Tragic timeliness and timelessness doesn’t make up for the scrawniness of Richard Greenberg’s play.
Scene after scene transpires as a discussion about togetherness—as eternal ideal and currency.
The Americans is the rolling stone that gathers no moss.
Maybe the ultimate project of The Americans is to recognize its characters’ collective disillusionment.
Another week, another episode of The Americans that’s notable for its pervasive lack of hurry.
The producers of The Americans are more than aware that they’re playing a very, very long game with their audience.
The latest episode of The Americans is practically a treatise on the psychodynamic theory of guilt.
The episode is unique in the canon of the series for the sterling self-reflexivity of its sense of humor.
The attention to behavioral detail that goes into any given episode of The Americans is unlike that of any other show.
The series proves once again that action need not be explosive to be effective.
The real danger in the world of The Americans is that one fails to notice they’re being crushed.
The episode frames its constituent parts as opposing forces, but in the end each element contributes to a coherent, if half-hidden, whole.
The episode is, in one sense, a portrait of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
“The Rat” reaffirms one of the show’s central ideas that all of us are, to a certain extent, hiding in plain sight.
The episode tightens the vise around the characters as if to test their instincts.
Indeed, it’s another faintly electronic rhythm, this one a music cue, that sends this dazzling season of The Americans hurtling toward its conclusion.
A morass of lies, betrayals and undetonated bombs, “Divestment” isn’t about civil disobedience but vengeance plain and simple.
The Americans traditionally finds suspense in the slow, summative effect of its wary glances and closed doors.
A master class in suspense, not only of spies caught in a tightening net, but also of characters whose choices begin to feel less like liberty and more like entrapment.