Photo: Clifton Prescod/Netflix
Spoilers follow for The Diplomat season-three finale, “Schrodinger’s Wife.”
By its third season, The Diplomat has established a reputation for shocking developments and sudden, dramatic pronouncements. Characters deliver lines like, “The president is asking you to serve as ambassador to the United Kingdom,” or “The president is dead,” or “I killed the president.” This level of stakes is not unusual for a political thriller or even the many shows that live alongside The Diplomat on Netflix.
No, what makes The Diplomat special is that it is the only show on television where one can witness Bradley Whitford prone on a bed nuzzling Allison Janney’s chest and declaring that it is “like a … like a fresh focaccia.”
It’s overwhelming, I know. And it’s worth taking a few moments to break down all the layers nestled within this very important line of dialogue.
First, too many thrillers fail to be funny and odd. It’s not a requirement of the genre, but it is the sort of tonal control that makes those big, dramatic twists land with power. A slog through one dark development after another (ahem, Task) creates the impression of a show that’s important but not necessarily enjoyable or memorable. It’s easy for one scene to slide into the next when they mostly consist of a sad man staring glumly at a woman in a very dark car, hoping she will forgive him for his flaws. No one on Task is rolling around in bed trying to get their lover’s attention to look at a meme they just saw. No one is rubbing their nose over someone else’s bra and comparing the experience to a baked good. If they were, those sad car scenes might hit a little harder! Lines like this leaven the overall experience, much in the way that a small amount of yeast is used to leaven focaccia dough, allowing for its airy, wide-crumbed texture.
Then there’s the nostalgia factor. Season three of The Diplomat reunites Whitford and Janney with showrunner and creator Debora Cahn, who started her career as a writer for The West Wing. The definitive Aaron Sorkin series shaped many TV viewers’ understanding of American politics and liberal ideology, and The Diplomat treats its casting coup with an enormous dollop of respect. When Janney and Whitford, playing the new president of the United States and her husband, appear onscreen together for the first time, the camera lingers on their embrace and Janney’s overwhelmed, relieved expression. Then it pulls back to show how everyone in the room — the viewer included — has stepped back to appreciate their reunion.
Once that’s taken care of, The Diplomat uses their united presence to conjure The West Wing’s hope-core fantasy of liberal political idealism while also laughing at it. When these two were last playacting presidential politics together, they were paragons of earnestness and competence, approaching their roles as White House staffers with a sense that America was a force for good in the world. So much has changed since then, and The Diplomat’s affection for that time comes with a need to poke fun at how far this country has fallen. Here, let’s watch two icons of a bygone era roll around in bed so that one of them can compare the other’s flesh to an Italian bread product.
Mostly, of course, it’s the line itself. What does it mean? Does Allison Janney smell like high-quality olive oil? Is it meant to suggest something about focaccia’s typically dimpled surface, in which case … kinda rude? Is it a textural comparison, perhaps relating to bounciness or plushness? (If so, should he have actually said “ciabatta”? Did it have to be Italian? Could he have gone for a brioche instead?) Or perhaps her skin was sprinkled with rosemary! More than once, characters on The Diplomat refer to how sweaty and unappealing their clothes get after periods of stress, so possibly Allison Janney’s President Grace Penn was trying some unconventional anti-perspirant.
There is no way to know. Like a terrible crisis of international diplomacy that leads to the death of 43 people on a submarine, life sometimes comes with no easy answers. But this is the delight and mystery of The Diplomat, neatly summarized in one brief line that may well only exist because someone realized how fun it would be to make Bradley Whitford say “focaccia.” To be fair, it would be fun to make Whitford say many words — especially ones with chewy consonant plosives or affricates like focaccia’s emphatic “ch.” But the pleasure is less in the word itself than in Whitford’s intonation, which often puts upward pitches and downward slides in places where no one else would think to put them, giving each phrase a strange sense of ambiguity. “Fresh focaccia” could be a joke. It could be sincere. The comment, much like The Diplomat, exists in the perfectly balanced middle space where both are plausible.
Lots of shows have car bombings and kidnappings, and at least a handful have women straining against the tension of their romantic lives and career ambitions while conducting their extramarital flings on the floor. But only one show can pull off a combination of straight-ahead seriousness and a line reading where Bradley Whitford murmurs the phrase “fresh focaccia” while rubbing his face into the chest of his former West Wing co-star Allison Janney, activating an entire nostalgic worldview and puncturing its hot-air self-importance in one swift gesture.
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