‘The Diplomat’ Season 4 Officially Fixes the Thriller Masterpiece’s 3-Year Character Problem

Warning! Spoilers ahead for The Diplomat Season 4!With a new season dropping on Netflix every year since its 2023 premiere, The Diplomat is one of the most consistent shows on streaming right now. That’s in terms of both quality and its production cycle. As such, there’s been very little to complain about. The Keri Russell-led political thriller has gone from strength to strength in most of the ways that matter.

However, there has been one element of the series that, although it was perfectly fine in 2023, has only drawn more and more criticism as the story has progressed. It all comes down to one of the story’s most pivotal characters. Three years later, The Diplomat Season 4 has righted the wrong in a way that feels authentic to the story being told. It also upholds the show’s strong sense of political realism.

How ‘The Diplomat’s New UK Prime Minister Corrects a Common Gripe About the Show

Rory Kinnear’s Nicol Trowbridge was introduced in The Diplomat Season 1 as the UK’s Prime Minister. The actor fit the role perfectly, making Trowbridge a tricky ally for Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) to keep happy while also being the particular brand of unlikable that you couldn’t help but want more of him on-screen. Kinnear’s performance and the character of Trowbridge himself have never presented a narrative issue.

The duration of his tenure on the show quickly started to raise a few eyebrows for other reasons, though. In recent years, the position of UK Prime Minister in the real world has had an unusually high turnover rate. Since 2022, the office has been held by five separate individuals, one of whom lasted just 49 days before resigning.

As such, the idea that Trowbridge would be a fixture across three full seasons of The Diplomat, a show made to feel like it belongs in an alternate version of the present day, came across as somewhat inaccurate. Thankfully, the Season 4 twist that sees Kate blackmail Trowbridge out of office means his uncharacteristic streak as PM is at an end.

At the time of writing, the UK’s current, real-world PM, Andy Burnham, has been in office a little over three months.

Now, Jodie Whittaker’s Bethan Vaughan is the latest through the revolving door of Prime Ministers. While she makes it to the end of Season 4 with her new role intact, The Diplomat has been continually returning to the fact that her tenure is still just in its early days. Not only that, but they’ve been especially challenging and turbulent days indeed. As a result, the impression that Vaughan too may be headed for the door soon feels like a natural extension of the idea that her days in office could also be very limited – just like some of her real-world counterparts.

Trowbridge’s Tenure as PM in ‘The Diplomat’ Probably Wasn’t As Long As It Seemed

Despite lasting three-and-a-half seasons as The Diplomat‘s UK Prime Minister, that’s a stat that overblows just how long Trowbridge was in office. In other words, The Diplomat‘s timeline, other than a few rare flashbacks, is only months long. It’s tricky to track exactly, but at most, the events of the show probably haven’t exceeded a full calendar year.

From Season 2 onward, the show’s premieres have picked up almost immediately after the most recent finale. This has allowed for a fluid sense of progression and time to explore the fallout of the story’s various twists and turns as they occur. This is nothing new, but The Diplomat has a not-unusual quirk in that it also heavily features a fictitious person who holds a position that exists in real life. While that real-life position is undergoing such a spell of inconsistency, its counterpart in the Netflix series gives the illusion of this not being the case. This could be said to stray from the path of political realism.

On the other hand, the show never reveals how long Trowbridge has been in office when he enters the story. If we assume he’s still fairly new to the role in Season 1, then he actually wasn’t Prime Minister for more than a handful of months. However, because The Diplomat‘s storyline has only been delivered in bursts over three real-world years so far due to its release schedule, it has perhaps provided a false impression of 10 Downing Street having an unusually long-standing occupant.