Rufus Sewell and Keri Russell in Netflix’s The Diplomat, which received seven Emmy nominations this year. Liam Daniel/Netflix Debora Cahn received her first Emmy nomination 20 years ago as a producer on The West Wing. Now, the TV vet is up for best drama for her own show, the political thriller The Diplomat, for the second straight year — while also receiving her first-ever writing nod.
Cahn discusses with THR her partnership with star Rufus Sewell and writing the “terrifying” finale.
The show has grown in Emmy nominations over each of its three seasons. What do you make of that from your own creative perspective of evolving the show?
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There’s always the hope that a show can continue to thrive past all of your first-grade ideas, which you lay out in the first season. All of the low-hanging fruit storywise goes into those first few episodes. Then it turns into this new thing that is partly a show that I had in my mind and partly the product of a bunch of people working on this thing together — the relationship that Keri [Russell] and Rufus built out of Kate and Hal and turned into this marriage that has really drawn people in and served as the spine of the series. The hope is always that you haven’t used up all your good tricks and that you have a deeper well than you knew yourself going in. That’s a little bit of a leap of faith. It’s really great when it feels like your audience is responding to that reach.
Rufus got his first nomination for the show, and it feels appropriate since Hal takes more center stage this season opposite Kate. What is it like writing for him?
He has been, from the beginning, this stellar dance partner who is in so many ways responsible for everything that that relationship is. There are a lot of people who really connect with Kate as a character, and see themselves in that character, and there is a tremendous amount of love for Hal and connection with Hal. I sense from the audience that Hal is just giving them a unique ride. He’s fucking great.
You end the season with Kate realizing Hal’s subtle, brutal betrayal. How did you get there?
When you’ve achieved a finale by blowing a bunch of people up and then you’ve achieved a finale by having a president killed, having an interesting shift in one character’s attitude toward another character … is the most terrifying finale to write. (Laughs.) It was intimidating to try and figure out how you make a finale out of a really subtle shift in perspective that you’re not sure is real. It was a relief that people were willing to watch.
You’re nominated for writing the episode “Amagansett” with Peter Ackerman, which pits the relationship between Kate and Hal against that of the president and first gentleman, Grace (Allison Janney) and Todd (Bradley Whitford). How did that parallel develop?
It certainly was an experiment in turning the Grace character into a piece of another marriage where the marriage itself was going to be a character in the way that Kate and Hal’s was. We didn’t know that it was actually going to work, but was there a ton of suspense? No: It’s Allison and Brad. We were excited to see them build a different kind of way to work together after they had decades ago. We were all a little bit nervous that we were writing into a piece of the past, but they so elegantly and joyfully have created this whole new thing with two new characters that are just such a blast to watch. Every time that epic foursome is onstage together, the whole crew leans in. It’s just without question a career highlight for me, seeing the four of them work together. Boy, does game recognize game.
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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