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This is Fresh Air.
I'm Terry Gross.
My guest, Cameron Crowe, is known for writing the screenplay for Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and writing and directing Say Anything Jerry Maguire, Vanilla Sky and Almost Famous, for which he won an Oscar for Best Screenplay.
We'll be right back.
As improbable as that may sound, it's based on Crowe's own life as a teenage music writer.
His new memoir, The Uncool, is about that period of his life and more, including his adventures and misadventures, writing about musicians like Greg Allman, Kris Kristofferson, Jimmy Page and David Bowie.
He also writes about what life was like in his family when he was growing up and how reluctant his parents were to allow him to go on the road with musicians before he'd even graduated high school.
Let's start with a clip from early on in Almost Famous.
The Cameron Crowe character.
William is about 11, listening to an argument between his mother, played by Frances McDormand, and his older sister, played by Zooey Deschanel.
The mother speaks first.
You've been kissing.
No, I haven't.
Yes, you have.
No, I haven't.
Yes, you have.
I can tell.
You can't tell.
Not only can I tell, I know who it is.
It's Daryl.
What you got under your coat?
It's unfair that we can't listen to our music.
It's because it is about drugs and promiscuous sex.
Simon and Garfunkel is poetry.
Yes, it's poetry.
It is the poetry of drugs and promiscuous sex.
Honey, they're on pot.
First it was butter, then it was sugar and white flour bacon eggs bologna, rock and roll motorcycles.
Then it was celebrating Christmas on a day in September when you knew it wouldn't be commercialized.
What else are you going to ban?
Honey, you want to rebel against knowledge.
I'm trying to give you the cliff notes on how to live life in this world.
We're like nobody else I know.
Cameron Crowe, welcome back to Fresh Air.
It's a pleasure to talk with you again.
Thanks, Terry.
Was your mother at all like the Frances McDormand character and how unusual she was and how opposed to rock and roll?
Even Simon and Garfunkel, who she probably hadn't even heard yet.
Well, first of all, hearing that clip, it's uncanny how much Frances McDormand is my mother.
I mean, the dialogue was straight out of our family and our home.
Let me just kind of interrupt by saying your mother died, I think it was last year.
She died in 2019.
2019, yeah.
On September 11th.
Born on the 4th of July and passed away on September 11th, two days before, almost famous, the musical opened in San Diego.
So it was a dramatic exit from the earth, from my mom.
Yeah, so I didn't mean to interrupt except I just wanted to express my condolences.
Thank you so much.
She's a huge character and completely inspiring.
But listening to that clip...
It just made me appreciate how sometimes real life is the best writer.
And it was just lodged in my head forever as this classic thing that happened, where my mom made us believe that she could tell if you've been kissing.
And of course, it was a stunt to get the truth out of us, or my sister in that case.
But just hilarious how life kind of puts in front of you the best stuff to write about.
With a mother who was so controlling in terms of like food and vehicles and not even listening to rock and roll, which was kind of banned in your house, you had to sneak it in.
How did you manage to get away at the age of 15 and start going on the road with bands so that you can write cover stories about them?
She was all about as a teacher and a counselor who had many great counselees who loved her so much.
She always respected intellectualism.
If I could somehow pin it to intellectual success, I had a way in.
So to go on the road with Led Zeppelin at 15, I had to really sell Led Zeppelin to her as like music that's based on Tolkien.
This is like lofty material that's like good for the soul.
Ultimately, I think she said, because we loved the interviewer Dick Cavett in our family, Go and take this journey.
Put on your magic shoes.
Call me every night and don't take drugs.
And that was my ticket out.
Don't take drugs is like the refrain of the movie, like your mother's always calling.
Anytime you call her, it's like, don't take drugs.
Because it was about brain cells.
It was about brain cells.
Oh, you had to stay smart.
Yeah.
Did you end up taking drugs?
No.
I'm sure you offered them all the time.
I was offered drugs for sure.
And I learned early on, Terry, that like the best response is no.
Because the person offering you the drugs generally then says, smart kid, more for me.
And that made me I don't know.
It made people know that I wasn't there to join the band party with the band.
I was there with a notebook full of questions based on loving music.
And that really swung the door open.
Was the writer aspect of being a music writer what your mother approved of, because that is a more intellectual pursuit?
Exactly.
And it was true.
You know, I really felt like the best of the music that we loved, that did sneak into our family, had its roots in wonderful writing, for example Joni Mitchell.
Simon and Garfunkel.
There was something about the song Mrs Robinson that That rubbed my mom the wrong way.
And I think it was the way they said coo-coo-coo-choo.
Totally.
You got it.
She thought it was sneering.
And she did.
She pulled out the Bookends album cover and showed us the pupils of Paul Simon and promised us that he was high enough.
And the funny thing is, when the movie came out with that scene in it I think it was on CNN somebody was interviewing Paul Simon and they said you know what about this movie, Almost Famous, holding up the bookends album covers?
You know Francis McDormand saying they're on pot.
He's like, we were.
She was right.
I think she's also right of being like a sneering song about middle-aged women.
Absolutely.
So she saw clearly, and it was inevitable, I think, that music was going to come in, you know, underneath the door or through the window.
Somehow the power of rock was going to find my sister and me.
And it did.
To this day.
That's our favorite language, with each other, sharing music, and the things that happen when music kind of takes over and transports you and gives you that feeling that you really can't get any other place.
The first concerts you went to, including a Bob Dylan concert very early in his career, you went to with your mother.
That could be a very wonderful or a very embarrassing experience, with both mother and child being uncomfortable.
Oh, yeah.
Their child doesn't want to be seen as needing to be escorted by a parent and the parent feels like 100 years old compared to all the kids that are there.
What were those experiences like for you?
Knowing that she hated rock and roll.
Yeah.
Well, Bob Dylan.
We were pretty young and he was appearing at a gymnasium at the college near where we lived in Riverside California.
She had read something about this young protest singer that had something to say.
And so she came to us and said let's go see this protest singer, and brought a blanket for us to sit on the floor of the gymnasium.
And we did see Bob Dylan in 1964, like right after he had written Times They Are a-Changin'.
And he was... kind of a Charlie Chaplin type figure.
I remember like, he just kind of like was a little jaunty and these loose fitting jeans.
And he was funny and serious at the same time.
And that affected us for sure.
But real rock is was banned for the longest time because it was, as she said, a vehicle for sex and drugs.
And, you know, sometimes it really was.
But I was able to go to another concert, which was Eric Clapton, Derek and the Dominoes, with her.
And it was so electrifying that even she kind of understood what the power of rock sometimes could be.
And after somebody sitting next to her offered her cocaine, which was...
You know, striking to see, but she, you know, politely turned it down and everything.
But when the concert was over, we were walking out and she said, you know what?
Your music is better than mine.
Wow.
And that, that was my mom.
She is a truth teller.
So that was her truth.
And that was another moment where the door swung open a little wider.
When you were 15 writing about bands, the bands were older than you were.
But looking back now, they were probably mostly in their 20s.
I know.
Which is really young.
Really young.
So what's your take on some of those musicians now, thinking of them as young people and not as older people?
Yeah.
Well, I thought they were, you know, seasoned adults at the time.
And you're right.
They were 22, for example.
And being 15, you know, the distance between 15 and 22 is enormous.
It's like a generation gap.
But really, we were all kind of young together, and rock was young.
There wasn't video assists and all the bells and whistles and dancers and stuff.
It was really just a naked stage and people playing songs.
The power of the songs was the power of the concert.
And what I thought as a young guy, led into some of these dressing rooms to glimpse how bands prepared for a show or how they struggled to figure out you know who was right in an argument about how to play a song.
I started to see a dynamic that was so human that it was kind of beyond what I'd been able to see as a high school student, for example, when my mom had skipped me two grades and later three.
But then somebody like Chris Christopherson deigns to give me an interview and tries to sneak me into a bar where I'm underage.
And then when we get caught, he says well, I'll sit out here in this big red leatherette chair and I'll do my interview with you as fans and people stream by.
He treated me like an adult.
And talk to me about the power of movies and music and all this stuff that ended up speaking to me so strongly later.
But as a young guy, you're kind of in this position where...
You know, this person is allowing me to ask them whatever I want to about music that I love.
It was a blissful time, and I still love writing about it.
So how did you manage to convince anybody that at the age of 15, still in high school, that you were worthy of being taken seriously, that your opinions were informed enough and deep enough, went deep enough to be a spokesperson for whether this album was good or not, to be worthy of talking to a band?
I'm just laughing because so much of it was just where I lived.
We lived in San Diego, and San Diego is not a primary market.
San Diego usually happens at the end of a tour, after a band or an artist has been in San Francisco LA, New York.
Big reviews.
They had to worry about San Diego.
It's like it's the surfers, you know, so they would just be partying early for the end of their tour a lot of times.
And so.
Here's a kid that comes to the door with a notebook full of questions based on the music that nobody was really asking them about, in the hands of an older journalist.
Here's some guy with an orange bag full of cassettes ready to talk to you about your album Aqualung.
They're like, get that kid in here.
Come on, we're bored.
Let him ask us those questions.
And so many of the bands were just nice to me because they were bored in San Diego.
And I got to tell you, going back and listening to a lot of those interviews because I kept everything they really talked to me.
They really opened up.
And that informed the life I was lucky enough to have later as a writer and a director in movies.
Because I knew how people spoke.
I transcribed all my interviews myself, so I knew that people don't talk elegantly, but they can pour their heart out in half sentences.
So it was really one big magic carpet ride of learning about people.
And it started early.
I'm a lucky guy.
So Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Lester Bangs in Almost Famous.
And I want to play a scene where he gives you some very interesting advice.
But first I want to explain who Lester Bangs is.
I mean, he was a really eccentric guy.
And such strong feelings and unwavering in his confidence and his opinions about what was great and what was garbage.
Oh, yeah.
And he pretty much became a cult figure.
Yeah.
And died young.
Sadly, yes.
Yeah.
So when you start writing for Cream, he gives you some advice.
So this is a scene between Patrick Fugit, who plays your surrogate in the film, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays Lester Bangs.
Once you go to L.A., you're gonna have friends like crazy, but they're gonna be fake friends.
You know, they're gonna try to corrupt you.
You know, and you got an honest face, and they're gonna tell you everything.
But you cannot make friends with the rock stars.
You're going to be a true journalist.
No, a rock journalist.
First, you never get paid much.
But you will get free records from the record company.
There's nothing about you that is controversial, man.
God, it's gonna get ugly, man.
They're gonna buy you drinks.
You're gonna meet girls.
They're gonna try to fly you places for free, offer you drugs, and I know it sounds great, but these people are not your friends.
You know, these are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of rock stars and they will ruin rock and roll and strangle everything we love about it, right?
And then it just becomes an industry of cool.
I mean, I'm telling you, you're coming along in a very dangerous time for rock and roll.
That's why I think you should just turn around, go back, you know, and be a lawyer or something.
I can tell from your face that you won't.
I can give you 35 bucks.
Give me a thousand words on Black Sabbath.
An assignment?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You have to make your reputation on being honest and unmerciful.
Unmerciful.
Honest and unmerciful.
Yeah.
And I think that was true of Lester Bangs.
Absolutely.
Were you capable of being unmerciful?
Intermittently.
When I listen to that, it takes me right back to when I first met him.
He said almost exactly those words.
And can you imagine being 15 or 16 and somebody enters your life who speaks that kind of truth, with that kind of passion and treats you like an equal?
Yeah, and unmerciful isn't something you usually strive to be in your life.
Yeah.
But as a critic, you have to be honest.
And sometimes that means unmerciful.
But that's still a harsh word to use for a 15-year-old who's starting in a very harsh business.
Yeah.
Well, let me give you the context.
His stance when I met him that day was, it's over.
You know, it's gone.
That passion, that thing, that flame that is true rock, true music is It's over.
They've taken it over.
So I was like a straggler to something that was like a flying saucer and had left to him.
So he's telling me it's over.
But here you are and just watch out because they'll try and corrupt you too.
And I'm warning you right now because they already ruined rock.
It was like a lot of information.
But his thing about unmerciful was you've got to fight back.
You have to fight back in the homogenization of something that is important to you.
And that's why he used that strong word.
And he was sometimes not unmerciful.
Sometimes he was very kind.
He was kind to me, for example.
But he was a politician for the soul of rock.
And to me, he was legend instantly for that and many other reasons.
Lester Bangs also warned you about not making friends with musicians or publicists.
You probably really wanted to be the musicians' friends, but did you try not to be?
How did that work out for you?
Well, I think generally I was able to witness people that would come through a tour backstage and you could tell the people that were there to like party.
And act like they're a rock star too.
And that person would leave the room and you'd hear how they were talked about by the bands.
And you just go, wow, okay, well, I get it.
I don't play an instrument, so I'm not going to be in a band or try to be in this band, but...
Generally, I thought, like, be the guy that's there to document it.
And when you're done, go home.
Don't stay out or try and hang out in the hotel rooms.
Go back to your room and transcribe the interview.
I remember something, Terry, that happened early on.
I was on the road with the Allman Brothers Band.
And I loved the Allman Brothers Band.
And they were staying at the Continental Hyatt House in Los Angeles.
And I was covering them for Rolling Stone.
And after their show at the Forum they all came back to this kind of communal room to party and jam.
And so there's Greg Allman playing this blues song, Come In My Kitchen.
And I'm just loving it.
He's like eight feet away.
And there's some people singing and there's another guy playing guitar over there.
And there was a guitar right next to me.
And, you know, I only knew two chords, but I picked up the guitar and I started to strum.
And I was thinking, this is cool, man.
I am like jamming with the Allman Brothers band.
And it was like hands appeared kind of behind me and lifted the guitar out of my hands, almost like a hand from heaven is just coming to relinquish the guitar from my grasp.
And I just felt like...
Oh, that's cool.
I'm in heaven and there goes the guitar now.
It's like, don't jam with the Allman Brothers band, particularly when you only know two chords.
I thought that was the most gentle way to teach me a lesson early on.
We need to take another break here, so let me reintroduce you.
My guest is Cameron Crowe.
We'll be back after a short break.
I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air.
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You followed David Bowie around for, you know, off and on for a year and a half.
Yeah.
And wrote a piece.
You know, was it a cover story?
Yeah, it was a cover story in Rolling Stone.
It was also the Playboy interview.
And I did some other stories for, like, Cream and some other publications.
It was...
It was a David Bowie factory I had going for a while because he wasn't talking to anybody else.
I mean, you know, life puts you at a crossroads and you go one way and it turns into 18 months with David Bowie.
I had no assignment.
He said to me, hold up a mirror to me.
I want to see what you show me.
So like spend some time around me.
Ask me anything you want.
I want to see the mirror that you hold up.
And that's what I did.
I'm not sure he appreciated totally the mirror that I held up to him.
But he did know that it was an accurate portrait of what he was going through in those 18 months, which are kind of referred to as a lost weekend, when he was living untethered in Los Angeles.
And not sure if he was going to become a movie actor for a while.
He fired his manager and he was just kind of learning what was going to be next and trying to reinvent.
And he was playing around with this character called the Thin White Duke.
And one day he put 12 pages of an autobiography in my hand and signed it and said I wanted you to have this.
And it was called The Return of the Thin White Duke.
He never finished it.
It's 12 pages.
It's striking.
And this was the time David Bowie was trying to figure out what was coming next.
And I was lucky enough to be around and I asked him all kinds of stuff.
And he was both warm and engaging, steely and brilliant.
And lost.
Well, you know, that kind of fits in a way with the fact that he had so many characters that he embodied.
And when he said to you, I want to see the mirror you hold up, do you think he didn't really know who he was in some ways?
It's so funny that you asked that.
I asked him at one point, because his real name was David Jones, right?
So I asked him at one point, am I meeting David Jones or am I meeting David Bowie, the creation?
And he said, you're meeting David Jones who's aggressively throwing David Bowie at you.
Oh, wow.
I know.
I know.
I know.
I asked him at one point, I was like, how do you think you're going to die?
Do you think you'll die on stage?
Because Ziggy Stardust, one of his characters, I think was based on somebody who had died on stage.
And he said, no, no, no, I don't think that's going to happen to me.
I think my I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but he said I think my death will be an event, something that I manage and produce and make my own statement.
And that is exactly what happened.
Remind us how he died.
Well, he died of cancer at a young age, and he knew he was dying.
He didn't tell anybody except a small group of collaborators.
And he did this album, Black Star, which is his statement about the death that was coming.
And it's profound and it's managed and it is an opportunity that he did not throw away.
And he also said in one of the songs, you know, I can't give you everything.
So he kept a lot for himself.
I think he found a life where he was in love and living in New York and he loved his family.
And the mirror that I held up to him Terry, was a glimpse of a time when he almost died and wasn't looking after himself and involved in drugs.
And too many of his friends, he said, were drug dealers.
And he's lucky that he made it out alive.
One of the things that you portray in the movie Almost Famous is the teenage girls and young women who followed the bands and partied with them afterwards and went to their hotel rooms afterwards.
And people would call them groupies.
But the leader of the group of girls in Almost Famous says we're not groupies.
We love the music.
That's why we're here.
We're band aides, A-I-D-E-S.
And we're here to help the band because we love their music.
The name of the character in the movie, the leader of these girls, is Penny Lane.
That's what she was known by.
It wasn't her real name.
In your memoir, she's also using the name Penny Lane, but her real name is Penny Trimble.
In the movie, she's a main character played by Kate Hudson.
In your memoir she gets a paragraph in which you talk about her, her importance in the band world or the groupie world and her importance to you.
But that's it.
Are you trying to protect her privacy by not saying more?
A little bit.
I've talked about Penny quite a bit.
Penny Trumbull is an open book.
She always said at the time when she got older she wanted to use whatever money she'd saved to put together an old folks home for old rock stars up in Oregon, which she did with a little bit of the money that she made which wasn't that much to be able to use her story in the movie.
We wanted to give her something which she definitely used for exactly that.
So she loved music and behaved exactly that way.
I was...
Pretty young at the time.
And so for Penny and the Flying Garter girls, who was like her clan, you know, who would fail at not getting emotionally involved with the bands.
It was like, watch out.
They all would fall for some of the guys and get their hearts broken, whatever.
But Penny Trumbull was one of the ones that really opened up to me and told me what it was like emotionally to follow a band and to crave that experience of being in an empty arena after you'd seen the show that meant so much to you and you could still feel the spirits in the air of that empty arena.
That's my favorite scene in Almost Famous, when Kate Hudson is dancing in the garden of trash left behind where Stillwater has played.
And that's what I was left with, not trying to protect them.
I think, you know, I've written about it and you get the emotional carnage that can happen.
That's in Almost Famous.
But I always felt that Penny Trumbull was an open book and was, you know...
A friend as well as kind of a flamboyant figure who was true to her word.
She loved music.
But there's a scene in Almost Famous where Stillwater, the fictional band that your fictional surrogate, is following.
Yeah.
My fictional surrogate.
So the members of Stillwater basically trade some of the girls for to another band for 50 and a case of beer.
That is so condescending and so dismissive and so misogynist.
Was that based on something real?
And what does that say about the way the band sometimes saw the girls and young women who followed them around?
Well, not everybody was... And went to their hotel rooms with them after the show.
No, I know.
I was horrified when I saw that.
That was a road crew traded one of the women who had been following the band around.
And I felt that that was kind of a dark cloud that was passing over this thing that I felt so lucky to be covering and be given a backstage pass to see etc.
That was the ugly side of things.
And it was heartbreaking to watch.
But you know, I felt at the time like this was a glimpse of the thing that I'd seen in movies, sometimes like in a movie like Carnal Knowledge that Mike Nichols had made.
This is, like, emotionally violent.
And...
It frightened me what people were capable of.
I didn't see it a lot.
I saw it sometimes.
And I think that's probably something that wasn't unique just to the world of rock.
People mistreat people.
And I found it really interesting. powerful.
And when it came time to write about it in a fictional sense later, I did.
Let me reintroduce you here because we have to take a short break.
My guest is Cameron Crowe, whose new memoir The Uncool is based on the same period of his life as his film Almost Famous, which he wrote and directed and won an Oscar for Best Screenplay.
We'll be right back.
This is Fresh Air.
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I want to talk with you about the title of your book Uncool, and about what cool means, or what people think it means, and what cool signifies.
In your movie...
Philip Seymour Hoffman, as Lester Bangs, the rock critic, is giving you advice again.
And his advice is like always very astringent.
And coming from a very skeptical or cynical point of view, usually with good reason.
And so he's talking with you about wanting to be cool and what that really means and why you are not cool about it.
So here's Philip Seymour Hoffman playing Lester Bangs and Patrick Fugate playing your surrogate.
Oh, man.
You made friends with them.
See, friendship is the booze they feed you.
They want you to get drunk on feeling like you belong.
Well, it was fun.
Because they make you feel cool.
And hey, I met you.
You are not cool.
I know.
Even when I thought I was, I knew I wasn't.
Because we are uncool.
Now, while women will always be a problem for guys like us, most of the great art in the world is about that very problem.
Good-looking people, they got no spine.
Their art never lasts.
And they get the girls.
But we're smarter.
Yeah, I can really see that now.
Yeah, because great art is about guilt and longing.
And you know, love disguises sex and sex disguises love.
Hey, let's face it.
You got a big head start.
I'm glad you were home.
I'm always home.
I'm uncool.
Me too.
You're doing great.
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool.
I sent my advice to you.
And I know you think these guys are your friends.
If you want to be a true friend to him, be honest and unmerciful.
So that was Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs.
So did you want to be cool and what did cool mean to you?
And I just want to start by saying too, that Lester Bangs Ended up personifying cool for a lot of rock critics and people who were devoted to reading rock criticism, because he went his own way with such confidence and was so skeptical of the rock star machinery.
Yep.
He said cool. in a way that I think Philip Seymour Hoffman caught, which is like cool.
It's like the derisive way of saying cool because that way of cool means you're trying to be cool.
And when you're cool, you're posturing.
So I was always trying to figure out what cool was because, as we spoke about earlier, my mom skipped me too many grades.
I got my high school diploma in the mail because I graduated as a junior.
And the attempt to be cool— or even cool was never gonna pay off if you're younger than everybody else.
But what Lester was saying was exactly that.
When you're posturing, you're never there.
He said that they had done that to music.
They had made music a lifestyle posture, not the thing that's ripped from the soul of everyone, from Van Morrison to the guys who made Louie Louie.
That's real.
And everything else is just cool.
And I thought wow, so many of the musicians and the writers and the people that I came to love were not cool.
They couldn't even be cool.
It was like a lost pursuit.
But they found each other through music.
They found each other through this thing that gave you that feeling of being understood.
So...
I called the book The Uncool because it was the badge of honor that Lester put on me.
You know, don't try and do it.
Be whatever is real to you.
And that might be cool.
But the distinction between the two was pretty clear when he first started talking to me.
It's like he was kind of a rumpled genius who did not look at himself as cool, which made him, to me, legendary.
Well, also, he was saying like, I'm uncool, you're uncool.
You're not part of like the rock star tribe.
Exactly.
So don't fool yourself.
And maybe he was also implying you should be honored you're on my team.
Exactly.
And I got to tell you a tiny story, because when I wrote that scene.
When Lester in Almost Famous says you know we are uncool.
You know, and I met you.
You're not cool.
So I had this kind of... scene written in my head of like victory.
You know, Lester would say, you know, we are uncool.
You know, that's who we are.
And when it came time to film the scene this is the brilliance of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who Lester, I think, would have loved playing him philip seymour hoppin said like what, what if we do this scene?
Like we are the only two people awake in the world me and the character william miller and i'm i'm gonna tell him quietly who we are.
We are uncool, And it was that time, as a director, where you go?
Thank God I have like this person playing this part, who takes your words that you wrote in a quiet room and sends them into a whole other world of meaning.
And that's one of the other reasons why I used the title The Uncool, because it reminds me of like the lineage of Lester and what he told me.
And it ended up in the hands of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who landed it in a way that Lester truly meant as a gift to me, not as a warrior cry.
Cameron Crowe, it's really been a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Really enjoyed this.
Cameron Crowe's new memoir is called The Uncool.
The new season of The Diplomat, starring Keri Russell, is now streaming on Netflix.
Our TV critic David Bianculli will have a review after a short break.
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The Diplomat, the Netflix drama series starring Keri Russell as a career American diplomat and ambassador to Britain, has returned for its third season.
One of its prominent guest stars from season two, Allison Janney, who plays Vice President Grace Penn, has been promoted this season on screen and off.
Janie is now a series regular and this season she welcomes a new guest star, Bradley Whitford, her former co-star from The West Wing.
He plays her husband, and our TV critic, David Bianculli, says it's a fabulous example of stunt casting.
Here's his review.
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 CJ.
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.
We can't put the president on the plane we have here.
What?
It doesn't have the comms package.
We're scrambling 747-9000.
It's in... Washington.
Billy.
14 hours until she's back?
More like 16.
No, not okay.
We need to swear her in like now.
And not on foreign soil.
On the plane?
Is the plane America?
The plane is not America.
Then when we hit American airspace?
That's still 12 hours from now.
The embassy is, right?
It's American soil.
It's not.
People come to the embassy and claim asylum because it's American soil.
And then they don't get asylum because it's not American soil.
She's already president.
She was president the moment he stopped breathing.
You don't want to explain the 25th Amendment to North Korea.
You want to publish a picture of her with one hand in the air and another on a Bible.
You have to do it here.
I'm okay if you don't talk.
She's right.
We need to do this within the hour.
Deborah Kahn, who created The Diplomat, won an Emmy as part of the writing team for The West Wing in 2003.
She also wrote for Homeland, one of the best TV series ever at dramatizing two opposing or shifting points of view.
So the complexity of The Diplomat isn't surprising, but it is impressive.
She even has Alex Graves, a veteran director of the West Wing, directing this new season's first two and final two episodes.
When the writing and the direction are this excellent and the actors every bit as good, scenes just soar.
The silences are as powerful as the dialogue, and every conversation is bound to shift the interpersonal dynamics, often profoundly.
As Kate helps Grace prepare for her swearing-in ceremony, adjusting Grace's outfit in the bathroom mirror, Grace takes the opportunity to confess and Kate takes the opportunity to mend fences.
I killed him.
Not your husband.
No.
I killed a good man and a great president.
That's not what happened.
Of course it is.
He heard what I did and his heart halted.
You can just agree with me.
You don't have to kiss my ass.
You're the one who accused me of a terrorist plot.
I never said that.
That's right.
You accused me of botching a terrorist plot.
I said I would have done the same thing.
And yet you were trying to replace me with you.
As vice president, you were replaceable.
In your current role, you are not.
You didn't kill the president, ma'am.
You made a tough call.
In hindsight, nobody likes it, you included.
After Grace is installed as president, her husband Todd, played by Janney's former West Wing co-star Bradley Whitford, is flown to London and is reunited with her in the London embassy.
They exchange a hug and swap disbelieving expletives.
But it's not a private moment.
Kate's husband, Hal, who greeted Todd and escorted him to where Grace was waiting, stuck around.
So he could talk to the brand new president about his own spouse, Kate.
Hal Weiler, ambassador's wife.
Todd Penn, first lady.
They put her in the ambassador's office.
It's in here.
How?
I'll show you the corner of the office where the husband sits and tries not to look diminished.
Holy .
Holy .
I don't know.
I'll get out of here.
I'm so sorry.
I just need to have a second.
I need to make sure you understand that my wife is your vice president.
Every misery you've suffered at our hands has been me, not her.
Her play for your job, that was my idea.
She hated it from the jump.
The call to the president, she knew nothing about.
She would never have allowed it.
She is the fiercest advocate you will ever have, and she is effective.
Bradley Whitford, as the new first gentleman, isn't around much.
He vanishes after the first episode, but comes back strong, very strong, for the final ones.
When he and Janney share scenes, they're lovely, even when the characters are fighting.
Meanwhile, Kate's husband Hal is this season's secret weapon.
I adore this series for its intelligence, its wit, and its confrontations.
But most of all, I love its unpredictability.
All eight episodes of Season 3 are available now, and there are unexpected developments the entire way.
All I'll tell you is, the cliffhanger this season is one I never saw coming.
When you get there, I hope you'll be as knocked out by it as I was.
Our TV critic, David Bianculli, reviewed the new season of The Diplomat, which is streaming on Netflix.
Tomorrow on Fresh Air, our guest will be Judd Apatow.
His new book Comedy Nerd is filled with never-before-published photos, handwritten letters and early script drafts.
He'll share some related memories, including the childhood obsessions that led to comedies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Freaks and Geeks.
I hope you'll join us.
To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air.
Thank you by Phyllis Myers, Anne Rebo, Donato Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Daya Chaloner, Susan Yakundi and Anna Bauman.
Our digital media producer is Molly C.V.
Nesper.
Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson.
Roberta Shorrock directs the show.
Our co-host is Tanya Mosley.
I'm Terry Gross.
This message comes from Dignity Memorial and Memphis Funeral Home, one of their nationwide providers.
Retired football coach Bill Muir shares how they curated a memory table for his wife Barbara, that brought joy to family and friends at her celebration of life.
If you walked around this table, when you got to the end, you knew Barbara Muir.
I walked around it at least a dozen times.
I mentioned that she liked to play Scrabble.
Well, they had a Scrabble board there and on the Scrabble board it spelled out the names of all of our grandchildren.
There was a decal from her high school.
You know her sister.
She walked around and said to me Bill, how do they know so much about Barbara?
Their meticulous care and the detail in which they put it together speaks volumes.
I felt very special.
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