Binge all six seasons of this remarkable drama while you can
The Americans ★★★★★
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Take this opportunity to binge it while you can. It’s close to a decade since one of the best dramas of the 21st century has been available on a free-to-air service, and now all six seasons of The Americans – 75 episodes! – are out from behind the various paywalls that have enclosed them. It’s fitting that a show in which revealing their true selves was a risk the characters could rarely afford can finally, six years after it concluded, step out into the open.
Having watched this series year after year from its debut in 2013 onwards, I still wonder whether its architects, Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields, knew what they truly had. The concept was fascinating, but open-ended.
In this image released by FX, Matthew Rhys, left, and Keri Russell in The AmericansCredit: AP
In 1981, as the Cold War ramps up, a pair of deep-cover KGB spies from the Soviet Union live undercover in the suburbs of Washington DC. Elizabeth and Philip Jennings (Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys) run a travel agency, have two children and covertly work to compromise America’s national security.
Caution could have made The Americans into a procedural – each week Elizabeth and Philip find a way to accomplish their latest mission and dodge the agents of Uncle Sam. But from the start its makers understood that the show was really about a relationship. In the pilot we learn that Elizabeth and Philip barely knew each other before they were assigned together and smuggled into the United States in the early 1960s. Their marriage was fake: the sex to conceive children was simply another task for the patriotic Elizabeth, but Philip loved her.
The couple’s private and professional lives constantly comment on one another, especially after Philip proves his commitment to Elizabeth and she stops treating him like an asset to the mission. You realise that Philip would happily defect and take his family into witness protection, but Elizabeth would never accept that. He can’t persuade her and, frankly, he knows she’s uncompromising. Elizabeth’s dedication is terrifying.
Despite all the plotting, which tied together a sizable supporting cast including the couple’s undercover liaisons (Margo Martindale playing the most memorable) and the compromised KGB staff at the Russian embassy, the show had a way of unfolding organically.
The Jennings’ new neighbour, FBI counter-intelligence agent Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), is dedicated to tracking down the unidentified Soviet agents, but Philip can’t help but befriend him, leading to a bond that is equally intimate and deceptive.
I can’t remember the exact point where I stopped simply liking The Americans and instead loved it, but I was almost there by the end of the first season. There was a cruelness to the demands put upon the central characters, and the solutions were often compromised. You wondered when either Elizabeth or Philip – or is that Nadezhda and Mischa? – would stop bending and just break. The performances of Russell and Rhys, who became a real-life couple, are painfully nuanced.
Each fictional year added to the duress, with Elizabeth and Philip’s children, Paige (Holly Taylor) and her younger brother Henry (Keidrich Sellati), figuring more prominently in their calculations, or upending them. It made for a show that was deeply, uncomfortably tense. The risk of who would discover what never abated, whether it involved a professional seduction or a personal betrayal. By the latter seasons, The Americans was a masterful production. How do you make the unbearable tenable, it asked? Such a question can never have an easy answer.
The Americans is on 7Plus.
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