The Americans was a thriller. I don’t mean in general. I mean “Once, The Americans was a thriller.” For a while it wasn’t much else. The show’s first season was lauded to the heavens, and—from the ferocity and agency of Keri Russell’s co-antihero Elizabeth Jennings to the bold and clever use of Big ‘80s pop—not without reason. Yet it lacked the quiet, the dread, and the terrible empathy that would come to define the series. Early Americans opted instead for violent high-stakes spy games among its principals, the likes of which The Americans as we know it today would take a full season or more to build up to, if it were to show them at all. Recall that Stan Beeman murdered a man, and that at one point Elizabeth and Claudia—Claudia—have a physical fight as part of a quickly resolved side-plot. Either of these events would now drive a dozen episodes.
The show tightened up significantly during its second season. It was helped by its terrific antagonist, a closeted Navy SEAL whose innate all-American fascism blossomed forth spectacularly when he had a chance to serial-kill his way to the Soviet agents that blackmailed him into becoming an informant. But its main purpose was setting up what was to become the central conflict of the series: Philip and Elizabeth’s decision to follow orders and recruit their teenage daughter Paige into the KGB. The plight of a Soviet defector whom Philip kidnaps and repatriates was a major leap forward for the show too, in terms of taking the suffering of the Jennings’ victims as seriously as the suffering of the Jennings themselves.
This is the terrible empathy that would reach full flower in the form of Martha, the FBI secretary who falls in love with and marries Philip’s alter ego “Clark.” An act of profound cruelty on Philip’s part, it forms a moral abscess the show never really stops probing, as surely as Philip using pliers to rip one of his “real” wife Elizabeth’s teeth out. This is the trademark of The Americans, once it truly became The Americans: taking the time to linger on pain.
All this is to say that “START,” the end of The Americans, suffers from a structural disadvantage, one that sets it at irrevocable odds with the series at its best. Everything that happens in this final hour-plus happens here and only here, because there are no other hours. There’s no place left to linger. And in the absence of the ability to wallow in the guilt and shame and horror of it all, The Americans becomes a thriller once more.
I reviewed the final episode of The Americans for Decider. I wasn’t crazy about it. This was a great show with an adequate finale, one that for all its many strengths (I go into them in detail and was not immune to their power) was both too much and not enough. Having such mixed feelings about the last episode of such a great show was a difficult position to be in, so I took writing them out very seriously, and I hope that shows.
Tags: decider, reviews, The Americans, TV, TV reviews