What are the unseen challenges faced by diplomats, and what role do they play in maintaining global order? How do TV shows influence our understanding of real-world politics? How do women navigate power, and what does it take for them to lead in politics?
Debora Cahn is the Emmy-nominated showrunner and executive producer of Netflix’s The Diplomat, a political thriller series starring Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell. She’s worked with television’s leading showrunners, including Shonda Rhymes, Terence Winter, Steven Levinson, and Howard Gordon. Her career began working on Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing which has led to projects such as the hit Showtime series Homeland, ABC’s long-running medical drama Grey’s Anatomy, and HBO’s Vinyl, which was co-created by Martin Scorsese. She’s the winner of two Writers Guild of America Awards for The West Wing and FX’s limited series Fosse/Verdon and the 2023 Quincy Award for Responsible Statecraft.
This episode contains spoilers for The Diplomat.
DEBORA CAHN
The question of who's good and who's bad is always front of mind for me because my basic goal is to get to the place where no one is good or bad; everybody is in an unspeakably complicated situation. From the very beginning of the series, this event happens. We believe that it was perpetrated by Iran. Fairly quickly, we learn through the relationships that have been built over time between our heroes, Kate and Hal, and people in other countries that they’ve negotiated with that the assumptions we're making are completely incorrect. In fact, the people we assume have some sort of malintent toward us are being falsely accused. Someone else is playing on the stereotypes we have of those people in order to send us off in the wrong direction.
Much of the first season was sort of this whodunit. First, you think it's Iran, and then it's not. We then go to our kind of next favorite villain in the world. We think it was Russia. It's not. We learn that in this season, it was our closest friend and that this terrible crime was perpetrated on British people by British people. So, we think of it as the call was coming from inside the house.
Talking to experts in the field, talking to politicians in this country on more than one side of every end of the political spectrum, and talking to people in other countries, talking to people in the military, and journalists and policymakers, I always came away feeling like I had encountered somebody who was really intelligent and had good values. They were doing what they were doing because they were trying to make the world better for more people, even for people they didn't know. They didn't necessarily succeed, and they didn't necessarily do that with a philosophical set of values that I shared, but I never walked away thinking, that's a bad guy. That was very much the driving force behind the creation of the show.
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When I was first developing the series, Joe Biden was choosing a vice president, and a friend of mine worked in the political news business and said he was going to pick one of these three people. It was fairly early in the process; there was not a short list yet. Then there wasn't an even shorter list. She said, "No, it's one of these three." I thought, well, there are thousands of people who could be right for that job. She explained that there were three and why. She ticked through a long list of what makes a person viable or not viable. At the end of the list, I said, "Oh my God, there are only three people who are close to getting this job." Probably one of them is a no, and there are really just two. So that idea—that because of the number of things we're looking for in a candidate for national office, the Venn diagram, that spot that makes you viable at the center is so incredibly small—took me by surprise. I was certainly fascinated with the question of what we are looking for in a leader and whether the things that get you into the center of that Venn diagram are the things we want or whether we are just ending up with the least bad option. Or, in some cases, are we ending up with the most bad option because we're trying to move so far away from one attribute that we swing wildly toward another one?
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I was the baby in my family by a lot. I have a brother who's ten years older and a sister who's twelve years older than I am. I was the late baby in my family and in all of my extended family and family friends. So, I was not around many kids. The kids were all teenagers, and they seemed to me to be adults. I just wanted to be with them or like them. I spent a lot of time quietly listening to the conversations of people who were much older than me. I think that gave me an ear for dialogue, and it put me in a position to start writing about stuff that I didn't really understand.
I wasn't a political junkie who came to write about politics; I was a drama junkie who wound up on a show that talked about politics. I had to learn a lot about something in which I had no knowledge or experience. I found it very useful to be able to go into a new world and ask, "What does it sound like for the people who are really in here? How do they talk to each other?" I don't want to have a character explaining something to the audience. I want the audience to believe that they're really in this world and that they're hearing how people talk to each other, while still being able to follow along. I think I’m always still sort of the little kid in the corner listening to somebody else's conversation.
Also, certainly, a large part of what got me where I am is that both of my parents are immigrants. My dad is from Germany, and he came to the United States, coming to New York a year before World War II started. My mom was from Poland and came a year after World War II ended. She was a hidden child in Poland, and many people risked their lives to take care of her. I think I very much grew up with the idea that there were good people and bad people, and the bad people had tried to kill us and the good people either were us or were the ones that saved us. And I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the difference was between those two sets of people. They grew up in the same places; they lived on the same block. Why did the neighbors on this side of the house agree to take in and hide this child while the neighbors on the other side of the house didn't?
I tried to be honest with myself about which one of those families I would be in that kind of situation. I want to avoid the notion that those people were inherently bad and that bad people did this. Bad people murdered so many members of my family. I really want to understand the conditions that create that behavior because I wish it were as simple as saying those people were bad and these people are good, but I don't think it is.
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I feel very fortunate that the medium I’m in is television, which is a very long form of storytelling. You're not telling a single story; you're telling a world. You're inviting people into a world and asking them to live there with you and these characters for a period of time. To me, that’s gratifying because I can choose a world that I believe in, build it, and not have to take care of it quite so much. When you're telling a singular story, you have a point that you're trying to make. Do you make it by the end of an hour and a half or not? There's a lot of pressure in that, along with a strong desire to deliver a single message, perhaps something philosophical, political, or intellectual that you want to say.
On the Real Life Inspiration for The Diplomat
I found that I did all this research and talked to such incredible people who are trying to end global conflict. There are things they've said that make me think, Oh my God, I want everybody to know this. I want to make sure the world hears this. I have a platform, and I must, must, must say this. Yet, those things never make it in. They absolutely never make it into the story. I build a narrative around them, and then the scene where somebody says that incredibly profound thing gets cut, or the speech where they convey that gets cut. The best I can do is build a world where people grapple with these important questions and try their best. All I can expect from people and from myself is that we're trying to do something larger than ourselves.
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The CIA invited a group of writers for film and TV to come in, take a tour, and learn about the various capabilities the CIA is working with, including the technologies they're developing and what the work really looks like behind the scenes. It was mind-boggling how much knowledge and technological capacity they have, along with the different kinds of specializations among the people there. After a full eight hours of touring and talking to different people in various areas, we all had to leave, and our passes that opened the doors didn't work. So we had these special passes that got us in the door and had been there all day hearing about the great technology, and then those special passes couldn't get us out. For 20 minutes, writers sat there watching the most capable and well-meaning people, who are fighting for their country every day, fail to get the gate to open. To me, that is a perfect moment of what it means to be a power in this world.
There are certain ways in which we are an incredibly powerful country. There are ways in which our military is mighty and our intelligence services are unparalleled, but when push comes to shove, you're still dealing with a piece of machinery that half the time doesn't work.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Which teachers or mentors have been important to you?
CAHN
I always think about having started my career on The West Wing and working with Aaron Sorkin and working with John Wells. John Wells took the show over when Aaron Sorkin left, and I had time with both. Those were very different approaches to the creative process. Sometimes I think of it like I started out working for Dionysus and then I went and worked for Apollo. I feel fortunate to have had both of those streams of influence.
Aaron was very diligent about putting a story together that was based on realistic dynamics and detailed, intricate policy webs, but then also had the ability to just take a moment and throw magic at it. A lot of those moments, when you first talk about them in the writer's room, seem silly, frivolous, or not believable, but they're the moments that drag people into a story and grip them emotionally or imaginatively. They're the moments that people remember. They're the moments that we enjoy the most in stories. So how do you find the marriage between flights of fancy? I started to gain an understanding of that process by watching Aaron go through it again and again.
Working with John Wells, I think that I learned that in writing a television show, you’re not working with a bunch of actors. You’re not working with another handful of writers. You're working with 250 people, all of whom chose to go into this creative field. Each of them wants to do the artistic, creative version of their job, whatever piece of the process that they're in. There are situations as a showrunner that you can create that make it possible for all of them to exercise that creative impulse. There are also situations that you can create which make it impossible for anybody other than you to exercise that creative impulse. Most of that has to do with time. How quickly do you do your work? How quickly do you create a script so that you can hand it over to other people who can do what you did, which is spend time in the imaginative process of letting the story live in them and germinate to see what comes out the other side?
There are very simple steps that you can take to give all of those people a creative artistic role in the process. There are things that you can do that really kill that and kill it quickly, turning it into an exercise in frustration and stifled creative impulses.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
We often try to avoid portraying characters in their most fragile states for too long. We don't want to make them appear weak, particularly in political office. However, I really see that in your storytelling as a source of profound strength. It’s our flaws that make us uniquely human. I think your characters—not just Kate Wyler played by Keri Russell—are struggling to shield themselves from their own humanity. It’s a powerful reflection on the tension we all face between embracing our imperfections and curating this image of perfection for the world. It's also interesting to see how a marriage can survive behind this veneer within a diplomatic atmosphere, where her husband, Hal, has to deal with going from being front and center to being behind the scenes.
CAHN
Those cracks in the veneer, to me, are the most fascinating and most endearing moments in any situation or in any person…I’m a professional communicator, right? Yet, I very rarely can get to the end of a sentence without losing my train of thought, doubling back three times, sort of meandering, repeating myself, and then desperately hoping by the end of the thought that I can bring it around and make it sound like there was a purpose there. That’s the state that we're all in all the time, and I think it has a profound impact on important moments in our lives. I don't think events happen despite those cracks. I think they happen around and often because of those cracks. To me, it’s both important and endlessly entertaining to see those moments and give a little bit more of a spotlight to them.
