The Diplomat is a thoroughly engaging series that had me hooked from the get go. It is such a well crafted show that I wanted to create a place where I could index its subtly epic dialogs (and share it with fellow Diplomat fans). I have watched the series “cover-to-cover” a couple of times now and here’s why I highly recommend it:
- The show is not only entertaining but also educational, as it portrays how diplomatic, geopolitical decisions move through bureaucracies. You don’t have to take my word for it, you can take the Belfer Center, The Washington Post, and Foreign Policy‘s word for it.
- An intelligent portrayal of the complexities of marriage between two intellectual equals, highlighting the nuances of balancing personal and professional advice within a relationship. I have rarely seen this captured in cinema but this series finally gives this a worthy, intelligent treatment. It explores themes such as:
- Trusting a partner’s advice while maintaining individuality.
- The gendered conditioning that influences how men and women approach their work differently.
- In fact, the main premise revolves around Hal, a diplomat whose career stalls after a significant misstep, forcing him to support his wife Kate’s career progression. This shift in their dynamic requires major adjustments from both characters, bringing to light issues of career ambition, gender roles, and personal growth.
So lets go! Here are some noteworthy dialogs from Deborah Cahn‘s masterpiece:
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- Hal: He’s a big boy. He dropped the ball. You picked it up.
- Kate: I made him look like an idiot. It was a dck move. Was it the wrong dck move? – [sighs] I lack experience.
- Hal: No, you don’t.
- K: I lack experience in this role, and I panicked and did what you would do because it’s the first thing that popped in my head.
- H: You called DoD, you got a target list. It’s not a panic move. It was a premeditated d*ck move. It was effective.
- K: Making your ally look like a fuckwad in front of his boss is not the only way out.
- H: Is it the first thing you tried? It was like the 80th.
- K: What if it doesn’t work? I told him to bomb Russia. You have a plan.
- H: This was a move. It’s not the final destination.
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- Brit PM: It takes a team of mad geniuses to hoist one man to the top of the greasy pole. And once you’re in office, it’s best to sack them before they burn the place down. Then you’re stuck in a sea of angry geese who spent all of recent memory trying to destroy you. Austin Dennison has so thoroughly colonized the moral high ground, I couldn’t set foot there if I wanted to.
- Kate: Do you want to?
- Brit PM: No, Mrs. Wyler. No, I’m a bad man. I chose this path because I adore raw power and I crave dank lodgings in Central London. One year passed between the German invasion of Poland and the start of the London Blitz. My country does not see the destruction of Ukraine as a heartrending regional conflict. It will come here. We need not imagine it. We remember it.
“A dustup with Russia is a puerile fantasy. Stop acting like a child, Nicol, they’ll stop treating you like one.” - K: I don’t think it’s childish. It’s pragmatic. Look at every real option. If you have a good one on the table, you won’t choose the bad one. I’m not afraid to admit the bad one exists. Don’t play chicken with a country that’s ready to lob a tactical nuke. Try everything, everything before that.
- Brit PM: Well, I’m on the edge of my seat.
- K: Your city is a 24 hour laundromat for dirty rubles. You have all their money. Take it.
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- Kate: We’re gonna need more hands. You call him. What are you doing?
- Hal: Wives don’t make calls, wives make drinks. You’ve had enough of those, so I made you water.
- K: I was not that wife. Not ever. I was your partner. You can pinch hit for one night.
- H: I don’t want one night. I wanna be your partner. For life.
- K; You can’t.
- H: If you give me a shot, I will.
- K: Constitutionally, Hal, you can’t. You’ll want to and you will fail.
- H: F*ck you. I gave you 15 years of my life. Give me a chance.
- K: So you can go to the White House? So you’re back-seat driving the vice president?
- H: So I’m married to you.
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- Roylin: Let’s test your recent British history. “Take back control.” “Leave means leave.” My personal favorite, “No, thanks.” Brexit slogans. Yes. But they’re being repurposed… for the independence movement. “No, thanks” is trending on the surprisingly active Twitter community of East Kilbride, Strathaven, and Lesmahagow. Their representative in parliament just dropped dead. His wife will likely win his seat. He was a royalist, but she says… “No, thanks.” Her vote will force the prime minister to call for a second referendum in Scotland. There’s a very real chance that Scotland will declare independence. Northern Ireland will follow. The Welsh do everything slowly, but eventually they’ll get the idea. The first line of Nicol Trowbridge’s obituary will declare him “the prime minister that lost the United Kingdom.” He won’t accept a response to Russia that doesn’t help him keep the kingdom. He needs one shining moment of unity to get him past the referendum in Scotland. And your words seemed to have a clarifying effect. How did you put it? “Let’s bomb something.”
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- H: That means Billie wants to make you happy. And the president wants to make you happy. That means right now is the one time when you get to break shit.
- K: Do you see… that every time you’re backed into a corner, or I am backed into a corner, your best idea is to cut the legs off one of your colleagues? You’ve left a bloody swath across all of Washington.
- H: Why does Ganon have to like you?
- K: Because people do things for people they like. We exist in a marketplace of favors. That has lubricated your journey through the world.
- H: So Stuart will lubricate. That’s not your job anymore. It’s his. I didn’t do any of that because you did it for me. I was doing something else, right?
- K: If everybody hates you, it all stops.
- H: Does it? Well, you hate me. I’m still sitting on your bed.
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- Hal: You did it for years. Not your job anymore.
- K: Yeah, this job is better. On a day like today, yeah.
- H: It’s like a f*cking drug, isn’t it?
- K: I was a little shitty. About the idea of you playing number two, without eating up all the oxygen in the room.
- ….
- Stuart: You brought the Western alliance back from the brink of war with Russia.
- K: Whoa, grandiose.
- H: Accurate You know who has days like this all the time? The VP.
- K: Plenty of vice presidents do nothing ever.
- Stuart: Plenty do a lot. You can do more in an afternoon than most people accomplish in a lifetime. Just think about that.
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- Cecilia: It’s a gift, isn’t it? Passion for work, passion for each other, all whirled up like some lusty tornado. Some people never have anything like it.
P.S.
- More Dialogs of previous and newer episodes
- Cinema is rife with stories of “great” men with an array of irrelevant domestic relationships, predatory romantic interests or unhealthy partnerships of skewed power dynamics. Personal lives are depicted as yet another dimension to demonstrate power, one where they can pick the rules and discard those that don’t maximize their domination. This is why ‘The Diplomat’ is such a rarity in that sea of beaten-to-death nonsense. A breath of fresh air.
- If you actually watch the series, the extra material on Netflix’s fan website TUDUM is a great companion as well.
- Some useful links on women and their relationship with work over the past decade:
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