Netflix moved fast on the Keri Russell political thriller, confirming a fifth season barely a fortnight after Season 4 landed with a cliffhanger involving a G7 summit and a felled Russian warship.
Netflix announced the renewal on Thursday, which means The Diplomat got its Season 5 green light just two weeks after Season 4 finished streaming. That's become something of a house style for this show. Season 2 was ordered 11 days after Season 1 premiered, and both Season 3 and Season 4 were locked in before the previous season had even aired. Season 5 is the first time Netflix waited until after a season landed to pull the trigger, and even then it barely waited at all.
The reason isn't hard to find. Season 4 ended on what Deadline described as an explosive note, with Vice President Hal Wyler, played by Rufus Sewell, resigning mid-G7 summit in Italy, and Ambassador Kate Wyler, played by Keri Russell, walking out shortly after. The Hollywood Reporter's account of the finale has Sewell's character facing a room of reporters and getting only as far as "good morning" before the screen cuts to black. That's the kind of ending that doesn't leave much choice but to keep going.
Allison Janney, who plays President Grace Penn, told THR she wants the same answers viewers do. "Is she going to resign? What does she do? What the hell is going to happen if we get to another season?" she said of her own character, who per Variety's account of the season spent Season 4 scheming with Hal to seize Russia's most powerful weapon, a plot line that reportedly pushed the US toward war even as Kate tried to hold her broken marriage and her broken diplomacy together at the same time.
Numbers-wise, the show keeps clearing the bar Netflix set for it. Season 4 opened with 4.8 million views in its first week, according to Deadline, in line with Season 3's debut, and climbed to No. 3 on the platform's global Top 10 by its second week while landing in the Top 10 in 63 countries, per both Variety and THR. Season 1 had pulled in over 173 million viewing hours in its opening month back in 2023, so the franchise has been a reliable Netflix performer from the start.
Creator Debora Cahn isn't treating five seasons as an endpoint. She told THR she grew up in network television, where a single season could run 22 or 25 episodes, so four eight-episode seasons still feels like early days to her. "It doesn't feel to me like we're in season four. It feels like we're in the juicy middle," she said. She was equally non-committal to Deadline about how long her plan for these characters actually runs. "I legitimately don't know, and I don't know if I'll stick with that," she said, adding she'd happily abandon her own roadmap if something better turned up.
Sewell and Russell, for their part, were joking with Deadline about where Season 5 might take them next, floating Fiji and a tiki bar as the next stop for Kate and Hal. Whether the writers take that literally or not, Netflix hasn't released plot details yet. No premiere date either. Given how quickly this show tends to move from renewal to script to screen, don't expect the wait to stretch too long.
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