CULTURE CURRENT-Debora Cahn on diplomacy in an age of political upheaval

By Yasmeen Serhan

Nov 14 (Reuters) - After meeting former US ambassador Beth Jones in 2017, “The West Wing” and “Homeland” writer and producer Debora Cahn jotted down four words: “She is a series.”

Nearly a decade and four seasons later, “The Diplomat,” starring Keri Russell as Kate Wyler, a career Foreign Service officer thrust into the role of US ambassador to the UK, has become one of Netflix’s most popular political dramas and was recently renewed for a fifth season.

Speaking with Reuters from New York City, Cahn discusses finding drama in diplomacy, the power of dissent and when political reality becomes stranger than fiction.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Political dramas often focus on presidents and spies. What made you want to make diplomats the center of the story?

When I was working on "Homeland," we would do something called “Spy Camp,” (in) which all the writers would come to Washington, DC, for a week and (hear from) experts from the intelligence fields, the military, policy, journalists — all kinds of people who would fertilize the soil out of which a season needed to grow. One day, this woman came in. Her name was Beth Jones, she was a former ambassador, and she talked really, really fast. She was very unassuming and down to earth, and you wouldn't pick her out of a crowd as an action hero, but it felt like I was listening to superhero stories. It was just breathtaking the amount of intense crisis-management ingenuity that was required for her to get through her work every day, helping to wind a war down or stop one from starting.

I had little kids at the time, so the idea of "use your words, not your fists" was well trafficked in our house. And it seemed extremely moving to me that there was this whole other army of people who went out to do work that when they weren't able to be successful, the military would then come in and complete. But if they were successful, nobody ever knew about it.

American political dramas tend to focus on what happens inside Washington, but “The Diplomat” is more interested in the US as the rest of the world experiences it. What made you want to turn the camera outward?

My parents are immigrants. My mom grew up in Poland during World War Two. She was a hidden child during the Holocaust and she remembers American soldiers coming in to liberate the (displaced persons) camp she was in. They were young and handsome and healthy and they gave candy to the children — straight-up storybook stuff. She and her parents and her grandmother all came to New York and she grew up in New York.

And I remember when I was in college, we were bombing Iraq (in the First Gulf War) and it was not entirely clear why. And I told a joke about burning an American flag in front of my grandfather and he looked at me and said, "You don't ever disrespect this country. This is the greatest country in the world." The narrative of the American heroes coming to save children from the Nazis and the reality of what the United States was doing at that time all over the Middle East kind of created a cognitive chasm that I wrestled with for most of my life and continue to, and this show very much came out of that.

Has your view of American power or how the US is perceived changed at all over these four seasons?

What's changed is my understanding of what the moves are in our interaction with other countries. We're all really familiar with the dance steps militarily, and I found it really reassuring to know that there's this whole language of diplomatic interaction that seems a little bit like kabuki from a distance — diplomatic protocol and who stands where and who shakes hands first. All of it seems very performative and meaningless, but there is language built into that provides ways for governments to talk to each other that aren't just, you know, we're sending troops or we're not sending troops.

Has reality made it harder to write political fiction, or does it give you more material to work with?

What's actually going on in the world at the hands of this country is just cartoon-y. You can't write it in fiction. It just looks like bad TV.

I find villains and the idea that like there are "bad guys" to be really uninteresting. It kind of flattens out a story. I actually think it's truly horrifying when two nations who both have a really good point are beating the shit out of each other. Like, that's a thorny problem. I guess I'm looking for a way to open a window into what is it like for these people who work inside this field. What is their day like? What is the vocabulary? What are the dance moves? What are the questions that they're wrestling with?

High-profile ambassadorships are often given to political donors. Kate Wyler, by contrast, is a career Foreign Service officer. Why was it important to you that the show's central figure be a professional diplomat and why in London?

When I was on "Homeland," I was very much aware of the fact that that show was talking about foreign policy in a really visceral, gritty way. And I felt like there was a space in the TV landscape for a show that provided a little bit of a gentler environment, a little bit of a Cinderella story. I wanted to create a little bit of levity that can sort of be the peanut butter around the pill that is "let's talk about foreign policy failures." That meant (having) a not particularly realistic depiction of how this particular ambassador ends up in London.

London gave us a way to provide castles and palaces for our kind of scrappy, rough-around-the-edges heroine to navigate. I also like the idea that there's this kind of double vision from the US about the UK, which is like we're sort of the same and we're not the same at all. And I felt like (in) speaking with people who speak the same language, we would have the ability to create a more nuanced depiction of how cultures miss each other.

The US-UK “special relationship” is central to the series, and you often portray it as something that has to be constantly negotiated rather than taken for granted. Do you think the show has become more skeptical about the durability of traditional alliances as it's gone on?

I liked the idea of talking about long-term relationships that either were or weren't gonna split apart, right? The marriage (between Kate and her husband Hal) and the special relationship are the same thing. It's a little bit of a bald metaphor, but it's what we went with.

When we first started writing the show, it felt like we were pushing it a little bit to say that there might be a fracture between the US and the UK. It was a little bit fantastical five years ago. And now, you know, like we almost invaded Greenland. The Overton window has shifted so far that it zipped right past us into melodrama and we're kind of doing a nice little realistic fiction over here.

As a dual national of both countries, I particularly enjoyed the show's characterizations of Americans and Brits and the misunderstandings between them. Which side has complained more about how they're portrayed?

The Brits have complained more, and I think fairly. I wanted to talk about the American government and creeping authoritarianism and taking potshots at Trump seemed really easily dismissible. So what I did was I created a Trumpian PM (in the character Nicol Trowbridge). A lot of his dialogue comes straight out of the mouth of (former British Prime Minister) Boris Johnson.

Taking Boris Johnson as the model gives us the ability to say, as an American audience, well, that seems ridiculous! But is that what's happening over here? So we're trying to other-ize the UK a little bit in order to create a mirror for this country because I think as introspection goes, it's easier if you can create some of that dramatic distance.

Season 4 keeps returning to this question of complicity and what responsibility public servants have when carrying out policies they believe are wrong. What made you want to visit that question?

Well, it was a huge question when we first started researching the show during the first Trump administration. There had been many people all over the government who resigned in protest, and other people who stayed because they felt like somebody needed to try and hold the line as much as possible. And I felt like that debate was a really powerful one.

There's a question of where do you do more good? Does your public protest move the needle or do you need to stay on the inside protecting from within? I don't have a clear answer on that. I'm impressed always with people who resign in protest. But I also know in my heart there's people I've never heard of that none of us will ever hear of that have kept their heads down and tried to hold on to some of what we hold dear.

The perspectives expressed in Culture Current are the subject’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Reuters News.