Interest in ‘The Diplomat’ is surging as it enters its third season. © 2025
COURTESY OF NETFLIX
Netflix’s latest smash hit series has peaked in worldwide popularity just days after it debuted on the streaming service with a record-breaking budget.
Measuring the return on investment in a streaming show is far from child’s play. Subscribers pay a flat fee each month to get access to an entire archive of shows and movies making it tough to attribute revenue to each production. Some streamers have ad-supported price plans but even then, brands don’t tend to pay to advertise alongside specific shows or movies, they too play a flat fee covering a certain number of spots across the platform’s portfolio.
Several streamers disclose how many views and minutes its shows and films have been watched but they don’t do that for all their content and it is only revealed a week or so after the debut as it takes time to compile the data. In the meantime, speculation usually abounds about whether or not a show has grabbed the attention of audiences. It doesn’t have to.
The clearest evidence of this is the level of online searches for it and the vast majority of that traffic goes through Google. Its Google Trends service analyzes the popularity of top search queries with a score of 100 representing the maximum relative interest worldwide during the given period rather than the absolute number of searches.
As the chart below shows, data from Google Trends reveals that interest in The Diplomat peaked this week as the third season of the tense political thriller debuted on Netflix.
Searches for ‘The Diplomat’ are surging as its third season launches.
Google Trends
The show stars Keri Russell as a veteran American diplomat who finds herself out of her depth when she is appointed as the ambassador to the United Kingdom to deal with an emerging international crisis. The show shines a spotlight on the twists and turns in the corridors of power and the sacrifices and consequences of forging strategic alliances.
Despite its dry premise it has been a hit with viewers as its first two seasons both got scores of over 80% by critics on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. The latest instalment has the highest rating of them all with critics awarding it 95% and audiences only giving it slightly less at 91%. It didn’t come cheap.
As this report revealed, the first season of the show cost $68.2 million with the second rising to $76.9 million. Netflix went all out on the third spending a season-record of $82.8 million though it doesn’t stop there.
That’s because Netflix banked an impressive $22.2 million of fiscal incentives for filming the show in New York City and London. This mitigated risk by bringing Netflix’s net spending on the show down to $60.6 million by the end of 2024.
Filming continued until mid-March 2025 so the final cost is likely to be even higher than that though the spike in interest gives a good indication that it could pay off, especially as it was only released two days ago.
However, it still has a long way to go to hit the level of interest in the second season which peaked in November last year just days after its debut. As the chart below shows, it still reigns supreme.
Interest in the new season of ‘The Diplomat’ has yet to match interest in Season 2.
Google Trends
Season three currently only has 45% of the level of interest in its predecessor but Netflix clearly has high hopes as it renewed the show for a fourth instalment in May. Production of that is scheduled to start in November and is expected to split its time between London and New York again. That will keep costs down so even if audiences begin to tire it should still be a dream ticket for the streaming giant.
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