The previous geopolitical thriller starring Keri Russell was one of the best shows of this century. In FX’ing The AmericansRussell played a Russian spy in the Washington suburbs during the waning days of the Cold War. The show was about the maneuvers that countries make against each other, but it was just as much about the spy game that took place in Russell’s character’s house. Russell’s Elizabeth Jennings teamed up with Matthew Rhys’ Philip to conduct on-screen espionage, but the two spies didn’t just surveil American officials and kill Soviet dissidents. They were both suspicious of the other half of their fake marriage, and they grew apart when Russell’s character realized that Rhys was losing his passion for the gruesome work of espionage.

It was a role that earned Russell several Emmy and Golden Globe nominations – though, disappointingly, no wins – and a slew of new fans who admired her skill at portraying a principled but murderous spy who also puts together a nuclear family. held and served as a fake travel agency during the day. (Women who work, right?) When The diplomatRussell’s next big TV role premiered on Netflix five years later The Americans As they concluded, the similarities seemed immediately clear: Here was Russell once again in a political drama, working to advance her country’s interests on the world stage. Only this time, instead of a Russian spy, Russell played an American ambassador – not a big move, considering the point is to provide opportunities to see Russell get in and out of trouble on screen. Fans of The Americans were happy to get another vehicle that allowed one of TV’s best actresses to perform a riveting show of running around and dealing outside her home while engaging in a controversial dance with her partner inside.

The first season of The diplomat was a rambunctious, entertaining mess. As a document about the way in which foreign policy is conducted, it sometimes bordered on the line between drama and nonsense. But as a chance for Russell to flex some muscle as an actor, it was great. Her character, Ambassador Kate Wyler, was a skilled diplomat who navigated the corridors of power with precision and grace. It was as if the showrunners had swapped her old character’s disguises and weapons for pantsuits and pencils. The show wasn’t particularly concerned with questioning America’s behavior as a superpower, and Kate was easy to support in a way that Russell’s Americans spy character was not. She was a benefactor in a big job.

The diplomatThe recently released second season follows Kate as she searches for the truth surrounding a false flag attack on a British warship. Russell is still a major foreign affairs agent, and she continues to have a messy marital relationship, this time with former ambassador Hal Wyler, played by Rufus Sewell. Hal is reminiscent of the character of Rhys The Americans as both a source of stability and a potential corrosive force on Russell’s character. Together, Kate and Hal are a diplomatic but dysfunctional power couple, reshaping the rest of the world while their own falls apart.

But in this six-episode series, Russell gets to do what she rarely did in her most famous role: act like an ordinary person. Make mistakes at work. Be outsmarted by smarter players. Shows the kind of emotion that Elizabeth Jennings either didn’t have at all or squeezed out of her during a brutal, abusive upbringing in the KGB. This is the second series where Russell has tried to save the world. It’s the first where she almost blows it – not literally, although her flaws this season do relate to US nuclear vulnerabilities.

There’s still a lot of statesmanship and mercantile power in this season: Kate moves a key witness to safe houses and facilitates an interrogation. She confuses and misleads British intelligence officers. She becomes involved in a potentially disastrous (at least for US-British relations) plot to depose a Prime Minister. She sets up a surveillance operation against a head of state. But where season 2 gives Russell room to stretch her wings is in the way she can take a character in directions she couldn’t take in the series’ first season. The diplomat or any of the six seasons of The Americans in which she played a spy. After all, an American ambassador in Great Britain has different instruments of power than a Soviet agent in the United States. Elizabeth Jennings had no scruples about anything. She was mission driven and she was a spy, and those two facts justified everything. “Do you have children?” a secretary memorably asks her in The Americans‘ third season, as she is about to die from poison that Elizabeth has just forced her to take. Elizabeth says yes, and the doomed woman asks her why she kills innocent people then. “To make the world a better place,” Russell’s character tells her. When pressed about how killing this woman would improve the world, she doesn’t budge an inch.

Kate has the same North Star in it The diplomatbut understandably US ambassadors would have a hard time running around killing people and stuffing limbs into suitcases himself. Their battlefields are meeting rooms and ornate hallways. The solution when you encounter an opponent in the British government is not to execute that person. (Presumably this would mean recalling an ambassador.) Constrained by both her moral compass and the nature of the job, Kate must oversee an entire global chessboard, rather than taking things one mission at a time.

In season 1, Russell’s ambassador character behaved with about the same level of seriousness as her secret agent character The Americans. But the events of season 2 lend themselves to Russell showing a tender side of Kate that feels new. A car bombing that nearly killed her husband at the end of season 1 puts her in an immediate state of vulnerability. She bursts into tears when she learns of an office romance between the CIA agent in her office and her deputy chief of mission at the embassy. (“It’s the cutest thing I’ve ever heard,” she tells her CIA boyfriend, blessing the potentially testy workplace relationship.) Kate is also sloppy with her own affection, displaying undeniable sexual chemistry with Austin Dennison, the British foreign secretary played by David Gyasi. One of the best moments of the season comes when Hal convinces the recalcitrant Dennison to please the American delegation. He seals the deal by reminding Dennison that he was about to have sex with Hal’s wife, the American ambassador, before Hal himself was blown up on the streets of London. Dennison acquiesces; some men still have honor. Whether it is ultimately productive for the ambassador to have such a relationship is a question the show explores.

It’s a bit shocking to see Russell play a character who makes such glaring mistakes. She wasn’t an antihero The Americansand she wasn’t one of those either The diplomat‘S first season. We’re used to seeing her solve problems, not create them. But the great thing about the latest batch of episodes isn’t that they’ll help you understand world affairs, nor that the mystery the show conjures up is so compelling – instead, the second season of The diplomat works because it pits the genre’s best possible actress in a different kind of battle than the ones she so often fought in her most iconic role. Russell still uses deception and manipulation to achieve her goals on this show, as she did as a Soviet spy, but her current character finds that job more difficult. Maybe it’s because everyone knows an ambassador is trying to work on them, while people don’t know that a good spy is a spy. And when a prime minister or vice president realizes her moves, she must find a solution more complex than feeding them poison.