Welcome to my weekly newsletter. It was a quiet week for premieres and next week is even more quiet so I will take a week off from the newsletter next week and return on November 18! This week, I am looking at Season 2 of The Diplomat and giving some quick thoughts on other shows.
The Diplomat returned for its second season this week. The season is a brisk six episodes. I've gotten to the first three of them. I'm sure many have finished the season but these thoughts are only on the first three episodes. I enjoyed the first season of The Diplomat, particularly the performances of Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell but I found myself not really remembering a lot about it by the time the second season rolled around. So I was glad for the lengthy "previously on" that Netflix gave us. But as it started to come back to me, I felt like the show spent much of the first two episodes sort of resetting the table from its explosive (pardon the pun) finale.
It wasn't until the third season where I felt the show was settling into its plot for the second season. And therein lies the problem with these short seasons. Back when broadcast dramas used to be more serialized, it wouldn't have mattered if they spent an episode or two following up to a finale and getting things clear and reset for a new season. There were still 20 episodes to go! But here we have the third episode finally getting things going and there's only three episodes left. I am not necessarily advocating for serialized dramas to go back to 22 episodes a year because we all know they can run out of stories quickly. But getting back to 10 or 13 for most of these types of dramas would be really nice.
