Get the latest gossip

The Diplomat Season-Premiere Recap: Expect the Unexpected


The shockwaves from last season’s finale keep Kate and her team from closing in on Prime Minister Trowbridge in a frantic premiere.

Unfortunately, the car bomb exploding in central London, right in front of Hal, British MP Merritt Grove (Simon Chandler), and Stuart and his own deputy, Ronnie Buckhurst (Jess Chanliau), is now the focus of their considerable energy and information-gathering apparatus. Kinnear continues to play Trowbridge as a loudmouthed, reactive Oxbridge-educated walking id — witty and fluent in all the right literary and historical allusions, but petulant and as likely to spin out of control as to offer some worthwhile insight or question — but in his first scene of the new season, in his offices at Number 10 Downing Street, we meet a new character who exerts not-inconsiderable influence over him. It’s called COBRA, each of its three 6-episode seasons focuses on environmental catastrophes and/or service grid hacking, and it stars Robert Carlyle as an eternally beleaguered Tory P.M. swimming with sharks (metaphorical; his cabinet ministers are a mustache-twirling opportunistic lot, but not literal terrors of the sea) in increasingly absurd ways.

Get the Android app

Or read this on VULTURE