Everything We Know About ‘The Diplomat’ Season 2 On Netflix

If there’s one piece of advice I would give to every new show on Netflix, it’s don’t end your first season on a cliffhanger. You may think you’re forcing Netflix’s hand to bring you back, but 80% of the time they will just kill your show and leave your story feeling wholly incomplete. But The Diplomat? It decided to end things on the cliffhangers of all cliffhangers, essentially begging for a season 2. Only in this case, it does seem likely to get one. Spoilers ahead.

The Diplomat ends on about the biggest type of cliffhanger you could imagine. A Tory MP who was supposed to meet with Hal is blown up in a car bomb with Ronnie, Stuart and Hal all nearby. Kate is informed of the situation and we are left not knowing who out of those three characters actually died. My money is on Ronnie, who was closest, and the more major characters of Stuart and Hal will survive, albeit likely with some injuries. I don’t think the show could afford to lose either of them this soon. We also just learned that the party responsible for the attack against the British warship, a plan to frame Iran using Russian mercenaries, was likely carried out by the British PM himself. Sheesh.

So yes, The Diplomat needs a season 2 or it will be one of the most unfinished of Netflix’s unfinished series. Unlike many other shows, however, The Diplomat has been planted at #1 on Netflix’s top 10 list since release, it’s scoring well among critics and audiences, and even before seeing how many millions of viewing hours it has, I am confident it will get a season 2.

But no, nothing official about a season 2 has been announced by Netflix yet. The Night Agent did such blockbuster numbers it was renewed almost immediately. That may happen with The Diplomat, but the more likely situation is they wait to see how it does over the course of the whole month, as even popular shows may wait 5-6 weeks before announcing a season 2.

We do have at least some commentary from The Diplomat showrunner on a potential season 2, as said on THR’s TV Top 5 podcast:

“I certainly like long-form stories I like being able to write about minutiae and the little odd moments of people’s lives and their worlds. So I like long-form storytelling. I certainly hope it continues. And I have a lot of ideas about where it would go. But we’ll see. We shall see what happens.”

She also talks about whether the show would stay in London or go elsewhere. The idea does seem to be to stay in London for a long while, albeit she’s also open to moving to a new country:

“I was raised in, you know, broadcast network television, I worked in that medium for about ten years, and on shows that ran for hundreds of episodes. So, I look for a world that I feel can be populated endlessly with people and characters and, and scenarios and like—this is not a world that’s going to run out of steam anywhere. One of the real gifts of being on Homeland was… I felt they kind of broke new ground in the world of you know, the show is based on these two leads. Then, you know, one of them isn’t there. And the other one still is. And it turns out this third person was the lead the whole time… and we’re going to this country, and then we’re going to that country. I mean, they shot all over the world every season. They completely rebuilt the show on a new continent. So I don’t know that we would ever run out of stories in London. But if we did, there are other countries. I’m okay going to Paris for a couple of years. I’ll be alright with that.”

Homeland, the last major show she worked extensively on, ran for eight seasons. The longest-running shows ever on Netflix are about eight seasons, and even the most successful ones run for maybe 4-5 seasons before stopping. But as ever, even getting just a second season is quite a lot of hoop-jumping in the current climate. But I do have faith The Diplomat will get its chance to resolve its huge slew of cliffhangers.

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