The situation is now so grave one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
The Americans is as full of formal coups as any of its more flashy brethren.
Creator Joe Weisberg and executive producer Joel Fields discuss season four of The Americans.
The show understands that in the wrong hands, belief, whether ideological or supernatural, may be no more than a kissing cousin to the violence it justifies.
Indeed, it’s another faintly electronic rhythm, this one a music cue, that sends this dazzling season of The Americans hurtling toward its conclusion.
It prepares the characters to reel in the big fish they’ve been tracking lately, yet never quite assuages the niggling feeling that these efforts will become a tangled mess.
Trust, you might say, is simply the time we spend waiting for the other shoe to drop, and in The Americans, it always does.
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.
The second half of “Born Again” features a number of tautly composed images that jostle against each other as if conflicting emotions.
“Salang Pass” deploys its constellation of ruses and false identities to examine the question at the heart of The Americans.
Professionals in the art of reading people are most vulnerable to misapprehension when their judgment is clouded by the personal.
“Baggage” uses Philip and Elizabeth’s respective reactions to Annalise’s death as an entrée into the subject of childrearing.
“EST Men” frames the debate between Philip and Elizabeth in universal terms: How do you raise a child?
Throughout The Americans, there’s an ever-present sense of an unwieldy narrative arc being perpetually built up, which has become a noticeable trend in primetime television.
Despite all the time spent focusing on the spycraft, subterfuge, and secret messages, The Americans is surprisingly straightforward.