“I am slow to anger, but I toe the line

As I reckon with the effects of your life on mine

I look back on where I failed

And in every place I checked

The only common thread has been your disrespect.”

-Aaron Burr, Hamilton (2015)

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Boy, I really did not want to be back in this spot again with a show that I used to love, but I am very sad to announce that, in my opinion, The Diplomat slid right the fuck off of the Slippery Slope that I warned them about and plunged into the abyss of horrid, trite, insulting writing and poor decisions directing the ship that should have turned away from the iceberg instead of plowing into it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am sorry to say that The Diplomat has Jumped the Shark.

I hate it every time I have to write these rants, believe it or not. I know most people don’t believe it, but I write this blog post with pure resignation and anger, not joy that I’m bashing a show that I once loved. I know everyone thinks I enjoy tearing things apart, but this is a show I didn’t want to write a post about since I truly did think it used to be bold and subversive for its genre. Sadly, as it often happens, there is rot in the roots that finally made the bad fruit grow and so it’s time for me to cull this show from my life.

That said, I want to leave a warning since I’m hopping off the sinking ship before the violin starts playing. I’m going to discuss what made me depart and why I think the show’s now bound for the iceberg with no chance of turning or saving everyone aboard.

Spoilers for the first four seasons of The Diplomat.

To recap my old post called The Slippery Slope, which is a writing series I have for when movie franchises or shows exhibit signs that they might be headed in a troublesome direction, I got very frustrated with the third season due to them scaling back most of the political drama to concentrate on Kate’s boring and frankly unhealthy romantic relationships. The three relationships are between her husband Hal Wyler, the elegant right hand man to the Prime Minister Austin Dennison, and a new MI6 love interest introduced after a time skip in the third season named Callum Ellis. What grabbed me about the show’s first two seasons is Kate being an interesting and subversive portrayal of a workaholic tomboy who means well and is deeply flawed. It worked perfectly that she has the world’s most sinister yet charming husband who is whip smart but impulsive and doesn’t care about risk if he thinks he has the right answer. The dynamic worked in the first two seasons because Hal is problematic but charming while Austin is a gentleman but a repressed one. Kate had to choose between the unhealthy familiar relationship or a healthy but risky new romance, and in the first two seasons, it’s at least balanced, but by the third, it is painfully clear they either were not interested in Austin or they listened to the whiny fandom on Reddit complaining that they wanted Kate with Hal and not Austin, so Austin was given next to nothing to do in the third season.

What’s more is last season, I was not the only one calling the show out on its now soap opera levels of concentration on the dull problematic romances in Kate’s life. I was regularly checking IMDB every day and reading that viewers said the same thing as me: the show has a sharp decline in the writing between seasons two and three, and oddly enough, the show didn’t change show runners and writers, at least in the main crew, and so it was just baffling how poorly written and unrealistic the third season felt along with the dull relationship drama. I literally mean it—the most repeated phrase in all the negative reviews of the third season is “soap opera” on the IMDB reviews, so I know I am not the only person that noted it had problems that I prayed they’d fix before season four. I even manned the Tropes page myself.

And sadly, all they did was seal off two problems while creating ninety worse ones.

If I had to summarize it, I would say this show tanked due to them listening to the wrong parts of the criticism of the third season and running out of ideas for conflict both professional and personal. I have several theories on why the writing tanked, but I’ll have to try to do some reading to find out if there is any official word. Further proof in the pudding is the decline in viewership, too—season one had a strong opening of eight million viewers, then season two started with 5.6M, and then it shot down to 4.8M and that tells you while the good reviews have insulated their IMDB rating from ever tanking, people noticed the decline in the writing between the first, second, and third seasons based on said views.

Essentially, season 4 attempts a “raze everything to the ground” season in which they kick out a main lead to be replaced with another very white one and remove the characters from their previous positions of power and they then change the entire premise of the show itself. These decisions are new to this show, but not to TV in general. There are a few shows that have a season where the character stops being the title they started the show with or the season just ends in a way to make you think they will stop doing their main job, but then the next season is about getting the job back.

Either way, trust me, y’all fucked this shit up.

Let’s go ahead and dissect this dead fucking pig already.

For the sake of time, I’ll condense the original premise of the show and then expand briefly on what the third season changed. Originally, The Diplomat was about Kate Wyler as Britain’s ambassador, and her manipulative husband Hal Wyler, a fellow ambassador and strategist. They are actually not together, but for her position, they have to pretend to be happily married to fool the world. She has an intelligence officer named Eidra and an aide named Stuart; the two are in a secret romantic relationship that later goes public.

The first two seasons are largely about their team attempting to stop the idiotic bully of a Prime Minister named Trowbridge from starting a war with Russia, but his Man Behind the Man is really Austin Dennison; a reasonable and peaceful right hand man to him who has Unresolved Sexual Tension with Kate. Meanwhile, Billie, the president’s right hand woman, and Stuart are trying to groom Kate for replacing the female vice president Grace Penn that has been tanking lately. Kate doesn’t want the job at first, but as she keeps working, she starts to think she may.

At the end of season two, President Rayburn dies just after Kate and Hal found out that the Vice President Grace suggested the fatal attack of the HMS Courageous that resulted in the death of a hundred British soldiers to Margaret Roylin, Trowbridge’s mentor. Hal told the president Grace made the suggestion and it caused him to have a heart attack and die (but to be fair, he was also in poor health and already old) and so they blame the attack on him since he’s dead and no one but them knows it was Grace and are trying to keep a woman with too few morals from starting a war. Grace chooses Hal as her VP over Kate, which creates resentment between the married couple. Grace’s husband, Todd, also notices Hal’s endless charm and drive and starts to resent their relationship, constantly jealous or feeling neglected by Grace.

The main source of conflict in seasons three and four are that a Russian ship called the Poseidon containing a very bad nuke ran aground of British waters, so Hal and Grace unwisely steal it and don’t tell the Brits, creating animosity and cover ups. Then, Russia pretends it wants to come get its dead soldiers and will find out the Americans stole the bomb, giving them an excuse to declare war or at the very least, attack the US somehow in retaliation. Kate then blackmails Trowbridge when he refuses to help, so he resigns, and the new PM knows he was blackmailed by Kate into resigning, so now she refuses to trust Kate. Grace gets shot by some anonymous angry terrorist, bizarrely with no follow up or even identification of who he is and why he shot her (thanks, plot hole; I’m calling up CinemaSins), and becomes convinced that she must seem “strong” to the UK and Russia, so she makes several stupid demands that make the conflict even worse. Grace stops listening to all counsel and fires Stuart for his dissention cable about her behavior, so Kate, Billie, and the Secretary of Defense Ganon quit at the G7 summit and walk out on her. Hal then walks out on the G7 summit too and is likely going to tell the American people what they have all been doing.

Welcome to Cautionary Tales. Here’s all the shit that The Diplomat did wrong in season 4 that has caused me to quit the show for good.

1. The utterly callous, stupid, disrespectful exit of Austin Dennison. *exhausted, heavy black fangirl sigh* I am not the least bit surprised that the show’s first huge failure is related to Austin Dennison. I had an inkling from how limp his arc was in the third season that he’d be the first one to get cut if these hack writers ran out of good material and “needed a change.” I am sorry to say this move is not even remotely new. I am used to being a black fangirl watching the sinking ship dump the people of color as fast as it can in attempt to keep fucking floating even though that person of color was instrumental in getting the show the acclaim it currently enjoys. It’s to the point that a newly formed sub-trope of Stuffed Into the Fridge and Disposable Woman is now Disposable Black Woman. These are black female leads or women of color (or in poor Austin’s case, male) leads that are built up to be important, but then are either sidelined in the plot or she has sexual tension with a handsome white lead and is killed off or written off the show and he gets an “appropriately” white female replacement love interest (ex. Sleepy Hollow, Daredevil’s first season, the Reacher series, or Thor: Ragnarok). That’s the role they wound up assigning Austin in the end, and it infuriates me. Austin demonstrated a level of class and restraint that endeared me so much that I actually based a character in my gothic horror romance screenplay on him. Yes, deadass, that’s real. There is a queer black professor supporting character that I picture as David Gyasu due to how distinguished, elegant, and gently authoritative Austin has been on this show. He is so delightfully witty and restrained that even though the kiss in the third season was ill-timed and forced, I still did get just a tiny little sigh of relief seeing this truly honorable man kiss this walking dumpster fire of a woman. I was utterly taken with him, how he has managed to subvert a thousand disasters without resorting to the same low class bullshit as Trowbridge or Kate and Hal. So for that same reason, I already got a bad feeling about his fate at the end of season three when I saw that Austin had so little impact in the third season. I am also sorry to say that I was unaware Austin has haters in the fandom, so it’s possible the nimrods in the writers’ room took that as a sign that it was the best course of action to kill him off-screen and no one would give a shit. Like Foggy in Daredevil Born again, I was unaware he had haters, so finding out after his abrupt death pissed me right the fuck off in addition to the poor writing. I can confidently say Austin’s disrespectful fucking exit from this now fuckass show is the number one reason I quit. Do I know that’s biased? Sure do! Do I care? No. This is why you hear so many of us say that we don’t like it when black people and people of color are the sole characters on a majority white show. We are always the one thrown under the bus so it can keep moving “lighter” without what the white ass writers’ room considers dead weight. The show would not have been what it was without the inclusion of Austin Dennison, and to just kill him off-screen without even a goodbye, without Kate even saying any words about a man she kissed recently or who saved her stupid ass more than once. It tells me they got on Reddit and assumed the people there spoke for the entire fandom, so it’s no trouble to toss this man under the fucking bus without care, assuming the entire fandom won’t mind because they think we all hated him. Fuck you. Sincerely, with my whole chest, The Diplomat writers, because there is a chance one of your little underlings or interns is combing thru the reviews of your 4^th season for feedback—FUCK YOU. Black characters are not stepping stones. We are not here for you to put your foot on our backs to get you where you want to go as white leads. This is exactly why Ryan Coogler is who he is and works with whom he works with, as do many other black directors and creators. This season is why we have to be in front of and behind the camera at all times. The death of Austin Dennison is horseshit. I am not saying he should not have died at all. I am saying they killed him in the most disrespectful way possible, not even bothering to let him or his new wife have final scenes, not even letting us say goodbye with anything other than a measly toast in his honor, without any continuance or even completion of a character arc for him. His role has been proven to be nothing more than goddamn performative for a bunch of toxic, privileged white people who can’t even honor his memory for more than five fucking minutes of screentime. This is why I now hope the show fails. You do not get to stand on a black character’s back to reach the ladder and snatch it up behind you so we can’t climb. Austin deserved better. Now, if some time passes and David reveals he asked to be written out for other reasons, I accept it, but I will never accept this show using Austin to get to these rave reviews for two seasons, then tossing him aside like he’s nothing and insisting to us that the erasure of this well written and acted black man was “a necessary evil” for the future of the show. I can think of other shows where they had an unpopular character exit, but not in such a disgraceful way. I can think of ten-thousand fucking things to do with him and Kate, but the show weren’t interested in that, so he just got a disrespectful exit instead. Real classy, assholes.
2. The utterly callous, stupid, disrespectful firing of Stuart. Again, with Stuart being a dark-skinned black man who is empathetic and caring, I’m not the least bit surprised he got the shaft immediately since this show is in its “raze it all to the ground” phase. Stuart being fired pisses me off for the same reason I mentioned Foggy Nelson from Daredevil above for—he must have a bunch of fucking vocal minority haters that wanted him off the show or the writers just decided the razing would reach him since Kate and them quit anyway. I’m irritated, but between him and Austin, he got less screwed. Stuart is the heart and soul of that office. He sees clearly and he is precise and he gives a damn about doing the job the right way. If this show is indeed trying to become Succession or Billions like I suspect, then I’m not shocked he got the fucking shaft because Billions did the same thing to the only character close to having any virtue named Doherty, and seasons three and four smack of that show. I’m also angry they had him and Eidra have a great breakthrough, then pissed it down their leg by having her flippantly say she’ll keep working there and doesn’t care that Stuart has been fired. Note, also, that these irresponsible, selfish, egotistical dickheads never blame Kate even though she unwisely told him to post the dissention cable. The negative consequences hit Stuart and Eidra, not Kate, who just loses access to a resource. I’m sick and tired of majority white shows shafting the very few minorities on their own shows and always giving their white counterparts more screentime, just like American Gods did before its rightful cancellation. Stuart deserves better, and frankly, another reason I am quitting this show is because I’m sick of Eidra taking advantage of his constant fucking patience with her awful behavior and I want him to move on with someone who actually appreciates him and listens to his worries instead of brushing them off and is willing to compromise and meet him in the middle. I’m sure the writers think that because Kate quit, she’s in the same boat, but I do not agree. They positioned her to be much better off when all of this shit is her fucking fault; she had the experience to have told him not to post the dissention cable at that time and didn’t advise him correctly, so he took the fall.
3. Constant goddamn cyclical arguments that do not produce any result and just take up fucking screentime. Sweet Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick. If I created a fucking drinking game for the cyclical conversations of the third and fourth seasons, I’d be dead of fucking alcohol poisoning before reaching the halfway point of either one. The arguments in seasons one or two revealed things about character or their professional relationships. The arguments in the third and fourth seasons just fucking spin wheels and waste the audience’s time. I know that this show is attempting the Sorkin vibes of West Wing, which I never saw, but I am very sure they are doing it incorrectly. For instance, Todd, Grace’s useless husband, only has two scenes the entire two third and fourth seasons. It is his job to either sit around being a sad sack who can’t support his wife and get a goddamn fucking life or it is his job to be an annoying chore that makes a mistake that makes Kate’s life worse. Two scenes! No more! Picture every time it cuts back to him and he is only doing one or the other or both. Tell me how fast you’d lose your goddamn fucking patience with this character doing it over…and over…and over again. I have no idea why the actor didn’t call it out or maybe they told him to shut up, but either way, Todd’s the most useless lump of tofu to ever set foot on this show. I’m not actually angry at him—it’s not his fault! Genuinely, it’s not. This is sheer writing incompetence. What’s insulting is I as a writer can tell you all kinds of shit we should’ve done with him, but the main issue is the show knew it ran out of ideas, so it just jammed this man into position for easy padding. He pads this entire season out with his two boring scenes until you want to rip your hair out, and sadly, it’s not just him. Kate and Hal and then Todd and Grace have the same argument ten-thousand times over the course of both seasons three and four, and by the time season four is over, I hate every single person involved for being so toxic that they pretend couples’ therapy and just general therapy does not exist. I am so sick of how this show portrays these toxic motherfuckers as being right all the time. There is a huge difference between self-righteous and being right. The show used to know the difference. It does not any longer.
4. They finished making Kate and Hal, and their subsequent marriage, unlikable as all hell from lack of accountability and constant hypocritical entitlement. As I said in my Slippery Slope post, originally, this show knew the exact balance between making Kate and Hal toxic but funny and charming. Again, in that post, I said I was not surprised the bubble burst since it was already balancing on a pin’s head, but the sadder part is that at first, they fixed the Kate/Hal ship in season four, and then just ran it aground again thanks to lack of fucking originality. This season, they finally stop sniping at each other and Kate promises to stop blaming Hal for their marriage failing, taking on the burden of apologizing and trying to meet him in the middle. They still argue constantly, but she started to compromise more, which she needed to do. Then, she proceeds to use his own manipulation tactic on him—which, mind you, he’s done for all ten years of their marriage—and she picks the worst moment ever to then reveal she lied to Grace about informing the PM of their two options for the Poseidon and she now needs Hal to clean up her mess. What angers me is in the past, they have both genuinely made mistakes and said sorry and then made a new plan to fix the issue. This time, Hal just goes off the deep end accusing her of manipulating him, even being a hypocrite by saying that she should’ve left him for lying in their past marriage. I couldn’t believe I watched that grown man throw a tantrum that he got his just desserts at the worst possible moment. It was appalling to see the show take his side and act like his anger was justified when he dragged her through the mud for over a decade, then becomes a cry baby when she does it to him. It’s so disappointing to see them make him do a 180 because of their own constant indecision about this marriage and due to the Moonlighting Curse (for you yoots, that’s the show Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd used to be on together where the only draw of the show was waiting to see if they fucked and when they finally did, everyone stopped watching the show, so it came to be called The Moonlighting Curse for decades). Kate and Hal have always been toxic, but the show used to balance their arguing with very sweet, sentimental scenes. Kate’s assessment is correct—the two of them are very high highs and very low lows, but the show never stooped this low before and it shows. There is no reason the show won’t commit to whether or not it wants these two egotistical, self-righteous shit-heels together or not and everyone’s tired of the ping pong nature of it. I’m walking out, but I still say pick a fucking lane and fucking stay there. Either you want them to be endgame or you don’t. Everyone’s tired of you never choosing a side. I also think people are tired of seeing how toxic they behave, yet never get punished for it and often get other people like Eidra in trouble with their actions. In the first two seasons, I’d see Hal and Kate making risky decisions, but it was easy to see the result was beneficial. By now, no way. This show is now about the ego of the two of them and who gets to be more “right” about whatever they’re doing with the president. It’s also not good enough for them? They also have to always prove they were right. It stopped being about patriotism by the end of the third season, and that’s a shame.
5. Kate and Eidra both are now basically just men with tits, and I’m sick and tired of it. We actually had a panel about this very same subject at the most recent Multiverse Con, and I wanted to be on that panel because I would’ve used Kate and Eidra as my examples. At first, no, Kate was not just a male-coded character with a female visage. Kate was a tomboy who hated procedure, but played nice to get the job done and protect the American people. I will argue that Eidra has been a dude with tits this entire show, but I personally felt the actress elevated the part anyway with her comedic timing and the brief vulnerable moments Eidra has during the show. By now, I can safely say they are both victims of being male-coded “female” characters because they behave the same way an arrogant white man would, but the words are just coming out of a woman’s mouth instead. The reason why is Hal and Stuart both are serving the “stereotypical female” role in both romances: they are the only ones willing to sit down and have the hard conversation about fixing the relationship and being emotionally open with their partner. Kate and Eidra both dismiss their partners’ feelings constantly, then get offended when they aren’t transparent with them or get impatient that their feelings are hurt. Both of them act like the man being upset is an inconvenience and constantly expect to be forgiven and the issue forgotten for the sake of convenience so they do not have work on themselves or change. Do you know what that is, kiddos? That’s the groundwork for emotional abuse. To never repair anything and just keep asking for chances is the sign of a bad fucking relationship, and a very toxic one. Female characters, like all characters, require nuance, and both of them have stopped having it at all. They just demand their men meet their needs without them moving barely an inch and it’s “my way or the highway.” That’s incredibly selfish and unhealthy, and the fact that people this smart refuse to go to therapy just makes them seem even worse. Look at how harsh they are with one another and how they seldom apologize. The fact that the show normalizes it is frankly kind of gross. I would never want to be around people who are this harsh to one another without ever apologizing and changing their behavior, but I’ll explain more below.
6. The continued Captain Obvious decisions where they think the solution to a problem is something that has a 100% fail rate, yet the show behaves as if it’s a good choice or the only right choice. This reason is slightly nitpicky, but it opens into a larger problem. After the excellent second season, it drives me nuts that it took them the entire third and fourth seasons to come up with the plan where they pretend the British Navy would collect the bodies from the Poseidon instead and hand them off to Russia, meaning Russia would never even see the sub and know the nuke was confiscated by the US. It pisses me off that they did not decide to sink and seal up the Poseidon in the 3^rd season the second they found it there using the British Navy. It feels very much like someone in the writers’ room didn’t figure out the solution to the problem until the last possible second, so that’s why it isn’t even said until the end of the season when now, the problem has escalated. The same thing happens again here. They have a subplot where they accidentally send a budget that is too small to sink the sub that the Brits don’t know does not contain the actual nuke that the US stole. Kate just needs to up the budget and Grace is aware they are hiding the truth, yet she refuses the budget increase and lets the entire negotiation breakdown, exposing herself in the process. What??? You are the fucking president and this is how you cover up a career-ending cover up. Why would you refuse the easier, more discreet fucking solution and pick one that puts ten times more attention on what you’ve done? Oh, I know! Lazy writing! I should not feel smarter than characters who I know are smarter and more experienced than me, and the show is either dumbing it down for the masses to try and get wider numbers (a fool’s errand for a show like this one) or they just ran out of Think Juice ™ and dragged the issue out to fit the episode order when it should’ve been introduced and considered way earlier than it is. Both season 3 and 4 have constant manufactured conflict and forced bullshit to spin wheels and waste time to get to the episode order length, and this frustrating element of the show is not going away. Grace should be taking every quiet solution that she and Hal created by stealing the sub for no goddamn reason when sinking it or getting the British to bring the bodies off is a better choice that preserves what she needs. However, since it’s likely they are setting the show up to be one with a “topple the corrupt leader in charge” plotline for its new story, then that’s why she just dug her heels in even though it does the opposite of what she wants.
7. As someone who is neurospicy, this show’s portrayal of emotional abuse now feels toxic as fuck and I don’t want to stand by it any longer. I’m fully aware that I’m an empath who has to maintain her own emotions, but this show’s now endorsing toxic behavior and refusing to acknowledge the existence of therapy that every single character on this show badly needs. I’m not okay with it. The show used to shine a lens on Kate and Hal and made it clear they are toxic, but they do actually love and support each other as well as their team, and they have the world’s safety in mind even as they do scummy things. By now, no. This is now two emotionally abusive people who need to “prove” to Grace and Todd that they are right and the two of them and everyone else is wrong. I didn’t sign up for that shit. I didn’t sign up to watch two abusive narcissists stomp around demanding that everyone obey them instead of the leader of the free world. It’d be fine if the show was trying to point out that it should never reach this point, but in general, the show has this ugly tone that Kate is always right and everyone should worship at her altar instead of admitting she’s a self-righteous Ambassador Karen who has to be right all the time, can’t apologize, can’t appreciate the sacrifices others make, and is ultimately a selfish human being who wants to stay in power as she thinks she has all the answers. Kate didn’t start out that way, but she’s now there. You don’t get to lie to the president and insist you know better; that’s an act of treason even with her compromised. I do not mean Kate should have followed the blind orders of a corrupt president; she lied and then tried to make Hal save her own skin after she made the decision without consulting him first. Kate knew that Hal would have no choice but to help since her lie put him on the chopping block too. The show then continues behaving as if she is in the right and she’s fucking not, because none of these terrible people but for Eidra and Stuart are anywhere close to being in the right on the issue. I cannot stand by a show that lets these people stomp around making demands, refusing to apologize, refusing to admit they made mistakes, and avoid changing their behavior to treat everyone around them fairly. I know politics is a place for vicious behavior, but the show is condoning their very not okay behavior and pretending like therapy is not sitting right there to help these assholes stop abusing everyone around them. Kate and Hal can argue all day, but they need a fucking marriage counselor. They say deeply harsh and harmful shit and normalize it, and we live in a country being torn apart thanks to lack of fucking empathy. I no longer want to endorse a show where no one calls these dickheads out for the abuse.

I’m very sad to sunset this show. I found my tribe with Kate for a while, especially since if there’d ever be a man interested in dating me, he’d be a lot like Hal. I hate to say goodbye, but there is no coming back from the cliché storm bullshit in seasons three and four. It went off the Slippery Slope and became a Cautionary Tale instead, so let’s get to the caution part of this post.

How do we stop this shit from happening to another good show like The Diplomat in the future?

1. Stop treating people of color like goddamn fucking stepping stones. Austin and Stuart made this show what it is. Without them, you are spending six to eight hours with ass clowns who wouldn’t know mental health if it sat on their face and shat down their throats. Give them respectful writing and value them as characters to round out your white cast.
2. Put people of color in the goddamn writers’ room so they will call you out on your blind spots and other bullshit you write in a majority white space. Austin’s exit may or may not be due to being a man of color or the actor departing or the criticism of season three, but whatever it is, the show runners should not have shoved him out of a show he helped build so hastily and with zero respect to the people like me who liked him. You wrote him. You owe him an obligation to at least allow him a shred of fucking dignity in his last appearance. Put black people in front of and behind your damn cameras or else you’ll end up write frustrating bullshit that angers the black fandom. It is so hard for us to get a win anywhere in any genre, so don’t help adding bad examples. Do the work. Find the right writers. Respect black writers and black characters.
3. Stop writing “men with tits” characters in general, but definitely in political dramas. Fuck Kate’s entire Karen act in seasons three and four, and fuck the writers’ lack of self-awareness of what an egotistical Karen she is to everyone around her. She is walking White Privilege, and it’s sad that it came to that with such a great character. Hold white women accountable and stop letting them tread on women of color like Eidra as Kate did in previous seasons. Stop writing dismissive women who make the men the “malewife” to their “girlboss” but without being respectful of their feelings, patience, and their relationship in general. No one should be doing all the work in a relationship. You split the work, you say you’re sorry when you mess up, you cop to it when you make mistakes, and you change your harmful behavior or you leave the person so you don’t hurt them. I am so sick of how awful these people behave, yet expect endless patience and trust from everyone around them without giving any in return. It feels very narcissistic in the end and I’m doubtful that was their intention.
4. If you do not have the plot and story for multiple seasons, quit while you’re ahead. I’ve seen several reviewers state the show should’ve ended at the end of season two and I would like to take on part of the argument. I think what would have saved the show is the third season is about Hal as VP, but Grace’s shooting happens at the end of the season and she dies instead of recovering. Hal is now president of the United States, and Todd is now a widower, struggling to accept his wife’s murder and trying to preserve her agenda and avenge her as a last act of devotion from a grieving husband, stepping out of the sad sack routine to become a secondary antagonist who means well, but doesn’t see he’s being harmful due to being blinded by grief. I think Hal as president would be a good trajectory for them before they ruined everything in that third season and I would’ve had Kate make the final choice between him and Austin, then have her choose Hal and let Austin sunset if the actor wanted to leave with Kate becoming First Lady and no longer the Diplomat/Ambassador. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but that, to me, is smoother sailing and less problematic. I do not think they planned this show past season two, even if they say otherwise. It feels very much like the first two seasons were The Matrix, and seasons 3 and 4 were Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions (to be fair, I don’t hate these sequels the way most people do, but I do admit they are inferior and bogged down with too much bad writing) and that’s why I’m hopping off the sinking ship. I hate showing up to a show that feels like it was not planned for longevity. They should have stopped while they were ahead and gone out on top. But money, dear boy. Always the money…

I am sorry to say goodbye to yet another show that I used to love, but life is disappointing and I have to accept it. Onward and upward. I wish it hadn’t come to this, but here we are. I hope someone learns a lesson, and hell, if the Diplomat intern I referenced before has actually read the entire post—for the love of God, for the good of the people who won’t quit this show, listen to the concerns raised here even if they insist the fandom all hated Austin and Stuart and everything else is now fixed with them yeeted. That is my final wish for anyone who wants to keep watching. Do it for them.

I have the honor to be your obedient servant,

K. dot M