WEST WING REUNION ALERT: The Diplomat Season 3 brings Bradley Whitford and Allison Janney back together — but this time, their White House power play could DESTROY Keri Russell’s Ambassador Wyler 😱🔥

The trailer teases betrayal at the highest level, with POTUS Grace Penn pulling strings that threaten to unravel everything.

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The riveting London-set political thriller, The Diplomat, returns with another high-stakes cliffhanger shaking up what fans may have expected in Season 3 for both Ambassador Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) and her meddling husband Hal (Rufus Sewell), as well for international relations. “We’ve come back to a situation,” says showrunner Debora Cahn, “where everybody’s place in the world has flipped. Everything that we think we understand about their own jobs and their own relationship is suddenly upside down and then reestablishing itself in a new place.”

In last season’s final episodes, we learned that the devious U.S. Vice President Grace Penn (Allison Janney) was the mastermind behind the two-seasons long plot to damage a British aircraft carrier and blame it on Iran and Russia. Penn, dragging in her own visual aids and using charcoal for a pen, was forced to explain her reasoning to Kate: Keep a secessionist Scotland in the U.K. so they’d keep our bases there to ward off attacks by Russia on the U.S.’s East Coast.

But the plan went too far, sailors died, and the rogue Brits who hit the ship also blew up a car killing a British MP and an American Secret Service agent. Penn may have apologized to Kate, but she believes it was worth the loss of life.

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Kate and Hal debated whether Penn should/could be fired — they basically called her a traitor to her face — and if she is, Hal pushed his wife to become Vice President.

But soon after, there’s another big shock: The POTUS (Michael McKean) keeled over with a heart attack while getting the news about his Veep from Hal over the phone.  Shock number two: Grace Penn is the new President of the United States.

Season 3 opens as Penn quickly gets sworn in while she’s in London. The question now is what she will do about Kate and Hal, who were about to expose her to the Secretary of State. Will she try to keep Kate close as the second in command Hal wants her to be or end her career? It’s a pretty bad spot to be coming back from,” says Cahn. “Though Hal is undeterred and literally nothing will stop him from having Kate become vice president,” she promises, “he’s like ‘Okay, a different president, no problem.’” How Kate feels about this tricky situation will shortly be revealed.

“Everything we learned about Grace Penn at the end of Season 2 makes the relationship between the U.S. and the U.K. a lot more complicated going forward now that she’s president,” continues Cahn. “Getting rid of her is not really viable in the same way…or maybe it is.”

Several new characters show up this season to help with the machinations. Poldark‘s dashing Aiden Turner has a so far undisclosed recurring role leaving viewers to ponder— is he a romantic or villainous addition?  And there will be another nice surprise for The West Wing fans when Grace’s husband Todd shows up. He’s played by Bradley Whitford, who shared a previous administration with Janney on the beloved political drama.

Clifton Prescod / Netflix

“We didn’t want to make too much of a West Wing tribute act,” says Cahn, “so we were a bit concerned about having both of them together in the same place. But as soon as we saw the character that Allison was building, we thought that bringing in Brad as an actor in that dynamic was only going to feed [their story] with a lot more richness. I just have to say, we loved seeing the two of them together.”

Part of what the show is “excited about,” Cahn says, “is taking another marriage and looking at Kate and Hal’s next to that one and seeing how two couples in a similar situation handle the dynamics that are inherent to that world, differently.” And we’ll see how Kate asses the new First Gentleman.

Also back for international skullduggery: British Foreign Secretary Austin Denison (David Gyasi) who has, you might say, a special relationship with Ambassador Wyler. “These are two people who trust each other,” the showrunner notes.

As for the show’s real-world topicality, “We try to be living in the headspace that the country is living,” Cahn explains, “but right now, the headspace of the country changes so fast that it’s hard to keep up with. We’re not looking to mirror what’s going on in the world; we’re looking to get a window into the kind of work these people do — what it is, why it matters, and why firing thousands of them is probably a bad idea.”

The Diplomat, Season 3 Premiere, Thursday, October 16, Netflix