The Diplomat, Netflix, review: Homeland meets Emily in Paris – with a fair bit of Britain-bashing

Forget Joe Biden. If you want an example of US disdain for Britain, look no further than The Diplomat (Netflix), a glossy American series whose creator should be on a Border Agency watch list for crimes against our nation.

I’m kidding. Sort of. The Diplomat isn’t a serious study of UK-US relations. It’s Homeland meets Emily in Paris, eight episodes of semi-enjoyable nonsense in which the US ambassador in London saves the world from Tory mistakes.

Kate Wyler, played by Keri Russell, is a career diplomat who has worked in Beirut and Islamabad. We know she takes her job seriously because she dresses exactly like Homeland’s Carrie Mathison: black trouser suit, cross-body bag, permanently knitted brow. She’s about to get her first ambassadorial posting and is hoping for Kabul – serious, see? – but unexpectedly finds herself sent to London, where she is appalled to find that the official residence resembles Downton Abbey and her first day involves a photoshoot for Vogue.

Kate does not like dressing up – politely asked if she has a tea dress to wear to an official function, she growls: “The only tea-length garment I packed is a burqa” – but by an extraordinary stroke of good fortune/casting she’s a size six and looks terrific in satin. She spends most of her time advising the British on how to conduct foreign policy, and by another stroke of good fortune/casting the Foreign Secretary (David Gyasi) looks as if he’s stumbled in from an action thriller. This means that Kate’s days are very busy, because she has to exchange meaningful looks with this hunk while trying to avert nuclear war.

She also has to navigate a faltering marriage to the rakish Hal (Rufus Sewell, British but playing American), a former ambassador who now jokingly refers to himself as “the wife” but has no intention of remaining a supporting player. He’s enormous fun, whether commandeering a police car as his personal runaround or scoring some weed from a stable boy at Chevening.

But we keep getting drawn away from the comedy. The main plot driver is an attack on a British aircraft carrier off the coast of Iran, which kills dozens of Royal Navy personnel but is viewed entirely through the prism of US power – the attack was retaliation for something America did a couple of weeks earlier. There’s some back and forth over whether the Iranians or the Russians are to blame but never mind, because the real villain in this show is the British Prime Minister, played by Rory Kinnear.

“Mark my words, I will rain hellfire upon them,” said no British person ever, but here this threat is spoken by the PM, the oddly named Nicol Trowbridge. He zips around in an open-top sports car, Mr Toad-style, and announces between mouthfuls of full English breakfast that he’d like to bomb the Middle East. Lurking in the background is his adviser, Celia Imrie, introduced here as “a Tory operative… she takes racists and makes them into lovable guys.”

Showrunner Debora Cahn previously worked as a writer and producer on Homeland and The West Wing. She has tried to recreate The West Wing vibe here, with peppy scripts for the tight-knit group running the US embassy. Cahn also acknowledges the similarities to Homeland; as Kate dashes around running her own intelligence operations, a character says: “She knows that she’s not CIA, right?”

The show ends with a set-up for another series. But how about we flip it: a British ambassador goes to Washington and teaches the Americans a thing or two?