The Diplomat’s Creator Knows What Happens After That Wild Ending

What a time for Netflix’s hit political thriller to return. Days before the election, season two of Netflix’s The Diplomat starring Keri Russell as Kate Wyler, a U.S. ambassador to the U.K. caught in the midst of a political crisis, hit the streaming platform. [Spoilers ahead]. By the end of the six-episode second season, Kate learns that the mastermind behind the maritime bombing that and set off the events of the series was neither Russia nor the U.K. Prime Minister, but U.S. Vice President Grace Penn, played on the series by Oscar and Emmy winner Allison Janney. Talk about an October surprise.

On a new episode of Still Watching, hosts Hillary Busis and Chris Murphy chat with creator and executive producer of The Diplomat Debora Cahn about how they engineered that shocker of an ending for season two, in which president William Rayburn (Michael McKean) drops dead after finding out Penn’s machinations—making nefarious Grace Penn the new President of the United States.

“I like to come into the season with a plan, but then throw it in the garbage as soon as possible,” Cahn said—“if one of the writers has a better idea, and often they do.”

Cahn and her writing team considered the implications of crafting a storyline that ended with an elder president dropping dead while in office—a plot twist that may have felt a bit too close to home just a few months ago. “We thought that that was going to sort of send the wrong message right before the election,” she said. Luckily for The Diplomat, U.S. politics took a different turn. “We did not anticipate this particular plot twist that happened in the real world,” said Cahn, with Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic nominee for president.

There are other real world political corollaries baked into The Diplomat as well. Hillary Clinton, Cahn said, has been on her mind “from the very beginning of the series,” and Janney told Vanity Fair that she partially based her character on the former Secretary of State. “It’s Hillary Clinton, but it’s also Samantha Power and Susan Rice,” says Cahn. “And certainly Kamala Harris, who was, when I was first developing the series, just being chosen as Biden’s running mate. There’s a lot about the Kate VP plot that came from the selection of Kamala Harris.”

As for where season three will take Kate and Grace Penn, Cahn has some ideas, but notes that the direction sort of depends on how things shake out with next week’s presidential election. “I don’t know what country we’re going to be living in a week from now,” she says. “So we try to leave ourselves a little bit open for the possibility of continuing to have a conversation with the world that we’re in.”