Debora Cahn has enviable writing credits through her work on popular shows including West Wing, Grey’s Anatomy, Vinyl, Fosse/Verdon, Paterno and Homeland. She’s been fortunate enough to learn from some of the industry’s best showrunners including Aaron Sorkin, Shonda Rhymes, Terence Winter, Steven Levinson and Howard Gordon to hone her writing craft.
Cahn spoke with Creative Screenwriting Magazine about her latest political thriller called The Diplomat starring Kerri Russell as Kate Wyler as a Foreign Service Officer in a crisis zone and Rufus Sewell as her husband Hal.
“The stories that I like to tell are about people in really important situations being confronted by their own brutal humanity,” Cahn ponders. “Going behind the curtain of what we think of as people in positions of power, and zooming in on the pieces of them that are like all of the rest of us. No matter how meaningful or high stakes the work that they’re doing, it is tragically affected by whether or not they’ve had enough milk in their cereal in the morning,” she jokes.
The Diplomat covers familiar story turf of a career diplomat thrust into a position she’s not ready for during a global security crisis. The resulting high-tensile diplomatic tension of a world in distress is paralleled by Kate and Hal’s marital distress. Kate and Hal still love each other despite their marriage being on the brink of collapse. “I think the thing that gives it a new take is the focus on what it means to be in love with somebody who does what you do professionally. And what that does to a relationship. I think it takes the dynamics that exist in all long-term relationships… who matters when, how do you support each other, and how do you both have your own lives and also a life together,” elaborates Cahn.
It’s a foray into a married couple who live and work together. “There’s no time off from the relationship. The work that you do, the choices that you make professionally, are things that you always want to run by your favorite collaborator/ competitor, who also happens to be your spouse,” she quips.
The two through lines in the series move as a unified dramatic unit rather than a traditional A and B story. “Once you put both Kate and Hal in the same professional field, and once you accept the fact that neither one of them will ever talk to anybody who they trust as much, or think is as smart as the other one, then those storylines become the same.”
The Diplomat is Kate’s story as she navigates the world of political theater to prevent a global catastrophe. On one hand, she has this secret plan of handling the situation, and on the other, she’s deciding what her goals should be in a new job at a new place. Cahn confesses, “It wasn’t obvious at the get-go which one of those stories was leading and which one was following. It took a while through the development of the show to really figure it out.”
“It became clear that Kate’s story was dominant from the totality of her experience and what she was going through in the embassy all day long… then compounding that with the battles she has with Hal. Those two things together gave the show the character and the tone that we were looking for, which is a woman whose life is just exploding all the time.”
The dynamics of our daily lives are overwhelming
Kate and Hal aren’t always in a state of marital conflict. They share numerous tender comedic moments to give The Diplomat a few rom-com flourishes and belly laughs to offset the gravity of global security. Debora Cahn has no issue with the twin-track, sometimes oppositional, tonality of the show. “My experience of the world always looks like that. For me, every very serious situation is always laced with utter absurdity. And I don’t know if it’s just that I tend to zero in on those things, or if those things are there for everybody and we all just do our best to pretend they’re not happening,”
The West Wing & Homeland – Working With Aaron Sorkin
Although Debora Cahn cut her television writing teeth on Grey’s Anatomy, it was The West Wing and Homeland that helped her conceive The Diplomat. “Writing on the West Wing was an incredible gift. Aaron had such an incredible ability to take important and complicated material and turn it into something that was accessible, relatable, and magical. He had the ability to kind of figure out where you sprinkle fairy dust on a story and suddenly elevate it.” (Read our interview with Aaron Sorkin HERE).
Writing concisely was a skill Sorking taught Cahn and she has used ever since. “After The West Wing ended, it was very clear to me that I wanted to do something about, not just what America was like in America, but what America was like in the world. And then it was a period of fifteen years of trying to figure out a way to do that.”
“And ten years into that, I was very fortunate to get hired on Homeland, which is a show that managed to do exactly that; to take the incidentally complex world of American foreign policy and turn it into something that’s dramatic, personal, emotional, and entertaining.” Homeland was a relentlessly intense show to watch. “People would take time off to recover from a season of Homeland. That is the kind of intensity that Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon were looking to create with that show and were very successful in doing so.”
“For The Diplomat, I felt like I wanted to take that kind of material and put it in a venue that was a little bit more forgiving and brought in a little bit of eye candy, levity, silliness and relatability that would make it an easy place to go.”
Debora Cahn is mindful of the dangers of over-simplifying geopolitical conflict to the point of reductiveness. “There’s no such thing as a conflict that has two sides. Every conflict has 148 sides at least. So, to be able to set a story in a world like that can honestly depict a little bit of the complexity of getting along with another country and be able to put it in a place where people want to hang out.”
Debora Cahn
Cahn is a self-confessed fan girl of the Foreign Service. “I’m interested in the people who attempt to represent this very flawed country in the world and attempt to be the better side of it in circumstances that are not always conducive to doing that.” There is no perfect way to depict these stories let alone easily identify the heroes from the villains.
The writer immersed herself in deep research so she could faithfully depict the world of Foreign Service Diplomacy in her work. She’s acutely aware that having such a rich interest in this world can lead to over-investing in research. “At a certain point you need to just pull back and see what’s going on in the relationship.” Debora kept returning to Kate’s story whenever she felt adrift because “her storyline became so magnetic that everything aligned around that.”
The Diplomat was initially conceived as an ensemble show, but it eventually became clear that Kate Wyler was the North Star. The writers cut any scenes that didn’t fully serve the narrative or the emotional state the characters needed to be in.
Inside The Writers’ Room
There are many moving parts to breaking episodes on The Diplomat, ranging from conceiving blue sky story ideas, to the tone and pacing of the show. “I don’t do a ton of character work,” confesses Cahn. “I feel the characters are people who are in that scene and in that situation, and they’ll merge when that information is slapped on top of a live human actor who’s gonna turn it into something. I knew that I wanted to create a situation where Kate was going to go to this place where she was uncomfortable. I knew that I wanted her husband to be there as her ultimate supporter and greatest impediment.”
Debora began the process by speaking to as many field people in Foreign Service about their nightmare scenarios. “One of them was a very accomplished British journalist who said a big fear in the UK is that the US is going to do something and the UK is going to get punished for it because it’s easier to hit them than it is to hit us.”
Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) & Hal Wyler (Rufus Sewell) Photo by Alex Bailey/ Netflix
“Once we knew that this dynamic needed to exist, we built a geopolitical reality around it. It was a puzzle that seemed interesting, engaging and true to the complexity of the world, but simple enough to follow in a plot.” For example, the writers set up a very familiar scenario where a Muslim was blamed for a bombing, but quickly make it clear that this wasn’t the case. The media would manipulate it knowing the world would fall for it.
“It’s about how do you get through a day in that life. There’s a toggling back and forth between what would happen and what are the needs of the characters. Everything is about the minutiae and I like finding interesting dynamics that can play out over very small, seemingly insignificant conflicts.” Cahn used this template on the overall plot structure as she tries to get through her day with so many elements outside her control.
Outlining an eight episode TV series requires a seminal pilot episode to set up the show and a definitive finale to conclude it. But where is the mid-point? “I don’t think there is a middle. I think you’ve gotta have a bunch of middles. You’ve gotta be able to keep the story twisting and turning enough that people want to watch eight hours of it,” Cahn quips.
Debora Cahn was raised in the world of broadcast television which routinely required twenty-four episodes per season. “That was much more about finding stories that could exist within the world.”
“This eight hour limited series is much more of a single storyline and keeping it alive and turning without relaxing back into the sort of the story that would occur in a twenty four episode series.”
We asked Debora Cahn if there are any memorable lines of dialogue that define The Diplomat. “One of them is, ‘Perhaps you’re just a decent person in a time when decency has lost its hold on the public imagination.’ There’s also a moment when Kate says to Hal, ‘You’re killing me’ and he says, ‘I’m trying. It’s not working.'”
In conclusion, Debora Cahn offers some insights for prospective political thriller TV writers. “Talk to a lot of people who really do it. Get as much specific detail as you can that’s unique to that universe. And then forget it all and use it mostly to bring texture to a dramatic storyline.” That was some of the most impactful advice Aaron Sorkin gave Debora Cahn.
