Keri Russell will return as Kate Wyler after that shocking twist in the Season 1 finale.
Fans of “The Diplomat” can officially relax knowing that they won’t be left hanging after that Season 1 finale twist.
Netflix has announced that Debora Cahn’s hit series — which stars Keri Russell as a well-dressed American ambassador who gets an unexpected (and unwanted) promotion while her marriage is unraveling — has been renewed for a second season. No release date or production schedule has been announced, but Russell will be returning as Kate Wyler with Cahn continuing to serve as showrunner and executive producer.
“I am thrilled to be headed back for another round of this
smart screwball show,” Russell said in a statement announcing the news.
“Dare I say it’s fun? Thank you Netflix for giving us another shot.”
“We
had such a great time making ‘The Diplomat,'” Cahn added. “And it’s a thrill
to see how much people are enjoying it. We’re so glad we get to do it
again!”
“The Diplomat” premiered on April 20 and quickly became a
hit for Netflix. It debuted at #1 on the streamer’s weekly global top 10 TV
list, and Netflix claims that it was viewed for 57.48 million hours during
its first weekend on the site.
The series has been praised by critics for putting a slightly
modern spin on the kind of slick political thriller that used to regularly
grace network lineups. The end result was exactly the kind of endlessly
binge-able middlebrow fare that Netflix has been prioritizing in recent
years.
“Created, written, and showrun by Debora Cahn (who spent
four years on ‘The West Wing’ before producing and writing for ‘Homeland’),
the new Netflix series starring the great Keri Russell is a clever evolution
from those two programs, balancing big walk-and-talk energy with hushed and
hurried chatter,” IndieWire’s Ben Travers wrote in his Season 1 review.
“‘The Diplomat’ doesn’t idealize government work like Aaron Sorkin did, nor
does it indulge in action-driven spectacle the way Alex Gansa and Lesli
Linka Glatter often enjoyed. But, as befits its character-based,
story-driven medium, the political thriller keeps you guessing from start to
finish, and it does so almost exclusively through dialogue, be it shouted,
whispered, winked, or stared.”
