attack on a British warship. Still an important foreign affairs operative, Russell is still in a messy marital relationship, this time with former ambassador Hal Wheeler, played by Rufus Sewell. Hull invokes Rhys’s character in The Americans as a source of stability and a potential undermining force for Russell’s character. Together, Kate and Hal are a diplomatic but dysfunctional couple, remaking the rest of the world as their own falls apart.
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But in this six-episode series, Russell gets to do what she rarely does in her most famous role: act like a regular person. Making mistakes at work. Beat smarter players. It showed the kind of feelings that Elizabeth Jennings never had or were taken out of during her brutal and abusive upbringing in the KGB. This is the second series in which Russell attempts to save the world. It’s the first time she’s nearly blown it up — not literally, though her failures this season have to do with America’s nuclear vulnerabilities.
There’s still plenty of statecraft and businessmanship in this season: Kate transports a key witness to safe houses and facilitates interrogation. It confuses and misleads British intelligence officers. She engaged in a potentially disastrous (for US-British relations) plot to remove the Prime Minister. She set up a surveillance sting against the head of state. But what Season 2 gives Russell room to stretch her wings is the way it allows her to take the character in directions that she couldn’t do in either the first season of The Diplomat or in any of the six seasons of The Americans in which she played a spy. After all, the American ambassador to the United Kingdom has different levers of power than a Soviet agent in the United States. Elizabeth Jennings never had much hesitation about anything. She was mission-driven, she was a spy, and those two facts explain anything. “Do you have children?” the secretary asks her memorably in Season 3 of The Americans, when she’s about to die from the poison Elizabeth has just forced her to take. Elizabeth says yes, and the distressed woman asks her why she kills innocent people. “To make the world a better place,” Russell’s character tells her. When pressed about how killing this woman would improve the world, she didn’t give an inch.
Kate has the same North Star as The Diplomat, but it’s understandable that US ambassadors would have a hard time killing people and putting limbs in suitcases themselves. Their battlefields are conference rooms and ornate corridors. The solution when faced with an opponent in the British government is not to execute that person. (Doing so will supposedly summon an ambassador.) Constrained by her moral compass and the nature of the job, Kate must survey an entire global chessboard, rather than taking matters one task at a time.
In Season 1, Russell’s character, Ambassador, was almost as serious as her secret agent in The Americans. But the events of Season 2 make way for Russell to show a softer side of Kate that feels new. The car bomb that nearly kills her husband at the end of Season 1 puts her in an immediate state of vulnerability. Her tears flow when she learns of a romantic relationship between a CIA agent in her office and her deputy chief of mission at the embassy. (“It’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard,” she told her CIA friend, congratulating a potentially prickly workplace relationship.) Kate is also clumsy with her own emotions and displays undeniable sexual chemistry with Austen Dennison, the British Foreign Secretary. The secretary played by David Gyasi. One of the best moments of the season comes when Hal convinces the rebellious Dennison to do the American delegation a favor. He sealed the deal by reminding Denison that he was about to have sex with Hull’s wife, the American ambassador, before Hull himself was blown up in the streets of London. Dennison acquiesces. Some men still have honor. Whether it would ultimately be fruitful for an ambassador to have such a relationship is a question the show explores.
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It’s a bit disturbing to watch Russell play a character who makes such blatant mistakes. She was not an anti-hero in The Americans, nor was she in the first season of The Diplomat. We are used to watching them solve problems, not create them. But the joy of the final run of episodes isn’t that they’ll help you make sense of world affairs, nor that the mystery the series cooks up is all that captivating — instead, The Diplomat’s second season works because it drops as best as it can. This is an actress in a different kind of fight than she usually takes on in her most famous role. Russell still uses deception and manipulation to achieve her goals on this show, just as she did as a Soviet spy, but her current character finds that work much more difficult. Maybe because everyone knows that the ambassador is trying to work with them, while people don’t know that a good spy is a spy. When the Prime Minister or Vice President becomes aware of their movements, they need to find a more complex solution than feeding them poison.
