The Diplomat 1.01: The Cinderella Thing (with Debora Cahn)

The West Wing Weekly

In this episode, The West Wing Weekly hosts sit down with The Diplomat creator Debora Cahn to explore the origin story and development of the series' pilot. Cahn discusses how her personal family history and extensive research with career diplomats shaped

Key takeaways

Cahn drew direct inspiration from her immigrant parents' WWII survival stories and a desire to explore the moral complexities of American foreign policy decisions.
The pilot's opening aircraft carrier explosion was added late in development after Netflix requested a stronger hook, significantly impacting the episode's budget but raising narrative stakes.

Main topics

Origin story of The Diplomat
Character dynamics between Kate and Hal Wyler

Notable quotes

"The phrase, what's next, never appears in The Diplomat."

Conclusion

Cahn's candid breakdown of The Diplomat's creation offers valuable insight into modern television development,

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:03) The phrase, what's next, Speaker 2 (0:05) never appears in The Diplomat. Speaker 1 (0:07) There was a lot of hand-wringing about how much West Wing stuff would be in the show. Aaron taught me how to write. He gave me my first job. Obviously, the show is completely inspired by the West Wing with a little... half a cup of Homeland in there as well and like mixed. But I didn't want Aaron to feel like I was just like coming in and like stealing every scrap of his brilliant creation and like duct taping it back together. So things like What's Next don't appear in the show. People say, what else? It's not as catchy, but at least Speaker 4 (0:48) it's ours. And here we go. You're listening to the West Wing Weekly in our new project. We're covering The Diplomat. I'm Rishi K. Sherway. I'm Joshua Molina. And we're joined today by a very special guest, friend of the podcast, creator of The Diplomat, Debra Kahn. Hi. Speaker 3 (1:07) Creator, executive producer, writer, showrunner, quadruple threat. Speaker 4 (1:12) And we're here today to talk about the very first episode, the very first season of The Diplomat. It's called The Cinderella Thing. Speaker 3 (1:20) It first dropped on Netflix on April 20th, 2023. A mere three years ago, but what a different world from today. Speaker 4 (1:27) Before we even get into the show, though, I'd love to ask you, Deborah, to tell us about the origin story of the concept for this show. At what point did the idea for The Diplomat first come to you? Speaker 1 (1:40) Sitting in my office at the West Wing, 20-something years ago, the show was coming to a close, Speaker 1 (1:50) I knew that it had been this extraordinary thing, and I wanted to try and do something like that again. And I wanted to do it with a focus on foreign policy and the way that our country interacts with other countries. Why Speaker 4 (2:07) foreign policy? Speaker 1 (2:08) Both of my parents were immigrants. My dad was from Germany. He and his parents came to New York just before. World War II, and my mother and her parents came just after. She was nine when they came here, and so she spent much of her childhood in war-torn Poland. And the stories of where they hid and how they hid and the many, many, many near-misses and scrapes where they barely got out with their lives was kind of the soundtrack of my childhood. And the vision that existed of America in those stories... Like, my mother remembers being a child and American soldiers coming in and liberating the displaced persons camp that she was in. Speaker 2 (3:02) Like, Speaker 1 (3:03) with chewing gum and candy. You know, like, it is the stereotypical American heroes... come in and save a frightened child. Like, that's the America that I was raised on. And at some point when I was in college and I was, like, spreading my wings a little bit as a person of the world with an understanding of politics, I made some sort of joke in front of my grandfather about burning the American flag. And he looked at me and he said, you don't ever disrespect this country. this is the greatest country in the world. And that was the deal within the family. However, the country, greatest country in the world, was also invading Iraq. It was a little bit complicated because the mythology and the current image and place in the world didn't quite mesh. And I remember being on the West Wing and thinking, well, a lot of the people who come in and talk to the writers of the West Wing, a lot of the consultants, they're like, you know, staunch Democrats out of the Clinton administration. They share my values and they're the good guys fighting the good fight. Well, the West Wing also brought in a lot of Republicans. And every single one of them, I was like, oh, it's the good guy Republican. This one is the good guy Republican because he's smart and he's kind and he has good values and he seems like he loves children. It must be the other Republicans that are so problematic. And at a certain point, I realized that I didn't understand the other point of view enough to really have a sense of why. decisions, why political decisions were being made, and particularly geopolitical decisions. And my desire to kind of fuse the image of like the good guy Americans from the not good guy Americans, the tension between those two things is what created the desire to write a show about foreign policy. How do we make decisions? with regard to other countries? And what is it like to be one of the people who actually goes out there and sits around the table and figures out how to stop a war? Speaker 3 (5:27) And how does the journey go from that inspiration two decades ago to finally making it happen? Speaker 1 (5:33) Well, John Wells, executive producer of The West Wing, offered me a pilot deal when The West Wing was over, which was lovely of him. I said I'd like to write about an embassy. We took that to... I don't know if it was Warner Brothers or NBC, and they were like, no, no, no, no. There had been one embassy show on the air for a couple of episodes, and it was about this adorable young blonde woman who was saving tourists, and it had belly flopped, and they were not interested in trying again. So that was clearly something that wasn't going to work. So then I wrote a pilot about relief workers working in a refugee camp, which... people said very nice things about, but God knows nobody ever wanted to make it. So then a few years later, wound up on Homeland and felt like kind of that, that was it. That's what I was talking about. Like, that's an incredible drama playing out in the world of foreign policy. Like they figured out how to crack the nut and make a show that even an American audience wants to watch about the rest of the world, which there was an assumption, you know. X decades ago that Americans didn't want to watch anything that wasn't about America. So that was fantastic. I came into that show in season seven. I was there for the last two seasons, seven and eight. And, you know, I would tell people that I was going to write on Homeland and I was really excited and everybody was like, oh my God, it's such an amazing show. And then they would say, I had to take a break at a certain point. Speaker 4 (7:09) It's a very stressful show. Speaker 1 (7:11) So I remember filing that away and bringing it with me into the writing process. And there was a morning, like 5 a.m., in a burnt-out building outside Casablanca that was our Homeland set, as many Homeland sets were, burnt-out buildings. And I was watching this scene that I had written between, you know, Manny Patinkin and Claire Danes were doing this great Carrie Saul scene. And I remember watching it thinking, there's nothing happening in this scene that couldn't happen on the set of The Crown. And if it was on the set of The Crown, it would have a larger viewership. Speaker 3 (7:53) And Speaker 1 (7:53) if it had a slightly lighter, more kind of sense of the absurd swirled in, it would also have... an audience that is not coming to Homeland right now. And Homeland did this thing every year, which they called Spy Camp, which was a research week for the writers and directors, and Claire and Mandy would come. We would be in Washington, D.C. for a week in this old townhouse that apparently was like an old spy hangout. They would bring in experts from the intelligence field, from journalism, you know, policy people, military people. And we would hear all about, like, what were the, like, most exciting, most horrible, most terrible, most insane days on the job for them. So one of the people who came in in one of those conversations was this woman named Ambassador Beth Jones. She had been... career foreign service officer. She had served in Pakistan. She had served in Jordan. She had served all over the place. She came in and she talked about her first day on the job when she was in Pakistan. And, you know, she and the ambassador got on a plane and flew to see somebody or other. They got a ride because they were going with the president. And so they're on a plane with the president and they go to a meeting and it's really exciting. And then They're going to fly back and there's no room for Beth on the plane because somebody else has to get on the plane. So she has to get shoved in the back of a car somewhere and the plane takes off with the ambassador and the president on board and explodes. So then Beth is in charge. Like, this is day one for her. So three minutes into her talk to the Homeland Writers, I wrote in my notebook, she is a show. And then when Homeland finished, I called her up and I said, I don't have any idea what you do, but I would love to talk more about it. And I would love to talk to some other people. And she was like, happy to talk, happy to talk anytime. And then she sent me an email the next day with the contact information for 40 other ambassadors. Speaker 4 (10:10) Wow. First of all, I wonder if your embassy pilot would have been better if instead of taking it to NBC, you took it to NBC. Speaker 3 (10:19) You still got it. When you learned about the diplomatic world, is there a macro, like greater general thing that you learned about how it operates that surprised you? Speaker 1 (10:28) It's much more kind of like retail politics than one would think. You know, like everybody has a story about. There was an intractable conflict and the two sides were at war and then they sat down and they had dinner and they talked about their grandchildren and they talked about their grandparents and they talked about this and that and they laughed together and then the next day there was an agreement. Every time it happens, it's shocking that it happens because it's preceded by months or years or decades of failure to communicate. But eventually it does happen. And I think the people who are really good at this have been through it enough to know that eventually that happens. Like, you try and you try and you try, and at a certain point, it just cracks open. So the personality and individual experience and kind of, like, dogged, relentless attack. on intractable problems, I think, is what struck me most. And particularly, you know, when you're in the middle of a war zone, the ambassador is often somebody from the Foreign Service who's been in the Foreign Service for 20 years and nobody's ever heard of them. And they're the boots on the ground. So all sorts of things are being decided that are very, very high level. by that person who just happens to be the one who's there. And talking to Beth, who looks like a lovely, kindly librarian, and a number of her colleagues who all kind of did, the first generation of women who did this have a kind of a look. And they are unassuming. They are not big Howell-Weiler personalities. They are... doers. They are people who just solve things that are so fucking complicated you can't see through them and aren't boasting about it, you know? So you sit down with somebody and they're like, oh, well, yes, I mean... There were some heart-pumping days. There was the time when we had the truck with the highly enriched uranium, and there was ice on the road, and so it flipped over a couple of times. And we had asked them to shut down the internet while we were moving it, so we sort of wondered if we were going to be able to flip it over in time. I mean, you're just sitting there like, what? You. Don't exist. In the middle of nowhere with nothing. Speaker 1 (13:05) I think that's what really made it feel like, how could this not be a show? Speaker 4 (13:10) When you started to put pen to paper, did you begin with the character first? Or did you have an idea for a plot first? What was your starting place? Speaker 1 (13:19) The thing that I took from kind of being raised in network television is the idea that you're building a world that you just want to live in for a while. It's not as true now. We do eight episodes a year, not 25 episodes a year. But I was looking for an environment that would have a lot of stories. Because in my experience, it's very hard to stick to a specific story. Because as soon as you get the plot up and running, well, that you thought it was going to lead over here and it doesn't. It leads over here. So are you going to like... change the beginning so it gets where you were going? Or are you going to, like, kind of follow the lead of, you know, the boulder you rolled down the hill? You get actors in there, and you've come up with an idea for a character, but pieces of the actor are going to take the character in a different direction. Carrie Russell. You know, she's trained as a dancer. She's really good with physical comedy. It's really easy for her. You know, like, wordplay was something I was really comfortable with, but when it was clear that, like, she fucking knocked that shit out of the park, suddenly, like, there's a lot more physical comedy in the show. It's something that we know that we can lean into. The way that she... and Rufus work together, that's an arena they're both comfortable with. And so, kind of like the absurdly physical nature of a marriage, like the weirdness of how are your bodies dealing with each other, not just like your hearts and your minds, all of that became kind of much more of a focus, because they were good at it, and so it worked. And was Speaker 3 (15:05) there any... finding out what they would be like together before you committed to him? Or are these people who get offers to do things and then you hope it works? Or do you do chemistry read? Speaker 1 (15:15) No, no chemistry read. With people like Carrie and Rufus, like, they're interviewing you. Speaker 3 (15:21) You Speaker 1 (15:21) know? Speaker 3 (15:21) You're pitching them the show, yeah. Speaker 1 (15:24) Yeah, and you're pitching them, like, come work with me either for one or six years, you know? Speaker 3 (15:30) But as you're saying, you really never know what, even though they're both... clearly, objectively great actors. You don't know what the chemistry is like until they get in the room and start saying your words. Speaker 1 (15:40) You have no idea. Speaker 3 (15:40) By the way, I love the show, and I love that it's got its own original, fresh tone. But I can see, like, some genetic material from the three, or three of the major things that you worked on, the West Wing, obviously, and people doing their jobs and doing their jobs well and all sorts of stuff and politics and policy, and then the geopolitical thriller of Homeland. And then...