On Oct. 26, Harvard Kennedy School’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum hosted actor Keri Russell, showrunner Debora Cahn, and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power to discuss the creation of the television show “The Diplomat.” Titled “The Diplomat: On Screen and in the World” and moderated by Shorenstein Center Director Nancy Gibbs, the conversation examined how the Netflix drama portrayed public service, from the strain it puts on personal relationships to the consequences of dissent inside the government.
“The Diplomat” follows Kate Wyler, played by Keri Russell, as she navigates her responsibilities as U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom while dealing with her strained marriage to fellow diplomat Hal Wyler, played by Rufus Sewell.
Beyond acting, Russell served as an executive producer, following earlier television roles in “Felicity” and “The Americans.” Cahn has written and produced for “The West Wing,” “Homeland,” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” alongside “The Diplomat.” Power served as the UN ambassador from 2013 to 2017 and USAID administrator from 2021 to 2025 before returning to Harvard as a professor. She joined Russell and Cahn to discuss the parallels between her experience and the show’s depiction of international negotiations.
The event followed the release of the show’s fourth season on Oct. 20. After showing an opening trailer at the forum, Gibbs asked Cahn why diplomacy, a profession concerned with defusing conflict, had appealed to her as a subject for television.
“When I finished on ‘The West Wing,’ I felt like that show had primarily focused on domestic politics, and I wanted to try to do a little bit of the same for foreign policy,” Cahn said.
Cahn recalled meeting former U.S. foreign service officer Beth Jones during a research session for “Homeland,” whose accounts of dangerous assignments helped inspire the U.S.-focused series. Drawing on “Homeland’s” approach of grounding the drama in the experiences of actual practitioners, the production of “The Diplomat” later consulted former ambassadors and intelligence officials, as well as specialists, including British civil servant Jonathan Powell.
Russell emphasized her excitement about portraying the people whose work supported more visible political leaders. “This show is meant to be a love letter to the foreign service,” she said.
The conversation then shifted to how the show blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction. “You endorsed someone’s description of the show [as] ‘not realistic but authentic,’” Gibbs said. “And so I’m wondering where you see that line and what you will bend for drama and what you wouldn’t.”
Cahn described asking consultants to review outlines and scripts, then deciding which objections to address and which departures from real practice to retain to further the plot. “We try to address those things, and sometimes we don’t, but at least we’ve chosen to break the rule. We are not just blithely losing interest in what actually goes on,” Cahn explained.
Power praised a different kind of accuracy in the show: how decision-makers bring in outside voices to test a plan. “So [as a diplomat] you bring in a team completely cold from the outside to have that reaction and to see whether something will work,” Power explained.
This practice, similar to “red teaming,” is a means of challenging groupthink and the pressures of hierarchy: by introducing a subject to unfamiliar eyes, diplomats have been able to develop innovative solutions, such as adapting Provincial Reconstruction Teams for Iraq and offering modest concessions, including civilian aircraft parts, to support European negotiations with Iran.
The discussion also examined the relationship between Kate’s professional responsibilities and her marriage. Russell brought up “The Human Factor,” a documentary that examined negotiations between Israel and its neighbors through the experiences of American negotiators.
“It always comes down to people, and what their relationships are with each other or how that specific person operates,” Russell said. “And every episode is a version of that. You know, what is someone’s redline? How far can you go? And what Debora has created so brilliantly is you are watching a marriage go through that at the same time as countries,” she explained.
Power extended the comparison to her efforts to maintain a relationship with Russia’s UN ambassador. The UN Security Council can impose sanctions, authorize military action, and establish peacekeeping missions, giving its decisions consequences for conflicts around the world. Any of its five permanent members can veto substantive resolutions, so maintaining diplomatic relationships with adversaries was essential to Power’s ability to negotiate collective action.
“This made my Ukrainian colleagues crazy that I would continue to try to invest in this relationship, but you can’t walk away from a marriage when there are five permanent members of the Security Council, and they all have vetoes,” Power said about her ties with Russian ambassador Vasily Nebenzya.
The discussion of public service took on a more immediate political dimension when Power addressed the dismantling of USAID. The agency stopped operating as an independent aid agency on July 1, 2025, after extensive funding and staffing cuts, and its remaining aid programs moved to the State Department. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had defended the changes as a shift toward more targeted assistance and investment. Power described the speed of the changes as a blow to employees’ belief that they could influence events.
“And the effectiveness of the people with the wrecking ball was that they did it so quickly and it really was shock and awe,” Power said.
Cahn also described the people she interviewed during research trips to Washington as moving away from a desperate mindset; they began taking practical steps to respond to the Trump administration. Her remarks came eight days before the midterm elections, scheduled for Nov. 3. She linked the approaching midterms to renewed optimism among her contacts.
“Everybody was kind of past it [the aid cuts] and onto the solutions of what happens next,” Cahn said.
During the audience questions, a student asked what happened when officials who challenged a president’s decisions were no longer in the room. “One of the reasons governments fail and authoritarian governments often make bad decisions is they don’t have checks and balances; they don’t have dissent,” Power said. The State Department formally established its Dissent Channel in 1971 to bring policy objections to senior officials, providing one institutional mechanism for that kind of challenge.
“But it comes from the top as to whether a leader believes that in the end, they and the country will be better off with more guardrails,” Power added.
When another student asked about the show’s British setting, Cahn acknowledged that its fictional prime minister also provided a vehicle for commentary on American politics.
“The portrayal of… the British prime minister: that is our way to portray Trump without saying we are talking about Trump. Make it about another country,” Cahn said.
A final audience question asked how Harvard students as graduates can change imperfect organizations from within. Russell pointed to Cahn’s leadership on set and argued that professional excellence had to be accompanied by responsibility for the people doing the work.
“And I respect that very much. And it’s vital when you are working within an organization or a group you have to take care of the group if you want the whole to succeed,” Russell said.
Power recalled regular meetings among female senior directors during her time on the National Security Council. “And lo and behold, people who had been in government for 20 years, people who had jobs where they saw the president three times a day were having very similar experiences to mine,” Power said. The meetings became known as “The Wednesday Group.”
“And then our ability to change the organization from within came from the security of knowing we were not alone and the brainstorming that we were able to do about the kinds of changes that could be made to the culture,” Power said.
Gibbs closed by returning to television’s role in making government work visible to audiences who might otherwise see little of it.
“It’s very hard for public service to succeed if people can’t see it,” Gibbs said.
Courtney Hines ’28 (courtneyhines@college.harvard.edu) is the News Editor for the “Harvard Independent.”