The Diplomat season two: Political thriller so compulsive you’ll literally lose sleep over it

A piece of advice before you press play on the second season of The Diplomat, the political thriller starring the inimitable Keri Russell.

Don’t start the show at 11.15pm, thinking you can squeeze in a quick episode before bed, and then pick it up again the next night. Unless you’re particularly disciplined, there’s no pressing stop.

That first episode will roll into the next and then the next and before you know it, it’s four o’clock in the morning and you’ve burnt through the whole season. True story.

If there was a moment to pause, it would’ve been at the end of the third episode, which doesn’t feature a cliffhanger. Because once you get past that point, it’s a straight shot through to the finale.

It’s not just that The Diplomat is so compulsive with its twisty conspiracy-driven story, you devour it as a starving person would a loaf of bread, it’s that it’s also incredibly fast-paced. By design, it doesn’t give you time to breathe.

Created by Debora Cahn, who was on the writing staff for The West Wing, Homeland and Grey’s Anatomy, The Diplomat is the tonal distillation of those three shows combined. It has political intrigue, espionage thrills and the melodrama of a prime-time soap.

When Netflix talks about making shows that are “gourmet cheeseburgers”, The Diplomat is it.

A refresher if you haven’t rewatched the first season recently, because the second season throws you right into it. It doesn’t give you the courtesy of a “previously on” nor does it spend much time on exposition of what came before.

Kate Wyler (Russell) is a career diplomat who was appointed the US ambassador to London but it’s hardly her dream job. She would rather be on her way to Kabul, where she was headed, where it’s less about protocol and hosting teas and more about the nitty-gritty of getting it done.

What she didn’t know at first is that the London posting is something of an audition for a more significant role – the vice president of the US – and her husband Hal, a wily former ambassador himself, was the one who moved all the pieces so it could happen.

Upon her arrival, she’s immediately thrown into a geopolitical incident when a British warship is attacked and more than 40 soldiers were killed. Fingers are quickly pointed at Iran, but Kate doesn’t believe it was them.

Throughout the first season, she’s running around, forging alliances and trying to work out who’s behind it and prevent all-out war, alongside her deputy chief of mission Stuart (Ato Essandoh), her CIA station chief Eidra (Ali Ahn) and the dishy UK foreign secretary Austin Dennison (David Gyasi).

By the end of the first season, Kate is convinced it was a false flag attack orchestrated by the blowhard UK prime minister Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) who was trying to unite the country and blunt a Scottish independence movement.

That’s when a car bomb goes off in central London with Hal, Stuart and two others in its blast radius. Cut to credits.

The second season picks up in the moments after and it’s immediate chaos. The trailers have already revealed that Hal and Stuart survive the attack so the stakes are more about who knew what and when, and who can they trust if, as their suspicions lay, the most powerful politician was responsible for a vast conspiracy.

The Diplomat is all-in on pulpy, giddy thrills, which would firmly put it in the guilty pleasure camp, but with Russell’s gravitas, you can’t write it off as just that.

It may be silly and very much suspend your disbelief with its cloak-and-dagger sequences of sneaking around the hallowed corridors of St. Paul’s Cathedral or Inverary Castle (the location budget this season must have been steep, they also filmed scenes at Hampton Court Palace), but it’s also sharp.

Some of the chicanery borders on shrill but then it will hit you with an astute dissection of geopolitics and the threat of autocracies in 2024.

That latter scene involves Allison Janney, who joins her The West Wing alums Cahn and producer Alex Graves in the final two episodes (there are six total) as the current vice president, who is supposed to be resigning her post over some not-yet-broken scandal.

Janney brings gravitas to the role but also difficult-to-place guile that makes her a threat to Kate. The scenes of her and Russell, where the sparring isn’t necessarily in what’s being said but what both women know of the other, are intoxicating. More of this please, always.

Luckily, there will be. The series has already been renewed for a third season and it seems very likely Janney will be sticking around.

The Diplomat is a lesson in how to make TV that is incredibly binge-y, and entertaining and doesn’t make you feel like an idiot for liking it.

The Diplomat is streaming on Netflix