By Hope Sloop
Published Oct. 15, 2026, 3:30 p.m. ET
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For The Diplomat creator Deborah Cahn, there is nothing quite so delicious as creating a character who cannot be put in a box and dances between the worlds of good and evil. Thankfully, she has Allison Janney to play that exact role.
**Spoiler alert: Major details from The Diplomat Season 4 ahead**
Sitting down with DECIDER for a Season 4 interview, Cahn shares that to take Janney’s character, U.S. President Grace Penn, to new and dangerous highs (or lows, depending on how you look at it), the writing team had to figure out how to make her decisions poor, but her reasoning understandable. So how do you get a character to make seemingly evil and ill-thought-out choices without making them an outright villain… well, enter the shocking shooting at the end of Season 4, Episode 1.
“I wanted to create something where everybody around her feels like they have an excuse for her behavior and an explanation for it. And I think from her perspective and largely from mine, there is an explanation for every decision that she makes that has absolutely nothing to do with that,” Cahn says of Penn’s rationale after the attempted assassination. “And there is a change that happens when you’re the vice president and [then become] president. They’re not the same thing. And when the buck stops with you and you’re the leader of the free world, you are dealing with questions that are just vaster than anybody else can get their head around.”
For her, all it takes it putting yourself inside the mindset of someone who is under more stress than they have ever been, leading a global superpower, and recovering both physically and mentally from nearly dying at the hands of a sniper. That pressure builds up to a release that might not be dangerous for anyone else in the world, but puts everyone in a precarious situation that creates a delicate balance for her character.
“I want to give the character the benefit of the doubt to say she’s really intelligent and she is making what she thinks is the most sane, most safe decision that exists and try and figure out what the thinking is that gets her there,” the showrunner adds.
As for those who say that the show only brought in Janney — arguably one of the most beloved television actors of the last century — to play a President who is taking concerning steps into the realm of authoritarianism, Cahn doesn’t deny that it’s much easier to make someone horrible when the actor behind the character is someone the audience still wants to love.
“I’m not gonna lie, it definitely helps,” she says with a laugh. “I don’t like writing villains, and I try not to because I think the world of narrative has taken care of that. There’s enough of that out there. And to me, it seems more interesting to deal with something you don’t like from somebody that you respect and from somebody whose decisions you’ve always felt that you could rely on. I don’t think the world’s that easy.”
Furthermore, for Cahn — whose resume also boasts shows like The West Wing and Homeland — it’s a careful and shockingly fair examination of the country and world leaders who sit in the positions of power and often are making judgment calls based on doing what they think is the most right option at the time. It’s that type of thinking that helps The Diplomat find its footing when creating a character like Janney’s, who is far from good, but not as evil as one might want to make her out to be.
“I don’t think that people who are making major geopolitical moves have the luxury of there being a good decision and a bad decision. They’re always dealing with, like, a handful of horrific options. And whenever possible, I wanna be able to say, ‘I don’t love what this person, what this character decided to do, but I understand how they got there,'” she adds. “And the story doesn’t always give us that in the beginning, but hopefully, eventually you do see what the character’s thinking is and how they got there.”
The Diplomat Season 4 is now streaming on Netflix.
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