‘The Diplomat’: Read Season 3 Script “Amagansett”

Editor’s note: Deadline’s It Starts on the Page (Drama) features standout drama series scripts in 2026 Emmy contention.

With Netflix‘s The Diplomat, creator and showrunner Debora Cahn is scratching an itch she’s had for most of her career, to pull back the layers of the Foreign Service to understand the people who dedicate their lives to global diplomacy. But, she’s also unexpectedly found herself meditating on something else: marriage.

Over the course of three seasons, viewers have come to know Kate (Keri Russell) and Hal (Rufus Sewell) Wyler as a zany, passionate, whip-smart and occasionally toxic couple whose entire romantic history is wrapped up in their high-stakes careers. They did meet on the job, after all. In Season 3, Kate and Hal are put even further at odds when newly sworn-in President Grace Penn (Allison Janney) asks Hal, rather than Kate, to serve as her vice president.

Episode 6, titled “Amagansett,” written by Cahn and Peter Ackerman, is somewhat of a character study — or, a marriage study — set at President Penn and First Gentleman Todd Penn’s (Bradley Whitford) estate on Long Island, New York. President Penn has called an emergency meeting to get ahead of the story that is bound to break about the United States’ involvement in the attack on the HMS Courageous and, amid the strategizing, is still trying to make a good impression on her house guests. That is, until “a drop of blood on an oyster shatters whatever veneer of civility Grace and Todd hoped to wear for their guests,” Cahn writes in her forward to the “Amagansett” script.

By the end of the episode, both couples are on the outs and the diplomacy between the UK and the U.S. has been, well, pretty much blown up when Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) throws his overseas allies under the bus for the aircraft carrier attack in the Persian Gulf.

Below is the script for “Amagansett” with an introduction from Cahn that explains how, with The Diplomat Season 3, she had untangled enough of “the Gordian knot that is foreign policy” to find that her North Star was the interpersonal, sometimes romantic and often tumultuous relationships at the center of the story.

The Diplomat turned into more of a meditation on marriage than I’d anticipated. Kate and Hal are the spine of the show. It’s obvious now, but it took me a tragically long time to figure it out. There was the workplace ensemble, the U.S.-UK culture clash, the upstairs-downstairs thing, and of course the Gordian knot that is foreign policy (she writes, after googling Gordian knot). It all seemed fertile. I didn’t know which popcorn kernels would pop.

It was the marriage. We learned that in the editing room in Season One. Episode after episode, when we were away from Kate and Hal for too long, we lost focus. Other things mattered, but the marriage was magnetic north.

This episode, written with the great Peter Ackerman, was designed to be a look at Kate and Hal’s marriage beside another. Grace and Todd. Compare, contrast. The oyster scene was our chance to put the four of them alone in a room and leave them there for a while. And, to state the obvious, putting Keri Russell, Rufus Sewell, Allison Janney, and Bradley Whitford in a room for a while was the opportunity of a lifetime. We talked about Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf a lot; director Liza Johnson brilliantly ran with it.

The series feels most distinct to me in moments of collision between language and the human body. Diplomacy, the careful crafting of communication. The power of its clarity or ambiguity. And then bodies, terribly short on ambiguity. They speak when they want to. They leak.

The collision felt sharp here. A president invites staff to work at her beach compound. Kennebunkport was on our minds. Pictures of JFK’s cabinet, trudging through sand in freshly shined shoes. Make yourself at home! Have a swim!

A drop of blood on an oyster shatters whatever veneer of civility Grace and Todd hoped to wear for their guests. It feels like such a relief, after seasons of worrying about Kate and Hal. Grace and Todd make Kate and Hal’s marriage look positively robust. But then night comes. Both couples have fought. One slams a door. The other spoons. Does that mean it will last?

I have no idea. I’ve only been married for 20 years. We’re just getting started.

Read the script below.