Weird ‘Flix, but okay: 2018 saw a certain streaming behemoth finally achieve the approximate cultural reach and clout the Big Four broadcast networks still enjoyed as recently as a decade ago. Unfortunately, the level of artistic quality and risk-taking roughly followed suit.

But even the algorithm-assisted return of TV monoculture—you can have any flavor you like, as long as it’s a flavor our data indicates you’ve enjoyed before—couldn’t stamp out the hard-earned gains television has made as an art form since Tony Soprano woke up that morning 20 years ago. Shows predicated on the idea that challenging your audience is a vital part of entertaining that audience, even if it’s an audience you have to will into existence in the process, are still out there.

Television can still make even a jaded viewer sob with sorrow and joy, recoil in suspense and terror, stare in silent (or shouting!) awe at the sheer emotional and aesthetic audacity of it all. Between them, the eight shows below did all that for me and more.

8. On Cinema at the Cinema (Adult Swim)

Now, nobody likes a good laugh more than I do. But comedy is about making people laugh, which turns characters in comedies into joke-delivery mechanisms rather than characters in the fully developed sense from which we derive value in drama. So it takes a lot for a comedy to make my list of the best the medium has to offer.

In the case of On Cinema, Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington’s byzantine saga of atrocious human behavior in the guise of a thumbs-up/thumbs-down movie-review show starring two idiots, here is what it took: Tim, the right-wing hedonist host whose endless series of jilted wives, abandoned children, unwatchable action-movie side projects, unlistenable alt-rock and dance-music spinoffs, disastrous alternative-medicine experiments, near-death experiences (including toxic shock from unsterilized acupuncture needles, malnourishment from an all-drug diet, and incineration after falling asleep with a lit cigarette in the storage locker cum VHS-tape library he’d been reduced to living in) culminated in a mistrial for murder after 20 kids died from smoking his tainted vape juice at an EDM festival. The subsequent tenth season of his movie-review show (“On Cinema X”) saw him caught between the diktats of the show’s snake-oil sponsor and the civil judgment won by the family of one of his victims.

Somewhere in there, he and Gregg may or may not have awarded Solo: A Star Wars Story their coveted Five Bags of Popcorn seal of approval; between Tim screaming obscenely about the district attorney (against whom he mounts a quixotic electoral campaign) and Gregg prattling on about how Tim Burton won’t answer his letters, it’s a bit hard to tell. Heidecker and Turkington have played out this shaggy-dog joke for years, anticipating (not kidding at all here) both the rise of Donald Trump and the role that aggrieved nerds would play as his cultural vanguard. The result is maybe the best thing the extended Tim & Eric universe has ever produced. Long may they rant.

I named the eight best television series of the year for Decider. I believe in all eight of these shows very deeply, which is why it’s just a top eight and not a larger, rounder number. I hope you enjoy them too.

10. Westworld: “Do the Strand” by Roxy Music

Few shows have been as guilty of music-cue abuse as Westworld. Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s leaden and labyrinthine sci-fi parable has folded an entire Spotify playlist of classic alt-ish rock songs into its narrative via instrumental arrangements by composer Ramin Djawadi. Give a listen to his best-in-field work on Game of Thrones and it’s painfully clear he can do much better than player-piano Radiohead or Japanophile remixes of Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” or whatever.

This is what makes Westworld’s in-world cranking of Roxy Music’s boisterous 1973 hit “Do the Strand” so remarkable. Blasted at full volume by James Delos (Peter Mullan), the Scottish founder of the Westworld theme park (and, unbeknownst to him, one of its core artificial-intelligence experiments), glam rock’s answer to Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” sounds as unexpected in the dour songscape of this series as Delos’s “dance like no one is watching” behavior looks. Yet Bryan Ferry’s hedonistic lyrical promise of the next big thing — “There’s a new sensation, a fabulous creation” — and Brian Eno’s retro-futuristic flourishes as the band’s in-house effects guy fit Westworld’s themes like they were engineered in a lab to do exactly that.

This is always one of my favorite pieces to do: I wrote about the 10 best music cues of 2018 for Vulture. Definitely stick around for Number One.

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.

9. Yaz, “Only You” (Season 3, Episode 4) / Pink Floyd, unspecified (Season 3, Episode 6)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPpHLK4SHt8

The Ballad(s) of Jim and Kimmy. Along with Peter Gabriel, Fleetwood Mac, and Roxy Music (don’t touch that dial, music fans!), Vince Clarke and Alison Moyet’s synth-soul duo Yaz — that’s Yazoo to us Yanks — were one of The Americans’ go-to artists. They were never employed better than when poor infatuated teenager Kimmy Breland played the group’s gorgeous love song “Only You” to “Jim,” the hipster weed-dealer alter ego Philip employs to gain access to her CIA father’s house. Sweet but never saccharine, it suits the dancing-in-the-moonlight ambience of the scene perfectly.

“Jim” returns the favor a few episodes later, with a truly brilliant non-music cue: Placing headphones on the ears of a very stoned Kimmy, he plays her an unnamed song by Pink Floyd, the mind-expanding beauty of which we’re left to imagine through watching the blissed-out expressions on the face of actor Julia Garner, then 21 and already a formidable talent. The heart of Kimmy and Jim’s relationship was a dark one, and it only got darker when she returned for the final season. But in these two scenes, Kimmy’s need to be acknowledged and understood, Philip’s desire to do right by a teenage girl while failing his own, and the power of music to transport and delight shine through anyway.

Combining three beats I love—The Americans, pop music, and the use of music by TV dramas—I wrote about the best music cues in the show’s history for Vulture.

“Is there anything I should know, as an FBI agent, about the Jennings family?”

“Philip and Elizabeth Jennings are not Russian spies.”

“Do you think it doesn’t matter who our leader is?”

“It was all for nothing, Elizabeth. You destroyed it all today.”

“I’ve always known, Mom. Every time, every lie, my whole life. And I know now.”

“Sex? Ha, what was sex? Nobody cared! Including your father!”

“Hi. I was hoping to make it home for dinner, but things are very topsy-turvy at the office.”

If you expected fireworks in the second-to-last episode of The Americans ever, you didn’t get them. Not in the usual sense anyway. Ever since The Sopranos established the structure for the contemporary drama’s short-season model — and certainly since Game of Thrones began using character-defining, character-destroying acts of violence to cement it — penultimate episodes have become the go-to spot for bodies to drop, en masse. (At least on shows where people kill other people for a living.) Yet the only prominent character to die here is Tatiana, the KGB agent based in the Soviet Rezidentura, whose relationship with Oleg Burov ended in career suicide for her when he outed her plan to steal weaponized biological agents to the FBI. Perhaps desperation is what drove her to accept a dangerous mission way out of her wheelhouse to assassinate a reformist negotiator; desperation is certainly what drove the Centre to ask her to do so, since their star agent refused. That star agent—”Jennings, Elizabeth,” as both the episode’s title and Stan Beeman’s computer list her—winds up killing Tatiana herself to stop the assassination. It’s over in seconds, and the eyewitnesses appear more confused than panicked. It’s the quietest public execution you can imagine.

No, this episode’s weapon of choice wasn’t weapons at all, but words. Over and over again, characters said things they’d never dared say before, or never had to, or never wanted to, or never even thought of. And no matter how soft-spoken the character or actor involved—The Americans is the most soft-spoken show on the air—each such line sliced through the show’s quiet like a knife.

I reviewed the beautiful penultimate episode of The Americans for Decider.

I once said The Americans is a great show for faces. I’ll now go a step further: The Americans is the greatest show for faces. Since the show’s third season at least, when it permanently slowed down the clip of its capers and became one of the most ruminative “thrillers” of all time, it has relied on long stretches of silence, on closeups held on faces as if actor and camera were in a staring contest, during which only a look in the eyes or a twinge in the cheek or a tightening or loosening of the lips can convey what’s really happening and what the people it’s happening to think about it. The only show that surpasses The Americans in this regard is the third season of Twin Peaks, which among its many other attributes studies the tectonics of faces with geological patience. Not coincidentally, Twin Peaks is also the last time I can remember that a show made me feel as nauseous, for as long, as this week’s episode of The Americans did.

Written by Joshua Brand and directed with series-standard restraint by Sylvain White, “The Summit” delivered a constant barrage of shocks to the storyline, belying its peacemaking title. Yet it was concerned less with those detonations than with their impact, spread across the faces of the characters involved.

I reviewed the faces of last night’s episode of The Americans for Decider.

It could have been worse. I sure thought it would be.

From a historical perspective, The Americans’ final season feels an awful lot like, well, The Sopranos’ final season. The similarities stem in part from the sensation that Season Five and Season Six are two halves of one larger run, with the sense of anticlimax that pervaded last year’s finale actually serving as a “stay tuned” for the final ten episodes this year. The Sopranos, you’ll recall, divided its final season into two parts, a model adopted by heirs to the throne like Mad Men and Breaking Bad as well. If The Americans disguised this by solidifying the split with different numerical designations, it’s kind of fitting.

But it’s the dreadful feeling, the awful feeling, shared by The Americans and The Sopranos in the end that stands out to me in “Harvest,” this week’s episode, and throughout this final season in general. Maybe it’s the presence of that cancer-stricken artist, who’s now so racked with pain she looks like she has a seizure disorder even as she barks orders at Elizabeth so she can keep making art until the end. Maybe it’s the return via flashback of Dylan Baker’s bioweapons-expert character, dying of a self-inflicted hemorrhagic viral infection as he talks to Stan Beeman about how the Jennings live the American dream. Whatever it is, there’s something sickly, diseased in the atmosphere. It permeates even the most innocuous or cheery scenes. So when Philip and Elizabeth embark on their most difficult mission yet, one in which failure could lead to the dismantling of their entire network, while at the same time their neighbor Stan grows more and more suspicious of his friends each time we see him…I expected a catastrophe. Somehow, not getting one, not yet anyway, feels even worse.

I reviewed last week’s tense episode of The Americans for Decider.

Let’s talk about silence. I mean, the Jennings family certainly does this week, and how can we go wrong following their example? Elizabeth discusses it in the context of Rififi, the classic French crime movie by blacklisted American director Jules Dassin. She watches the film in an attempt to ingratiate herself with one Jackson Barber, a handsome young film buff who works for Senator Sam Nunn, a key player in the arms-reduction negotiations she’s spent the season trying to undermine. The movie features a heist sequence that clocks in at something close to half an hour without a single word spoken. You can see how this would appeal to Elizabeth, who knows how these kinds of things work—and to The Americans, which has worked out so well in large part by following in its footsteps.

Elizabeth talks about silence again with her son Henry, in a painful phone conversation the pleasantries of which reveal long-standing estrangement between her and the child she didn’t bother recruiting. Henry complains about having to read Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s treatise on the virtues of quiet contemplation. “It’s important literature, apparently,” he verbally eye-rolls; critics of this show’s slow-burn approach no doubt know how he feels.

Yet Henry picks up on something hidden inside Elizabeth’s strategic silences: pain that she’s struggling, in vain, to cloak in small talk. “She was asking about school and the weather,” he tells his father Philip about the call. “It was weird, because she doesn’t really call me? We barely ever talk, but all of a sudden she’s calling from a business trip and asking me about English class.” He concludes with a casual observation that hits her husband like a Mack truck: “I don’t understand why she’s so unhappy.” She never said a word to that effect, bur her silence spoke volumes.

I reviewed the sixth episode of The Americans (from a couple weeks back) for Decider.

Can people change? The question drives many of the New Golden Age of Television’s greatest shows. Arguably it drives the New Golden Age of Television. To the extent that the medium’s rebirth coincides with the seismic upheavals in American life in the time period that stretches from 9/11 through the election of Barack Obama to the ascension of Donald Trump, the question may resonate because it’s so similar to the one we’ve been asking ourselves as a country for over half a generation.

Can people change? Different shows have come up with different answers. The Sopranos says no. Deadwood says yes, but at a cost. The Wire says the system prevents change, so “n/a.” Mad Men says yes, eventually. Breaking Bad (and its doom-laden prequel Better Call Saul) says yes, for the worse. The Walking Dead says yes, for the worse, and that’s good, which is why the show is bad.  Game of Thrones says we’d better fucking hope so.

Can people change? After watching “The Great Patriotic War” — an appropriate title for one of the most upsetting episodes of this series yet — I think The Americans is saying yes and no, simultaneously. Perhaps this, more than the simple fact of having co-ed co-protagonists, is its real innovation in the antihero genre. It’s telling two stories at once, chronicling two competing theories of the world. It’s its own cold war.

I reviewed last week’s episode of The Americans for Decider. I’m proud of what I was able to do with this review (and, in a different way, that headline).

I’ll close with one of my favorite-ever scenes of allegorically resonant sickness in a series that’s been full of them: Elizabeth in her home-care disguise, taking her patient to a World Series party so she can spy on the woman’s husband and a potential double agent with in the Russian negotiating team, then getting vomited on as the dying artist panics and gushes up food and fluid from her disease-ridden guts. It’s Elizabeth who pushed the woman into attending the party in the first place so she’d have a chance to spy first-hand; it’s Elizabeth who talked her and her husband out of euthanasia to keep the information channel open; it’s the hated Russian negotiator who rushes over to help clean the vomit by Elizabeth’s side.

As best we can tell, Elizabeth’s primary reaction to the incident is dismay that it interrupted the taped conversation between her husband and the Russian. But earlier in the episode, the artist told Elizabeth she wishes she’d spent less time painting and more time with her spouse “The work is the best of me,” she thought, “something to leave behind. But really, who cares? Who cares. All those hours, just…honestly, I wish I’d spent them with Glenn. Just being with him, doing I don’t know what. Just…doesn’t matter.” Something’s eating Elizabeth up from the inside, too: her work. “There’s something rotten about it,” Oleg says to Philip; perhaps that’s why the artist vomits three times, once for each of Elizabeth’s victims earlier in the episode. Will Elizabeth listen to the woman whose suffering she’s aiding and abetting and get out before any more lives are wasted, with bullets or otherwise?

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Americans for Decider. This is such a rewarding show to write about. It’s got so much to give.

“I am alone without them, here. Alone.” This line — delivered by Soviet hockey player turned double agent turned defector turned likely divorcé Gennadi to the FBI agent he considers his only friend, Stan Beeman — hit me harder than anything else in this week’s episode of The Americans. As a reminder, this week’s episode of The Americans opened with Elizabeth Jennings washing a man’s brains and blood off her face, then yelling at her traumatized daughter Paige for making the unforgivable mistake of running toward the scene to make sure her own mom was still alive. It includes Elizabeth straight-up lying to Paige about the nature of the man’s death, which she calls a suicide without mentioning that “assisted suicide” is closer to the mark but still woefully inadequate. It includes Elizabeth rolling some poor sap who may have been her easiest mark ever, effortlessly getting him to tell her everything he knows about the weak spots at the secure warehouse where he works before grabbing him from behind and choking him to death on his way out the door. It includes Stan apologizing to his old ally Oleg Burov for his inadvertent role in the CIA threatening him and his family should he refuse to turn double agent, and Oleg rejecting the apology. It includes Philip Jennings growing so alarmed about Elizabeth’s contempt for the United States and oblique hints about her participation in some kind of power struggle against Mikhail Gorbachev that he accepts Oleg’s proposal to spy on, and potentially act to stop, his own wife. If you’re in the market to get hit hard, this is an embarrassment of riches.

So why did this line from a minor character in the grand scheme of things affect me so much? “I am alone without them, here. Alone.” When he says this, Gennadi has been unceremoniously yanked from his double life in the middle of the airport, where in the middle of one of his courier missions Stan approaches him saying he understands he’s requested political asylum — an agreed-upon signal that he’s at risk and must end his life in the Soviet Union forever. Stan’s old partner Dennis Aderholt does the same with Gennadi’s wife Sofia, the TASS news agency worker who helped the flip Gennadi in the first place, but who’s now so unhappy in their marriage that she’s leaking secrets to her new beau, some unseen guy named Bogdan. Other agents pick up her son Ilya from elementary school. The protection they’ll need as defectors ensures that they’ll be moved far away; if the divorce goes through, they’ll be moved to separate locations where they’ll be unreachable to one another. So Sofia moves ahead with her plan to divorce him, Gennadi will never see her or Ilya again. What all of this means for Gennadi is that he’s lost his homeland, his home life, both of his jobs, and his family in the space of an afternoon. He is a man without a country.

Is there a better way to describe each individual member of the Jennings family?

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Americans for Decider. As an aside, it’s nice that the soundtrack calmed down a bit.

If I had to sum up this hour-long portrait of how Elizabeth’s studied, professionally mandated distance from the emotional needs of other people — except insofar as they can be instrumentalized and weaponized — is slowly destroying her, I’d do it with an exchange she has with Claudia. Elizabeth can’t help but see how Paige has responded to the woman’s grandmotherly presence in her life. “The way Paige has taken to you,” Elizabeth says to Claudia, “if something were to happen to me at any point…” Your mind fills in the blank before Elizabeth can do so herself — surely she wants Claudia to care for her daughter in the event of her own death — until Elizabeth finishes the thought: “I think you could finish with her.” Just as when she uses her children as a ploy to get the general to let down his guard when he pulls out the gun she’ll eventually use to kill him, the mission is the priority, not the well-being of another person, not even that of her own daughter. It’s clear where that leads them both.

I reviewed last week’s episode of The Americans, in which Paige gets a good look at her mother’s monstrousness, for Decider.

Elizabeth Jennings sits in a cafe in Mexico City and learns that the leader of the Soviet Union will be murdered if he agrees to deactivate his country’s top-secret plan for retaliatory nuclear annihilation. She learns this not in a warning, but in a demand for her assistance. Making an end-run around her superiors back home, a man from the Soviet army has come to recruit her to spy on Gorbachev’s team at a disarmament summit. Her job is to make sure that the Strangelovian project — codenamed “Dead Hand,” because why fuck around — is not on the bargaining table. If it is, she is to report back, and history will change forever.

As she learns this information, which will culminate in her receipt of a necklace with a poison pill hidden inside in order to protect the sanctity of Dead Hand should she ever be captured, Peter Gabriel’s “We Do What We’re Told” rises in volume on the soundtrack, higher and higher, until the only reason we can make out her contact’s words is because we can read their subtitled translations. It’s a clever callback to The Americans‘ first episode and its use of “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins — another eerie solo standout from a Genesis alum that was famously used in the soundtrack for Miami Vice some thirty years ago. But it’s also away to focus our attention not on the mission, but the shock of receiving it. The Americans deploys quiet and wordlessness as effectively as any show on TV; so many of its standout performers (Noah Emmerich, Brandon J. Dirden, Costa Ronin) are strikingly soft-spoken, and many of its best moments consist of characters just standing and staring at something they can only just bear to see. This isn’t an option in the middle of receiving your marching orders, so the show does the next best thing: It drowns them out. Elizabeth herself is quiet, but there’s a tumult in her head.

[…]

Watching The Americans in 2018 is a much different experience than watching The Americans in 2013 — not just because it’s much better show than it was during that first season (a reasonably enjoyable thriller and not much more), nor because during the 2012 election liberal pundits treated Mitt Romney describing Russia as our enemy as a gaffe while now many of those same pundits are out to start a new Cold War against the country and its ex-KGB leader. You get a little closer when you start talking about why — Russian meddling in 2016 election and influence peddling with its Electoral College–appointed winner Donald Trump and his minions — but only if you treat that as the starting point rather than the finish.

Should even the worst of the allegations against the Putin and Trump governments turn out to be true, they’re basically just tit for tat if you go back to what happened after Gorbachev, when America helped establish an oligarchy by kicking off a capitalist fire sale in the country, and intervened directly and more or less openly to ensure Putin predecessor Boris Yeltsin presided over it. A slightly, but only slightly, less dramatic looting of the commons by corporations, their wealthy viziers, and their paid representatives in the United States government took place here at home. And there’d be no Trump on whose behalf to meddle if our own grotesque racism, sexism, xenophobia, gutting of the social safety net, and worship of money hadn’t made him possible.

In short, it’s much, much harder than it used to be for all but the most blinkered patriots, liberal or conservative, to look at America and Russia’s recent history and see good guys and bad guys. History is a palimpsest, rewritten as we go. And as with Elizabeth in that cafe, things that used to be sound perfectly clear are getting harder and harder to hear.

I reviewed the final season premiere of The Americans for Decider, where I’ll be covering this very special show until the end.

Underdog TV: Better Call Saul, The Americans, & Halt and Catch Fire

Your illustrious co-hosts are back on the television beat for a full episode on three underwatched shows very close to our collective heart: Breaking Bad prequel Better Call Saul, Cold War spy thriller The Americans, and tech-industry drama Halt and Catch Fire. Those capsule descriptions are entirely inadequate for capturing these series’ depth, heart, intelligence, and skill, of course, and this episode is our attempt to do so ourselves. (Honestly, Stefan is so insightful about all three shows that Sean pretty much takes the episode off other than to chime in with the occasional “I agree,” but he tries his best to keep up anyway!) Note: We kept our conversation SPOILER FREE in terms of big spoilable moments, so if you’re curious about any of the shows but want to know more about them before pulling the trigger, this is your chance!

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Sean’s profile of Halt and Catch Fire for Esquire.

Sean’s recent essay on Better Call Saul for Rolling Stone.

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Best Actor in a Drama
Sterling K. Brown, This Is Us
Anthony Hopkins, Westworld
Bob Odenkirk, Better Call Saul
Matthew Rhys, The Americans
Liev Schreiber, Ray Donovan
Kevin Spacey, House of Cards
Milo Ventimiglia, This Is Us

WILL WIN: Here’s a Drama category in which the absence of Game of Thrones actually doesn’t wreak havoc, since HBO nominates everyone from Peter Dinklage to Kit Harington in the Best Supporting Actor slot. Plus, last year’s winner – Mr. Robot‘s Rami Malek – isn’t even nominated this year, so the field is wide open. Our guess is that the mass appeal of This Is Us gives the excellent Sterling K. Brown an edge over the star power of Anthony Hopkins on Westworld, whose show has plenty of other opportunities to take home trophies.

SHOULD WIN: Matthew Rhys and Bob Odenkirk are both plumbing such depths of unhappiness on The Americans and Better Call Saul that their performances should come with an antidepressant prescription; we’d give either of them the gold, particularly over such “well, we’ve got to nominate these guys again, I guess” choices as Schreiber and Spacey. Let’s go with Odenkirk, thanks to his material’s higher degree of difficulty this year.

ROBBED: Rami Malek won the Emmy in 2016 for his indispensable work on Mr. Robot; this year he wasn’t even nominated. The yeoman’s work that Justin Theroux has done on The Leftovers for years deserved recognition. And while we realize the networks decide which actor is submitted for which character, it’s nutty that Jeffrey Wright got tapped for Westworld‘s Best Supporting Actor and Sir Anthony got Best Actor, rather than the other way around. But tops on the list is Michael McKean on Better Call Saul, delivering a performance of such profound misery that you’ll forget Spinal Tap and Laverne & Shirley within minutes.

The tradition continues: I took a stab at predicting the outcome of all the major categories at this coming Sunday’s Emmy Awards for Rolling Stone. I have no truck with awards shows as barometers of quality, but they can be a lot of fun to analyze like a sport.

SPOILER ALERT

“The Soviet Division,” as the finale is called, ends with Elizabeth insisting that they can’t return to the Soviet Union as planned. Philip’s intel about Kimmy’s father, who’s slated to take over the titular branch of the CIA, is too valuable for them to retire now. Philip himself seemed to realize this when he brought it to Elizabeth in the first place, instead of simply discarding the recording that revealed it as was his original instinct. People will see this as an enormous anticlimax, and they may even be right—I certainly double-checked the time stamp on the episode just to make sure this really was the end of the season. But never believe this season of The Americans had nothing to say. It may have been more discursive and elliptical than previous efforts, likely a result of its first-ever guaranteed subsequent season. But what a menacing statement it makes about how much we rely on our family, and how willing we are to distort and destroy it to get what we need and want.

I reviewed the unusual season finale of The Americans for the New York Observer.

Elizabeth Jennings can quit anytime she wants. No, really, she means it this time. She’s had enough of the lying and fucking and killing, nevermind that the last bit wouldn’t even have happened had she not voluntarily stepped in and pulled the trigger last time around. She’s ready to quit the spy game go home, honest. Any day now. Until then, though, there’s appearances that have to be maintained. She’s got to fish her daughter Paige’s discarded crucifix out of the trash and give it back to her—not because she worries the kid is rejecting something important to her just to please her atheist parents, but because her Christian mentor Pastor Tim hasn’t quite been shipped out of the country by their paymasters yet and until that happens the lie must be maintained. She’s not a spy. She’s an addict.

I reviewed this week’s tense penultimate episode of The Americans Season Five for the New York Observer.

I marvel at Irina Dubova, the actor who plays the ill-fated “Natalie Granholm,” whose sad fate occupies the final reel of the episode and whose hometown, “Dyatkovo” gives it its name. The weight placed on this guest player’s shoulders, to bear the brunt of the hatred and horror and violence that has been brewing for episode after episode all season long. The need to lie convincingly, and then lie unconvincingly, and then tell the truth unconvincingly, and then tell the truth so convincingly it tears your goddamn guts out. “Natalie” was once someone else entirely—a teenage girl whose family was murdered by the Einsatzgruppen, the roving killing squads responsible for conducting the Nazi Holocaust on the move throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. She was gang-pressed into working for them afterwards, you see. And worse than accepting her punishment from Elizabeth and Philip, tasked by the Centre with executing her for the crime, is the idea of this happening in front of her American husband. “Please don’t hurt him,” she says. “Please, he doesn’t know,” she says. “He thinks…I’m wonderful,” she says. Christ.

“There was no reason,” she says of her survival among the Nazis, when her husband has returned home and finds himself at the mercy of the Jennings alongside her “Nothing made any sense. They give me food. I was obedient, helpless.” Quite suddenly and quite unexpectedly, I found myself crying over this woman, along with this woman, a minor character we’ve never seen before tonight and, as was becoming increasingly apparent, would never see again. “The first time,” she continued, “they gave me so much to drink I could barely stand up.” Thinking that I knew where this was headed, I started crying harder. “The first time…?” one of the Jennings asks—at this point my notes begin breaking down too—and Natalie-not-Natalie replies “…that they shot them,” and my understanding of the horror reverses course yes, but it deepens as well, as does my sobbing. That the Nazis assaulted her, violated her person, seems drearily likely. But they forced her into complicity with their violation of others, too—countless others, vast unmarked graves full of others. This is what she decides to tell her husband and her killers about in her last minutes on earth—what she did, or was forced to do, to others, not what others did to her.

I reviewed this week’s devastating episode of The Americans for the New York Observer.

“The badly knitted flank might not have caused an accident in and of itself, but further weakened by the frailty of the competitors it set a scene for death on an unprecedented scale.”

—Clive Barker, “In the Hills, the Cities”

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Americans, in part by leading with a quote from Clive Barker, because I can, for the New York Observer.

The Americans is no stranger to boredom. Boredom is the flipside of the danger and glamour that are Philip and Elizabeth Jennings’ nominal stock in trade. It’s the constant travel to decidedly un-exotic destinations like Topeka and Harrisburg, the endless surveillance and reconnaissance details, the dull dinner dates with uninteresting people they only pretend to like, the logistics and mechanics of spycraft which are so often no more thrilling than what an HVAC technician might do. But “IHOP,” this week’s episode, pushed the tedium envelope farther than ever. It showed Philip and Elizabeth doing jobs—listening to untold hours of recorded office chatter on the one hand, sitting around watching late night television while waiting for their teen-spy “son” Tuan to return home on the other—that are boring not just by their standards, but by ours. If you’ve ever sat in on a lengthy conference-call meeting or killed time until a delivery guy showed up, you know their pain. Almost, anyway. You never had to worry that you might need to kill someone at the end of it all.

Watching this episode, I was struck by just how exhausted everyone looks and sounds. Some of the characters are quite vocal about it, in fact; the language of enduring, or failing to endure, is everywhere. In a well-intentioned but poorly received attempt to check up on an asset who gave everything for the cause, wittingly or not, Gabriel tells Martha (Alison Wright, returning for a second welcome cameo this season) that he retired because he was just “done.” The late Frank Gaad’s widow tells Stan Beeman, making a parallel visit, that everything’s been so quiet since her husband’s funeral. We finally get to see the CIA bigshot father of Kimmy (Julia Garner, another face it’s good to see again), and he looks like a fatigued middle manager rather than the heroic hard-charger Kimmy and Philip’s conversations had conjured. The priest-slash-spy who reports to Philip in Gabriel’s absence suggests that he pray: “It is a great solace,” he says, “especially when you live this kind of life.” In a particularly unpleasant heart-to-heart, Oleg’s father bitterly describes decades of life with his mother, a changed woman after her experiences in a prison camp, as a sort of jail sentence itself. Tuan schleps all the way to Pennsylvania to surreptitiously call his former adoptive family back in Seattle, whose six-year-old son is suffering from leukemia. Philip half-suspects Tuan wanted to be caught doing this in order to get sent home, “pulled out of this shit, start over.” “It’s not who he is,” Elizabeth says, disagreeing. You have to wonder who she’s trying to kid.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Americans for the New York Observer.