Two captivating TV series about strong women facing adversity — Disclaimer and The Diplomat — are among the better dramas now available for streaming. Their respective lead characters and their circumstances are worlds apart, despite both shows being set primarily in the U.K. and continental Europe. Any differences between these career-minded females aside, the expectations that accompany gender, even in our purportedly enlightened times, suggest that they face a common struggle, and the subsequent way both women are perceived by those around them can’t help but influence the actions they take in response.
‘Disclaimer’
Part mystery, part family drama, and part morality play, Disclaimer is a prestige Apple TV+ miniseries that teams the Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón (Roma, Gravity, Children of Men) and the Oscar-honored actress Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine, Carol, Thor: Ragnarok) for a seven-part adaptation of author Renée Knight’s bestseller. The story is an incendiary one, initiated when respected British investigative journalist Catherine Ravenscroft finds out that once-secret events that transpired during an Italian vacation she took two decades ago are fodder for a lurid novel, The Perfect Stranger, anonymously delivered to her, her coworkers, her husband, and her son.
As blowback from the book starts to upend her career and alienate her loved ones, Catherine tries to find out who is responsible for this stealth campaign against her. In the process, she must also deal with the repercussions of concealing the incidents that went down during the holiday in Italy. The person attempting to destroy Catherine believes that her demise would be just, based on what supposedly happened in the past. But a crucial question here is the legitimacy of what’s written in the telltale novel that, if true, would be hard to forgive.
With Cuarón writing and directing every episode, there is a unity of tone to the entire project, which is helpful since it hopscotches from the present to the past, toys with conjecture, and like its source material, addresses the same significant occurrences via flashbacks from different perspectives that may or may not be reliable. One of the more addictive aspects of Disclaimer is unraveling what really happened by comparing and contrasting the account delineated in the text of The Perfect Stranger with the recollections and spur-of-the-moment reactions of principal figures who narrate from their specific points of view.
All of this situational conflict is a gift to the actors. The performances are superb across the board, particularly Blanchett as the tormented Catherine, who is wrestling with the fallout from revelations of ostensible betrayal that put her livelihood and marriage at serious risk, and Kevin Kline as Stephen Brigstocke, an elderly retired teacher on a twisted mission of revenge. For his part, Kline delivers a master class in acting, wherein Brigstocke believably ages over the course of 20 years, hardening from heartbroken parent into geriatric madman. The cast also includes Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat) as Catherine’s put-upon husband Robert; Leslie Manville (The Phantom Thread) as Stephen’s troubled wife, Nancy; Kodi Smit-McPhee as Catherine and Robert’s feckless son, Nicholas; Leila George as the nubile young Catherine; and Louis Partridge as Stephen and Nancy’s freebooting offspring, Jonathan.
It should be noted that Disclaimer includes somewhat explicit and steamy sex scenes that are visualized on screen as crucial aspects of the plot that drives The Perfect Stranger and as the genuine intimate encounters that are said to have inspired the inflammatory novel. In case anyone might find them off-putting, these R-rated moments are integral to the series as it lays bare the issue of perception versus reality and illustrates how belief — no matter how righteous or wrongheaded — can trigger destructive behavior.
Disclaimer is available for streaming on Apple TV+.
The Diplomat
Keri Russell initially caught the public eye when she played a collegiate dream girl as the title character of the TV series Felicity; then she was a veritable chameleon/mistress-of-disguise as a Russian spy stationed in the United States suburbs during the 1980s in The Americans, which ran for six highly praised seasons on the FX channel. Now, Russell has scored another signature role as Kate Wyler, the disheveled yet dedicated United States ambassador to Great Britain in The Diplomat, which recently debuted its second season on Netflix — and it’s a triumph.
The Diplomat succeeds as an espionage thriller with an international geo-political focus by virtue of its timely intrigue.
This is the first ambassadorial posting for Kate, whose marriage to longtime fellow diplomat Hal Wyler (a wry Rufus Sewell) is on the rocks. For the sake of the job and the fact that Kate is being vetted to potentially replace the current vice president (Alison Janney) on the president’s reelection ticket, the Wylers try to keep their marital strife on the down-low. Meanwhile, an international crisis involving a terrorist attack on a British warship brings Kate into the mix as America’s representative on the scene in England. She is immediately thrust into an uneasy alliance with handsome U.K. foreign secretary Austin Dennison (suave David Gyasi), puts her in conflict with ruthless British Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge (the always excellent Rory Kinnear), and compels her to grapple with the questionable allegiances of her embassy deputy Stuart Hayford (Ato Essandoh) and the head of the CIA’s London bureau, Eidra Park (Ali Ahn).
Although Kate’s job demands attendance at glamorous social gatherings where she’s expected to present an elegant image, she’s obviously uncomfortable under those conditions and, for the most part, prefers to dress down — shaking her head at the implied sexism that curries her attractiveness. As such, Russell displays a complete lack of vanity throughout The Diplomat, whether bickering in the boudoir with the shrewdly manipulative Hal, negotiating in a take-no-prisoners manner with Dennison and Trowbridge, or trying to squeeze inconvenient truths from Park. For all of the soap-operatic elements that admittedly inspire the urge to binge, The Diplomat succeeds as an espionage thriller with an international geo-political focus by virtue of its timely intrigue. And it resonates beyond genre, thanks to strong characterizations led by Russell’s Kate who refuses to back down, regardless of whatever forces are pitted against her. With a cliffhanger at the climax of Season 2, Season 3 can’t come too soon.
Both seasons of The Diplomat are available for streaming on Netflix.
