Getting outsmarted by a TV show: It’s a high I chase like Ahab chased the white whale. It’s not that I’m some supergenius drama savant, or conversely that every series, even in the New Golden Age of Television, is #actually dopey. Rather, it’s that even the best, smartest, most surprising shows pull their shocks and showstoppers from a painstakingly assembled deck of dramaturgical cards. When you get past that initial jaw-on-the-floor reaction to a particularly impressive or unpredictable scene, you almost invariably follow that feeling up with “Ohhhhh, of course.” Whether transcendent moment or twist, it was retrospectively inevitable. That’s exactly what makes for a good show, usually! So when a show completely laps your ability to click its pieces into place, when it does something you know you could have sat in its writers’ room for months and still never have come up with, hoo boy, chills. That’s something special.
With a lede graf like that, it has to be good, right? I reviewed this week’s brilliant episode of The Americans for the New York Observer.
Tags: new york observer, reviews, The Americans, TV, TV reviews