The Diplomat (Season 2)

I watched and enjoyed the second season of The Diplomat (the review for the first season is here, which I wasn't sure I would, given that back in the day when we all thought it couldn't come worse than the Bush administration (insert hollow laughter here), I found myself unable to marathan The West Wing and had to wait for the Obama era to watch it; the divergence from reality being too great. Welll, the divergence in the case of The Diplomat still is enormous - it's not that the poliictians on either side of the Atlantic aren't also capable of dastardly deeds, that's what drama consists of, after all. It's that humanity itself is by and large better in this show. (As it was in The West Wing, for which showrunner Deborah Cahn used to write back in the day.) I don't just mean the fact that most people in public service (again, on either side of the Atlantic), independent of political persuasion, are really dedicated to the public good - of course they're also ambitious, but the show doesn't treat this as an either/or thing, which I like - , and even the villains are 100% convinced to act in the general best interest and are workoholics. It's that I don't think the US electorate in showverse would ever vote for the Orange Menace, twice. He probably would not even have gotten through the primaries, and since so many more people with spines and ethics exist in showverse, there would not have been the transformation of his party into an authoritarian personality cult. You know, showverse might be uncomfortably close to WW3 at times, but I'd still rather live there. (Showverse does have a past questionable US president who was terrible, but not to the same degree.)

Anyway: the second season picks off where the first left off and and contiinues with its mixture of pulpy political thrillerness, walk and talk intrigue and confrontations and personal relationship drama, with the later not getting as much room as in season 1 due to this season being two eps shorter. The cast is the same as last year, minus the people who died in the s1 finale and plus Alison Janney as Vice President Grace Penn in the last few episodes, which was awesome. In terms of personal relationships, I continue to wonder if Keri Russell starring media can now guarantee me messed up, complex marriages designed to prove wrong the old tv assumption that people are only interested in the UST and the getting together part and as soon as a pairing actually is together, they lose interest. I mean, Elizabeth and Philipp in The Americans are very different form Kate and Hal in The Diplomat, but it's true for both relationships that the audience gets introduced to them as already existing, and it's one of the core emotional axis' on which the entire show revolves. (Meanwhile, Kate's UST ridden relationship with the British Foreign Secretary, alas, is much less interesting than in s1, but that fits with what happens, plot wise.)

Having just seen Ali Ahn as Alice in Agatha All Along and Rory Kinnear as Tom Bombadil in Rings of Power made it a bit odd to return to them as the London CIA station chief and the Not Boris Johnson British PM, respectively, but of course they're great in their parts. ( Spoilery remarks to follow. )

In conclusion, perhaps not despite but because of its increasing lack of a resemblance to rl marathoning the second season of this show provided me with good entertainment, and I look forward to the third.