The Diplomat season 4 release date: Netflix drops all eight episodes at once — and Keri Russell's Felicity lands days earlier to tide you over
Netflix is serving up Keri Russell twice in eight days, and one of those helpings is 84 episodes long.
The Diplomat season 4 arrives on Netflix on October 15, all eight hour-long episodes at once, Netflix confirmed. That's almost exactly a year after season 3, which by prestige-streaming standards is basically unheard of:
- Season 1: April 20, 2023
- Season 2: October 31, 2024
- Season 3: October 16, 2025
- Season 4: October 15, 2026
Asked by Screen Rant how the show keeps pulling this off, creator Debora Cahn joked that her team simply doesn't sleep, and pointed out that she used to make network shows with 25 episodes a year. Asked about a fifth season, she said, "You can ask, but I can't answer."
What's happening in season 4
Season 3 ended with President Rayburn (Michael McKean) dead, Grace Penn (Allison Janney) in the Oval Office, Hal Wyler (Rufus Sewell) as her vice president, and Kate (Russell) stuck in the middle. In season 4, Grace and Hal go after Russia's most powerful weapon, and Kate teams up with First Gentleman Todd Penn (Bradley Whitford) to stop the scheme before it sets off a global catastrophe. Cahn's description of that foursome is not reassuring:
"They're two couples strapped together in one car on a crumbling roller coaster."
— Debora Cahn, creator and showrunner
Janney won the show's first Emmy on September 14, 2026, and Netflix dropped the official trailer the next morning. She and Whitford have both been upped to series regulars, which means a full-time West Wing reunion, overseen by a former West Wing writer. Nana Mensah, who plays Billie Appiah, is a series regular now, too.
Meanwhile, Felicity
On October 7, all four seasons of Felicity landed on Netflix in the US, as Netflix announced on X. It's part of a new licensing deal with Disney, and international viewers will have to wait.
If you missed it the first time: Russell plays Felicity Porter, who skips Stanford to follow her high school crush, Ben Covington (Scott Speedman), to college in New York. The show ran on The WB from 1998 to 2002, won Russell a Golden Globe, and lost a big chunk of its audience in season 2 after a time slot change and, infamously, the haircut. It was created by J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves, years before either of them was directing Star Wars or Batman movies.
To finish Felicity before The Diplomat drops, you'd need to watch about ten and a half episodes a day for eight straight days.
That's 84 episodes in total, at roughly 42 minutes each, or around seven hours of television a day.
