In streaming age, you don’t need to be attractive to be a star

Well-scripted, multi-season series have given talented actors the opportunity to shine in compelling, layered roles.

Keri Russell as Kate Wyler, Rufus Sewell as Hal Wyler in The Diplomat.

Keri Russell made a great spy in the long-running hit show, The Americans, where she sizzled her way through six seasons alongside her real-life partner Matthew Rhys.

The couple played a couple of Russians, reporting home to Moscow from the clipped lawns and neighbourly cul-de-sacs of Washington’s suburbs, while looking for all the world like a couple of locals with a couple of kids.

It’s a delight to see her back again at the age of 47, and looking pretty damn good, this time paired with Rufus Sewell (looking older and greyer but pretty damn good) as her husband in the new political drama, The Diplomat. This time, she’s just out of Washington as the US Ambassador to London with Sewell as her “wife” who is an equally high-flying career diplomat.

The tension in a relationship where she (Kate Wyler) has the big job but he (Hal Wyler) can’t help supporting/interfering/mansplaining, mirrors the tension between the Americans and the Brits as they confront an international crisis sparked by an attack on a British carrier. Is it Iran or not? It’s almost war, certainly, and the Wylers are in the centre of it all. She’s the smart, serious one who (mostly) follows the rules of engagement; he’s the smart, rebellious one prepared to use any means to get to the right end. She’s no-nonsense, he’s all charm.

The script is pacy and complex (think West Wing; Homeland) and political nerds will revel in this one. Created by Debora Cahn, the experienced showrunner and writer of those two shows,
The Diplomat has longevity written all over it with infinite possibilities for intrigue and fluid allegiances, both professional and personal.

Sewell is terrific but this is a great vehicle for Russell who reminds us that while there are stars and leading men and women, there are also good actors – and she’s one of them.

In The Americans, she was never less than compelling and convincing, proof in every episode that a long-running series offers wonderful opportunities for performers who once might never have achieved such career success.

There are only so many Brad Pitts and Angelina Jolies and Scarlett Johanssons and Tom Cruises and for many others, such as Russell, the Hollywood option was really a solid but unremarkable life in the Second Eleven.

Thanks to the streaming revolution and the hunger for product, a heap of actors of moderate rather than sensational physical attractiveness but with plenty of talent now offer us sheer delight in their performances. Unlike the mega stars who don’t really need to know how to act to be winners, this crew is adept and adaptable. It’s not just the volume of product that has proved so good for so many actors, but the shift in the culture over the past couple of decades to promoting more “relatable” people for roles in which shiny, finished perfection just looks silly.

Just think about Bob Odenkirk, whose bit part in Breaking Bad, which ran from 2008-13, was so perfect that it led to the even better spin-off, Better Call Saul, with Odenkirk in the lead. His nuanced performance as the crooked lawyer is worth watching over and over and now we can see him in Lucky Hank, just launched on Stan.

Odenkirk has one of those everyman faces and was a comic and a writer before Breaking Bad, but he turned out to be superb as a dramatic actor. Would he have ever made the big time without streaming? It’s doubtful. Doubtful too for his female offsider in Saul, Rhea Seehorn. From the first episode, Seehorn makes immediate contact with the audience with her characterisation of attorney Kim Wexler. The show, which began filming in 2014 was Seehorn’s big break: she was already over 40, blonde, neither tall nor short at 1.64m, and attractive but far from stunning. One can almost see her grabbing hold of this role she’d waited half a lifetime for and, like Odenkirk, shaping and reshaping it over Saul’s six seasons.

There are so many others: think about Jason Bateman’s impeccable turn over several years (2017-2022) as the corrupt family man Marty Byrde in Ozark (now there’s an everyman if ever there was one); or more recently Matthew Macfadyen, who plays Tom Wambsgans in Succession, now in its fourth and final season on Binge.

Macfadyen was a successful British actor for 20 years before his role in the saga about a dysfunctional media family. He was always watchable, highly competent but never really breaking through – although his 2005 role as Mr Darcy in Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice delivered prominence. But just look at him go in Succession where Tom’s transition from the nice guy who marries into the corrupt Roy family only to become more evil than his in-laws, is so subtle it just creeps up on the viewer. The rest of the family don’t really change and the evolutionary arc is carried by Macfadyen with enormous skill. Mr Darcy might have been fun to do for a minute or three, but surely any actor worth his salt must be delighted with the opportunity to build, gesture by gesture, the layered character possible in a multi-season show? Macfadyen is a charmer even slightly thinner in body and hair than last season, which adds a touch of reality.

Sometimes that ageing process is more dramatic. Think of Shameless – which was originally a British TV series (11 seasons) later made as an (11 seasons) American version.

This family drama cast kids and teens to play the Gallagher family coping with life in working-class Chicago in spite of the alcoholic patriarch played by the excellent William H. Macy. Bingeing on Shameless you see the young actors grow into themselves and their parts. (Think of the Up series which returned every seven years to check on the original subject of the 1964 documentary.)

Again, this is a show to appreciate for consistent performances from an ensemble cast over several years. Watch for a couple of standouts if you decide to swing back and have a look at Shameless (available on both Binge and Netflix): Emmy Rossum, who plays big sister and stand-in parent Fiona; and Jeremy Allen White, who plays Lip, the oldest boy in the family. They steal any scene they’re in.

And a bonus: The American version has one of the more addictive theme songs in any series – and there are plenty in an era where the music, as one commentator put it recently, is an extra character. The Luck You Got, by Canadian group The High Strung, is a brilliant opener to each episode of Shameless. We’re talking serious earworms here: “Think of all the luck you got/Know that it’s not for naught/You were beaming once before/But it’s not like that anymore.”

The Diplomat, streaming on Netflix.