Credit: Netflix

Alright, so you have survived The Diplomat season four with normal blood pressure, which, honestly, is no small feat considering Kate Wyler has spent another season trying to keep international relations from becoming a disaster while her marriage carries on being its own diplomatic incident. At this point, Keri Russell deserves a very long holiday.

You see, this has always been the spirit of The Diplomat, because Kate never gets to leave the job at the office; whatever blows up in government follows her home, where Hal is waiting with his own ideas about power.

Season four of The Diplomat gets more fraught once Grace Penn takes the presidency, because Kate is dealing with a new political order while her personal loyalties start cutting across the job.

So, finished the season and already missing all the scheming? Fair enough. Time to hop on to these five Netflix shows with similar themes

Five Netflix shows to watch if you loved The Diplomat

House of Cards (2013-2018)

House of Cards is what you watch after The Diplomat when you fancy watching Washington lose whatever manners it had left, because Frank Underwood gets promised the secretary of state job and gets shafted when somebody else gets it. That, that right there, is more or less the moment he decides to take the gloves off. From there, you are watching a man who can turn a handshake into a threat. Kevin Spacey plays Frank through the first five seasons, Robin Wright is Claire Underwood, and once those two start working people against each other, Kate and Hal Wyler look like they are having a domestic.

And the funny thing is, Netflix launched the show back in 2013, when its original TV empire was still finding its feet, and then House of Cards became one of the titles that helped turn Netflix into a serious player in original television. Beau Willimon adapted the story from Michael Dobbs’s novel and the 1990 British series that came before it, but come on… this version has a taste for the grubby side of power.

Black Doves (2024-)

Oh, The Diplomat crowd, have we got an amazing mess for you with Black Doves! Keira Knightley plays Helen Webb, a spy married to a politician who has spent ten years feeding his secrets to the Black Doves, which is already one hell of a marriage arrangement before you learn she also has a secret lover. And then he gets murdered.

Christmas lights are up, and Helen wants answers, but now, keeping her double life from blowing to bits is the least of her worries. Ben Whishaw joins the series as Sam, an assassin and old friend who gets called back when Helen’s investigation starts brushing against a geopolitical conspiracy. That’s the whole point, innit: political mess mixed with personal! And you are here just in time because season two of Black Doves arrives November 5th.

Hostage (2025)

Poor Abigail Dalton didn’t even get to unpack her suitcase as a prime minister before somebody kidnaps her husband and tells her to resign as if she wants him back. Suranne Jones plays Dalton, while Julie Delpy comes in as French President Vivienne Toussaint, who is meant to be in Britain for a state visit and ends up with a blackmail headache of her own. So now you have two world leaders who do not trust each other much being forced onto the same side because the alternative is worse.

Matt Charman, who wrote Bridge of Spies and created Treason, keeps it short, about five episodes, and The Diplomat fans will love this very much because politics once again is meddling with somebody’s home life. Kate Wyler has dealt with plenty of that nonsense, but Abigail gets the brutal version, as her brand-new job demands one thing while the person she loves is being used against her.

The Spy (2019)

Sacha Baron Cohen with no comedy is enough for you to know that if he has broken character, this must be something exceptional, but The Spy gets even more interesting once you realise he is playing Eli Cohen, the real Israeli agent who worked for Mossad in the 1960s. Eli starts out as a clerk, then gets recruited and sent undercover under a false identity. Before you know it, he is rubbing shoulders with people inside Syria’s political circles, while his wife, Nadia, is back home with no sense of how far into the job he has gone.

The six-part series shows you the strain of living two lives at once, and the deeper Eli gets, the more that false identity starts eating into everything else. The Diplomat gives you lies told across conference tables and behind embassy doors, but The Spy gets into an even more dangerous territory and chucks its man directly into enemy territory.

Queenmaker (2023)

Let’s now leave the embassies alone for a minute, because Queenmaker takes all that political scheming but takes it to a campaign trail, where Hwang Do-hee, played by Kim Hee-ae, has spent years cleaning up disasters for the powerful Eunsung Group and knows every dirty trick in the book. Then a tragedy turns her against the very people she used to protect, and now she is using all that experience to bring them down instead.

Her weapon of choice is Oh Kyung-sook, a civil rights lawyer, whom Do-hee sets out to turn into Seoul’s next mayor across 11 episodes. The pair could not come at power from more different angles, which is half the fun, because one knows how the machine works and the other has no interest in being swallowed by it. The Diplomat fans should feel at home here: capable women in hostile systems with plenty of people pulling strings behind closed doors.