Debora Cahn received her first Emmy nomination 20 years ago as a producer on The West Wing. Now, the TV vet is up for best drama for her own show, the political thriller The Diplomat, for the second straight year — while also receiving her first-ever writing nod.
Cahn discusses with THR her partnership with star Rufus Sewell and writing the “terrifying” finale.
The show has grown in Emmy nominations over each of its three seasons. What do you make of that from your own creative perspective of evolving the show?
There’s always the hope that a show can continue to thrive past all of your first-grade ideas, which you lay out in the first season. All of the low-hanging fruit storywise goes into those first few episodes. Then it turns into this new thing that is partly a show that I had in my mind and partly the product of a bunch of people working on this thing together — the relationship that Keri [Russell] and Rufus built out of Kate and Hal and turned into this marriage that has really drawn people in and served as the spine of the series. The hope is always that you haven’t used up all your good tricks and that you have a deeper well than you knew yourself going in. That’s a little bit of a leap of faith. It’s really great when it feels like your audience is responding to that reach.
