“Apperceptive mass” is a fancy psychological term for the way our prior experience colors our perceptions. I first heard it back in film school as a useful critical concept to explain our evolving relationship with movie stars: the way a Tom Cruise or a Denzel Washington, to give two examples, carry the baggage of everything we’ve seen them do before into each new role. I would argue that even chameleonic character actors—Gary Oldman, say, or the queen of transformation herself, Meryl Streep—have a similar stickiness. It’s as if our minds can’t help but unconsciously form a shadow narrative in which each new character is a fresh iteration of a beloved actor’s previous roles.

In the crackerjack Netflix series “The Diplomat,” which recently dropped its fourth season, Keri Russell isn’t playing a continuation of Elizabeth Jennings, the tough Russian spy she memorably assayed over six seasons in “The Americans,” any more than Elizabeth was a latter-day incarnation of Felicity Porter, the curly-haired college student that first made Russell’s name in the 1990s in “Felicity.” But there’s no mistaking the way the role of Kate Wyler, the brash, flinty U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom who is the title role of “The Diplomat,” calls back to previous Russell characters: the tomboyish flair that finds her most at home in loose-fitting two-piece pantsuits, the towering poise that barely conceals a racing mind, her constant renegotiations in a complicated working marriage.

Let me put it this way: “The Diplomat” is an exceptionally smart show on many levels, and one of its savviest moves is the way it applies Russell’s peculiar mix of gravity and momentum, fire and ice, to the hard-driving character of Kate. Even the show’s insights into the ways women in power are expected to look and behave rhyme subtly but powerfully with the similar expectations placed on women in Hollywood, including Russell. When Kate is obligated to don an evening gown, she can work it—but we can always see her eyeing the exit, and counting the minutes till she can ditch her heels.

The show’s creator, Debora Cahn, cut her teeth as a writer on “The West Wing” and a show runner on “Homeland,” and the imprint of both shows is clear. Like those shows, “The Diplomat” constructs a more-or-less believable alternate reality that resonates with our current politics without slavishly mirroring them. Its plotting is deft, tricky and cliffhanger-prone. It is also almost perversely counterintuitive, imagining a timeline in which the most consequential rivalry facing the United States is also its oldest—i.e., with England, as led by a terrifically hotheaded Tory prime minister, Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear).

It is maybe this big counterfactual swing that helps the show mostly resist the temptation, famously indulged by “The West Wing” during the Bush years, to give liberal viewers the wish fulfillment fantasy of a thoughtful, statesmanlike presidency we are conspicuously lacking. The temptation must be overwhelming, amid the toxic shambles of the Trump administration’s foreign policy, to valorize the deliberative and diplomatic skills of the show’s characters. But, arguably until the dramatic finale of the new season, “The Diplomat” has avoided giving viewers easy, cheer-able triumphs.

Instead, what the show gives us is a bracingly plausible world in which even the most brilliant public servants do not necessarily act in good faith—indeed, where the more adept operators are often the most dangerous. In its gimlet-eyed view of the corridors of power, “The Diplomat” often recalls the Machiavellian machinations of “House of Cards,” though it thankfully doesn’t share that show’s withering cynicism.

And unlike that show and countless others with political themes, it has the considerable merit of taking the disagreements among its characters deadly seriously. Throughout the show, and in the new season in particular, the question of whether the American president, Grace Penn (Alison Janney), is a singular menace remains tantalizingly open. Is she merely a more elegant, well-spoken avatar of Trump-style, America First bluster—or something more interesting and farsighted? 

At one point, she’s defending her belligerent approach vis-à-vis a standoff with Russia to the First Gentleman, her husband, Todd (played, in a bit of “West Wing” fan service, by Bradley Whitford). Of the strenuous objections of her cabinet and diplomatic corps, she says, “They want a plan they feel good about when it fails. I want one that feels bad, looks worse, and might actually work.” Do we believe her? Or is the show’s judgment closer to the terse pronouncement of her razor-sharp chief of staff, Billie (Nana Mensah), that Grace is “unfit for office”?

The show’s other similarity to “House of Cards” is the extent to which it is informed, or perhaps haunted, by the problematic power couple Bill and Hillary Clinton. Whereas the earlier Netflix drama took for granted the cold transactional logic behind a marriage of convenience, “The Diplomat” explores a spectrum of relationships on a continuum from passionate to businesslike. At the heart of the show is Kate’s frustrating, fascinating partnership with Hal (Rufus Sewell), a talented if volatile diplomatic star who alternately boosts and undermines his wife’s career, and who has never met a back channel he didn’t want to chase. The on-again, off-again coupling of Kate’s sensitive deputy, Stuart (Ato Essendoh), with a brusque CIA operative, Eidra (Ali Ahn), plays as a mostly comic, occasionally touching subplot about the vagaries of a workplace romance in a high-stakes setting.

But it is Grace Penn’s brittle presidency that most troublingly evokes the Clinton specter, suggesting at times a nightmarish manifestation of the worst fears about what a hawkish Hillary Clinton administration might have looked like. The more Grace is challenged and doubted, the harder she pushes back, as if to prove her commander-in-chief bona fides. You could argue that this is not a welcome narrative in a nation that has still failed to elect a woman to its highest office. I would argue that a TV show has no responsibility to uplift or coddle our political preferences, and that I consider it a step forward to have a show that doesn’t merely heroize or idealize its women characters. Instead, “The Diplomat” pays them the respect of complication.

Rob Weinert-Kendt, an arts journalist and editor of American Theatre magazine, has written for The New York Times and Time Out New York.