David Bianculli

Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Deanna Martinez.

For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli.

Wow.

The Diplomat is one of those rare TV series that manages to get even better every season.

Season one, introducing and establishing Kerry Russell as diplomat Kate Wyler, was really strong and impressively intelligent.

It had to be, if it was to work.

Any one of the characters who populate the diplomat, the politicians, the support staff and advisors, even the spouses and significant others, would, in most environments, be the smartest person in the room.

Except, as with the classic NBC series The West Wing, they're all in the same room.

This means the arguments had to be equally strong on both sides, and the jokes and snide comments had to crackle and pop.

Check and double-check.

Kate's push-and-pull relationship with her husband Hal, played by Rufus Sewell, was the highlight of season one.

Season two upped the ante by reaching deeper into the West Wing bag of tricks and hiring Allison Janney, who played C.J.

Craig on that show, to play Vice President Grace Penn on The Diplomat.

And the season two cliffhanger, a brilliant one, had Hal telling Kate that he had just been on the phone with the president, informing him that his own vice president had been involved with planning a covert attack on a British military vessel.

And when the president heard that news, he dropped dead of a heart attack.

So now we're at season three, and suddenly Vice President Grace Penn is about to experience the orderly transition of presidential power.

Except it's not so orderly.

Janney's vice president, like Russell's diplomat, was in London when the president died, which makes the transition more difficult.

So does the fact that Kate recently had made moves to oust Grace from her job as VP, so their relationship at this point is, at best, tenuous.

But what saves Kate, with both the team in London and their American counterparts patched in from the Situation Room arguing about what to do next, is that she's still the most informed and level-headed person of all, much as the next president may hate that.