‘The Diplomat’ Boss on Biden-Harris Echoes in Netflix Show’s President-VP Dynamic: “I Didn’t Want to Make a Mirror”
The U.S. has an aging male president who’s expected to pass the torch to his younger female vice president. But something happens that disrupts these plans, and the White House scrambles to find a solution that will allow them to build on their commander-in-chief’s legacy.
That’s the political landscape in the fictional Washington of Netflix’s The Diplomat, as viewers learn early in the first season of the political series starring Keri Russell that the show’s vice president, Grace Penn (played by Allison Janney in the show’s second season, dropping Thursday), has a scandal that, White House aides say, will force her to resign. The aides are also secretly vetting Russell’s career diplomat, Kate Wyler, newly installed as the American ambassador to the U.K., as Penn’s replacement.
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Despite distinctly different circumstances around The Diplomat‘s succession drama, viewers could have been thinking of the political thriller over the summer as the real U.S. president, the 81-year-old Joe Biden, was being expected to pass the torch to his younger, female vice president, Kamala Harris, and facing increased pressure to drop his 2024 reelection bid in the wake of Biden’s disastrous performance in the first televised debate against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Ultimately Biden, who initially insisted on staying in the race before dropping out in a surprise announcement in mid-July, did pass the torch to Harris, ending his own presidential campaign and endorsing her as his successor.
Now, in both real-life and in The Diplomat, all eyes are on the vice president as Harris is the Democratic presidential nominee and Penn features prominently in the second season of the Netflix series.
It’s a turn of events that showrunner Debora Cahn tells The Hollywood Reporter was “not deliberate.”
“I didn’t want to make a mirror,” Cahn says of the similarities between the show’s succession drama and what played out in real politics. “I mean, we were certainly dealing with similar dynamics, and we were aware of that when we came up with the story two years ago. But we thought we were in the same neighborhood — not the same house. And we ended up, a little bit, sleeping in the same bed as this was playing out on the front page.”
Cahn describes it as a “little bit unnerving” how things that were happening on the show seemed to echo real life.
“We’re commenting on a world where certain issues arise, but we’re not really commenting on a specific situation,” she says. “But we did reach a point where, like, we taped a scene where a character [Kate, pictured in the main photo above] came out in a powder blue suit, and then two days later, Kamala Harris was at a rally in Georgia with hundreds of thousands of people and [wearing] a powder blue suit.”
She adds, “It all all looks much more deliberately in dialogue than it actually was.”
When asked about the real-life parallels to the show’s political dynamic, the actor who plays The Diplomat‘s President Rayburn, Michael McKean, says it was “interesting” but emphasized the differences between the two worlds.
“It’s different enough that [when there was discussion of Biden passing the torch this summer] it was like, ‘Oh, it’s quaint.’ It’s an interesting thing,” he recently told THR at the show’s season two premiere in New York. “We still can’t see around corners. The comparisons are few, and the longshots are many in this kind of political world.”
In addition to Penn, who viewers see for the first time in season two after she’s heavily discussed but not seen in season one, The Diplomat‘s second season will explore the fallout from the explosion at the end of season one that seemed to affect both Kate’s husband and former ambassador Hal (Rufus Sewell) and her colleague Stuart (Ato Essandoh). Additionally, Kate and her team spend the new season investigating her theory that the British government is behind the attack on the country’s own carrier ship that started the series.
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All six episodes of the Diplomat‘s second season will be streaming on Netflix starting Thursday, with the series already renewed for season three.
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