First Look - The Diplomat

There’s something very familiar about The Diplomat, the three-part German series centering around Foreign Service Officer Karla Lorenz (Natalia Wörner). She’s like Gary Cooper in an old Hollywood western, rolling in to break through impasses and handle tough situations. She’s the moral compass in each story, quickly assessing who’s lying and who’s telling the truth, and she is, of course, no respecter of persons. Not that Hollywood invented the idea of the lone hero – but it did repackage the character in uniquely modern terms. There’s an independence and a lack of pretense about Karla that seems normal to this American viewer, and the move by the Germans to make their hero figure female brings a delightfully fresh perspective. In the first episode she goes to the Philippines searching for two hostages, in the second episode she’s overseeing a security exercise at the embassy in Tunis, and in the third episode she’s starting her duties as ambassador in the Czech Republic and dealing with an asylum-seeker at the same time.

Karla is managed by Thomas at the Berlin Foreign Office, and in this clip from the first episode, she’s checking in after meeting with the Filipino defense minister. The Foreign Office sent her to rescue two German civilians but it turns out they weren’t really ‘tourists’ as she was told.