What Makes The Diplomat Click? People Crave ‘Competency Porn’

Kate Wyler’s hair and clothes always seem like they’re waging an insurgency. As portrayed by Keri Russell on the Netflix hit The Diplomat, Wyler, the American ambassador to the UK, is hypercompetent, fiercely intelligent and perpetually struggling with her fly or a stray wisp of unbrushed hair. It’s hard not to imagine that this is, at least in part, a way showrunner Debora Cahn is working through her own conflicted feelings about leadership and self-presentation. After all, Hollywood, like politics, is a place where surface matters at least as much as substance, even for experienced women behind the scenes.

“I think human bodies going through the world—whether the world they’re going through is a palace or a government building or whatever—they’re still dealing with the fact that they’re sweating or they have low blood sugar or they didn’t realize that the shirt they put on was dirty and now they have to hide the dirty shirt,” Cahn tells me when we sit down to talk about her show, two weeks before Season 3 premieres on Oct. 16. “All of those things continue to happen in those spaces and aren’t so different from what we’re experiencing day to day in our small lives.”