The Americans is TV’s tensest show — that’s a given. It can make life-and-death cat-and-mouse suspense out of something as banal as big clunky cars moving at the speed limit through suburban streets, or couples snooping around a divorcé’s home office during an open house. (And that’s just last week.) But to keep an audience on the edge of its (toilet) seat in a scene where nothing happens because nothing can happen? Because someone’s desperately searching for something that doesn’t exist? That takes skill bordering on virtuosity. And it takes really, really good synthpop.
No disrespect to Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell, but this was Vince Clark and Alison Moyet’s episode. As Yaz, the duo’s combination of Clark’s chilly electronic melodies and Moyet’s heartwrenching marvel of a voice was one of the early ‘80s most influential sounds. (Their album Upstairs at Eric’s probably should have been issued by the City as an educational measure for anyone attending a concert in New York during the early to mid ‘00s.) Here, it gave Agent Stan Beeman’s search for evidence that the Russian defector Zinaida is in fact a double agent a lunatic urgency. The thwap of the drum machine, the stabbing synth hook, Moyet singing her goddamn guts out — it transformed a slightly (if justifiably) paranoid man’s ransacking of a women’s restroom into an action setpiece. As uses of music on TV this year go, it’ll be tough to top.
But damn if the show didn’t try before the episode was even out. In his new guise as Jim, a dashing beer-industry lobbyist and fake-ID expert (quite a skill set), Philip is creepily, unhappily wooing Kimmy, the rebellious teenage daughter of a high-ranking CIA Afghan Group agent. The soundtrack of seduction: Yaz, Upstairs at Eric’s, the very album he’d given to his own teenage daughter Paige as a present after learning about it from Kimmy. As the almost impossibly sweet and romantic “Only You” plays, Kimmy dances for “Jim,” doing her best Audrey Horne, before snuggling into him for comfort. Watching Philip try to split the difference between giving himself over to the honeytrap like he’s done so many times before and pulling back due to the impossible-to-miss immorality of the act, you can’t help but wonder how he’s hearing this song, who he imagines singing it to.
Sorry for the illness-induced delay in posting this, but I reviewed this week’s typically fine episode of The Americans for the New York Observer.
Tags: new york observer, reviews, The Americans, TV, TV reviews