Moments after learning of The Diplomat‘s third consecutive Golden Globes nomination for Best Drama Series, Debora Cahn had to make a pit stop on the New York City set of Season 4.
“It is a very happy day over here on set…it’s been quite a week,” she told Deadline Monday morning, pointing out that the series also recently received a Critics’ Choice nomination. She described the feeling on set as “just joyful.”
“The news came out while we were filming, and it just sort of rippled through during everybody trying to be silent, while we’re filming,” she recalled. “I think it’s nice for everybody to feel like the show is being embraced in this way. So it’s really great. We are grateful.”
As for how Season 4 is coming along, Cahn remains cryptic about the specifics. When asked if she could distill it into a sentence, she teased: “Oh, God, Katie, if I knew a sentence like that, I would be writing it down. Unfortunately, I’m so in the middle of it that I don’t have a real sense of what the forest is through the trees, but I don’t want to say some stupid thing.”
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“It’s going great. We’re in the middle of filming it and in the middle of writing it, and we’re at that point where it seems completely impossible that we will figure out how to land this plane,” she added. “But that’s always how it feels at this point. So, yeah, now at least we were a couple seasons in, I’m at least starting to recognize that feeling and know that that’s probably a healthy part of the process.”
The one detail she did reveal is that, similarly to previous seasons, audiences can expect the story to pick up fairly close to where Season 3 left off.
“I try to skip forward in time, and it just never, never works,” she said.
While she is in the thick of things on Season 4, Cahn did reflect on the prior season’s achievement by detailing a scene she’s proud to have pulled off: “There’s a scene in the last episode at a dinner table, at the Prime Minister’s country house, and it was just one of those things where it was like we’re putting all of these amazing actors around one table, and we wanted the scene to be complicated, and I wanted it to be both a geopolitical conflict and also conflicts happening within every marriage at the table all at the same time. So it was a lot. It was a lot of dynamics to keep in the air simultaneously. Alex Graves did an amazing job shooting it, and the cast was just incredible, and it was really fun.”
Cahn received her nomination Monday morning alongside Howard Gordon, whose Netflix limited series The Beast in Me also received a nod. The two previously worked together on Gordon’s series Homeland, and Cahn has often credited the series, along with The West Wing, as the projects that allowed her to cut her teeth on political dramas before taking on The Diplomat.
“He taught me so much, and his work taught me so much, and it was such a joy working with him,” she said Monday. “His mind is just like an energy nuclear reactor, and I think my experience working on Homeland is what made me feel like I could do this show. It was a model for it in so many ways. It’s just a real, real joy to be listed on a page with him.”
As a showrunner who is working on an increasingly rare fourth season of TV, Cahn also acknowledges “the business is changing a lot, and the shape of viewing is changing a lot, and I’m trying to adapt as quickly as possible to the different structure of how people experience narrative.”
“I’m a late adopter with technology. I tend to be wary of things until they’ve been around for a while,” she continued. “So I’m sort of straddling these two positions of trying to embrace the new forms as they’re coming out and still stay connected with the things that drew me to this field in the first place.”
The best way to celebrate The Diplomat‘s latest awards recognition is “by making more of it,” she adds. “Sometimes it’s like, ‘Oh my god, we have so much work to do,’ and now it’s like, ‘Oh my god, we got to keep doing this.’”