strangecloud

Netflix's “The Diplomat” has somehow gotten better with every season, which itself is a plot twist when you consider how more Netflix shows fare as they age. It could've just maintained the momentum after three seasons of political intrigue, marital warfare and Keri Russell looking increasingly disheveled. Instead, season 4 doubles down on what has always made the show so much fun: putting brilliant, deeply complicated people in rooms together and watching them try to outmaneuver one another while barely holding their personal lives together. I've now watched all eight episodes of season 4, and I can say that "The Diplomat" remains one of Netflix's best dramas — if not the very best. The plotting is intricate without becoming incomprehensible, the stakes continue to escalate and the show has added two major weapons to its already formidable arsenal: Allison Janney and Bradley Whitford. Their arrival as President Grace Penn and First Gentleman Todd Penn was already a highlight of season 3, but season 4 brings them much further into the action, and the results are fantastic. Janney, Whitford, Russell and Rufus Sewell have the kind of chemistry where they could just read an encyclopedia together and it'd be high theater. So what makes "The Diplomat" season 4 work so well? It's not just the increasingly high-stakes geopolitical maneuvering, but the complicated personal relationships that make every backroom deal feel like a potential marriage-ending argument. And this season has plenty of both.