100 Favorite Shows: #22 — The Americans
“I believed I was acting in the service of a higher purpose, but I was just scared. It was terrible, terrible times.”
Alexander Nevsky. Catherine the Great. Vladimir Lenin. Each of these are important figures in Russian history, but how could they ever compare to Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell, respectively) of The Americans? Known in their home country as Mischa and Nadezhda, Philip and Elizabeth are two high-ranking KGB officers who infiltrate the United States by way of pretending to be a happy couple raising a happy family, Paige (Holly Taylor) and Henry (Keidrich Sellati), near to Washington D.C. They were no Rosenbergs, though. The Jennings happened to live right next door to Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), an FBI agent. Set during the Reagan administration, The Americans chronicled all the thrills of a tense spy drama, while also making sure to check in on themes of marriage and American exceptionalism over the course of its six-season run on FX. The Americans, created by Joe Weisberg and produced with Joel Fields by his side, has long been known to be riveting television, even if it never matched the popularity of other prestige dramas in the same vein, like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad. From 2013 to 2018, those who watched The Americans know how special the experience was. Do svidaniya (до свида́ния)!
(This essay contains spoilers for The Americans. History won’t tell you anything.)
The Americans began in 2013. This was just one year before the series leads, Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, officially started a relationship with one another. Intimacy, proximity, sharing. Perhaps any one of these was the propulsion behind some reasoning for the two co-stars falling in love with one another. Perhaps it was just the fact that starring on an acclaimed FX drama series is a rare thing and they were two people who grew accustomed it together. No matter the reason, it’s not for us to know. Instead, we’re given the parallel story of Philip and Elizabeth, growing accustomed to a manufactured marriage in the U.S. with one another.
Like Russell and Rhys, Philip and Elizabeth were “cast” in their roles as Russian spies turned American suburban dream. They became confidantes, life rafts for one another, swimming aimlessly through a world unfamiliar to them and feelings they can share with no one but each other. Even if they didn’t begin the series in love, the Jenningses eventually found it with one another. Maybe it was circumstance. Maybe it was fate. Regardless, their marriage was an abundantly complicated one, defined by its compromises, frustrations, and unexpected attachments. Like The Sopranos, the draw of The Americans was in its highly dramatic and intricate crime storylines, but the heart was always in the family and the marriage: two elements that colored every moment of the Jenningses, even if they were trained to prioritize the mission.
Just as they were deftly able to slide into the accent-less roles (Rhys is doing some serious work on the shocking accent front) of Philip and Elizabeth, so too were the leads incredible at pretending to be others. Any given episode of The Americans could call upon Elizabeth to take a lighter tone with her fake friend, Young-hee (Ruthie Ann Miles), or pit Philip’s training for lies against his aching desire to be a normal citizen. Not to mention, any episode could feature a slew of the immaculate wig/disguise work from Elena Roulenko and Peggy Schierholz that would eventually become the signature of The Americans. Just look at this majesty.
In spite of the falsified hairstyles, Philip and Elizabeth could never take their disguises off at home. Even though Philip spent a ton of time on The Americans pushing away his growing empathy and desire to relent from his spy work, eventually it would all come out and he’d eschew the life he’d always known in favor of a travel agency. Part time, anyway.
Over time, we could clearly see how moved Philip was at every turn of what was asked of him; his feelings were too innate to suppress. Whether he was mourning the connections he’d lost during his fieldwork or foregoing even the tiniest fragment of focus on the job, Philip’s emotions eventually became a liability for the team. But for his own well-being, they were always his most humanizing, most redeeming, most heartbreaking qualities. Never content to step away from the trauma he’d endured, Philip instead sought self-help initiatives and mental wellness programs. He was constantly asking himself, “What can I do to be better?”
Conversely, Elizabeth seemed to become even more stoic over the course of The Americans, oftentimes acting as a volatile rebuke to Philip’s own growing conscience. She endlessly focused on doing over feeling, as evidenced by forcing Paige, — who nearly blew the cover of the entire family (of which Henry was unwitting) — into daily stalking, reporting, and fraternizing with Pastor Tim (Kelly AuCoin), a role model of hers who is precipitously close to being eliminated by Elizabeth. (Protecting Paige and the family was always Elizabeth’s 1B priority, along with serving Mother Russia. In “Dinner for Seven,” for example, she brutally and fatally disarms would-be muggers. It’s a moment that sends Paige down a path of questioning (Was the response warranted? she wonders) and of self-defense.)
When Paige revealed the family secret, however, it put Pastor Tim in a targeted position of which he only wrestled free due to Paige’s affections for him. As far as Elizabeth is concerned, Paige destroyed the Jennings family when she confessed her secret to him and, as punishment, she must report every twitch, every flinch, every word of his when she attends Bible study. It’s only through reluctant maternalism and a sympathetic Philip that Paige manages to endure his threat of death. At the cost, though, she begins to follow the self-destructive path of her parents, suppressing any feeling that emanates from her newfound tasks. When she trudges up the steps with a stony report on Pastor Tim’s offer for her to babysit, it’s almost like the stairway leads to an espionage-related damnation.
There’s no universe in which Holly Taylor isn’t among the best child actors of her generation, but her exceptional, interior performance as a conflicted Paige Jennings is just one of the many awesome, key examples of acting on The Americans. Annet Mahendru’s regretful agent Nina Krilova, Costa Ronin’s privileged wild card Oleg Burov, Dylan Baker’s dangerous scientist William Crandall. But obviously, it always comes back to Russell and Rhys, two of the best to ever hit television and lead a prestige drama series.
For the most part, The Americans was always primarily concerned with the characters and, transitively, the acting on the series. As such, the majority of Americans shots framed the people solely, focusing mostly on their reactions and expressions; wide shots were limited and beauty was scarce. The performances on The Americans were so seamlessly dynamite that it almost seemed effortless for Russell and Rhys to engage in an argumentative scene. The confidence I had in them to rake the hell out of any explosive scene between the on-screen pair is nearly unmatched throughout the history of TV. These teed up moments were feasts for them.
I adore season four of The Americans, not least of all because of the eighth episode in the arc, “The Magic of David Copperfield V: The Statue of Liberty Disappears,” my favorite ever pulled off by the series. The knockout fights between Elizabeth and Philip peak with this installment, demonstrating the best their conflicting emotionalities could be depicted. For most of the series, their marriage was defined by wordless sequences and a great many things left unsaid (but no less felt) between them. The fight in this episode blows that up completely as Elizabeth discounts Philip’s loss of his informant and phony wife for whom he had true feelings and confidence, Martha (Alison Wright in another outstanding portrayal), and mocks his self-help guides as classic forms of American manipulation. It was one thing to argue about their discomfort, their unease, or their worries. But here, they’re not just arguing about their feelings, the validity of them, the alleged simplicity of them, and the ceaseless, unbalanced barrage of matters to manage. They’re arguing about the cores of who they are as human beings — and it’s about as electric as television has been in recent memory.
This furious tension is only felt so deeply by viewers because of Philip and Martha’s relationship and how it disintegrated for good at the start of “The Magic of David Copperfield” in heartbreaking fashion. For one, Rhys and Wright possessed undeniable chemistry, but for another, Martha was the affirming presence in Philip’s life. She was a tether to his inner humanity and this connection is something he craved in the face of Elizabeth’s stoic, seemingly careless mentality. Tragically, Martha’s livelihood becomes a sacrifice for Philip to maintain his cover (their bond was never all the way genuine), but their goodbye was absolutely gutting. Philip may have been playing the role of “Clark,” but as Martha’s plane departs, all facades have fallen off his shoulders and he reacts solely as the most honest, vulnerable version of Philip. It’s a side he rarely even showed Elizabeth.
If you haven’t seen The Americans, but you’re getting the sense that it’s gloomy, you’d be right. The darkness was always propped up over the levity on The Americans, as opposed to something that was outwardly funnier, like Mad Men. But still, The Americans never veered too deeply into this darkness that it felt like a slog to watch each episode. The story was more novelistic than oppressive with the greatest traumas coming in the form of characters who were simply stuck with lives they didn’t feel like committing to; they were spies, but they were still relatable.
“Feelings, sympathy, friendship, whatever. You can’t lose sight of who these people are,” Agent Frank Gaad (Richard Thomas) remarks over a collection of clips of the Jennings family at the end of “The Magic of David Copperfield.” The family had been buckling under the strenuous weight of their hammer and sickle obligations for many episodes before this one, but after Philip is forced to say farewell to Martha and later defend her to Elizabeth and after Elizabeth is forced to kill her unwitting informant, Lisa (Karen Pittman), it’s too much. As their handler, Gabriel (Frank Langella in an excellent character actor performance), acknowledges that it’s “too much for anyone” to handle, they’re finally given a multi-month reprieve from their duty-bound occupations and their dealing with problems simply by snuffing them out.
Compared to the Jenningses’ other notable handler, Claudia (Margo Martindale, who is — you guessed it — marvelous), Gabriel leads with a sweeter, more encouraging demeanor. He genuinely wants to help the family experience benevolent, memorable moments as a family, rather than limiting familial interactions to maintaining a guise.
Most of the time, Philip and Elizabeth have to pretend to be happy, but when Gabriel grants them a vacation (for as long as they need), they’re given a shot at finding it for real. As a foursome, they play mini golf, they debate a trip to Epcot, they play hockey in the driveway. It’s a refreshing montage of moments that, to be honest, seemed pretty damn distant when “The Magic of David Copperfield” began. But that’s the brilliance of The Americans. With its thorough groundwork building a solid foundation of narrative storytelling, the later seasons enabled the show to reach new heights by subverting the traditional trajectories of prestige dramas.
Stan could’ve been a hokey dumbass next door, for example, but instead he’s genuinely sharp at his job, save for a few instances where he’s just too trusting and forgiving. The departure of Gaad plays out sensitively for Stan, who is actively encroaching on uncovering Martha and “Clark.” (The maintenance of Martha as a living, breathing character in The Americans’ universe is a subversive development in itself.) It also plays out against the burden of Paige’s training; she might be the only one of the family who can’t give herself over to the fleeting moments of familial joy and togetherness. Philip and Elizabeth’s break from the KGB is hardly a vacation for Stan and Paige, who can’t keep down the conflicts boiling within them.
Typically, time jumps are reserved for season finales — if ever — and that is one of the most subversive elements of “The Magic of David Copperfield.” By the end of this installment, the stakes are entirely reshuffled and it positions the rest of the season in uncertain territory. Thankfully, Philip is, at the very least, relieved by his break, so the direction of the season is left a bit more securely following Gabriel’s act of grace.
The myth of the “happy family,” at least for the Jenningses, is always kept at onion dome’s length throughout The Americans. No relief is permanent and all joy is transient, all the way up until the series finale, “START,” which collapses the inner Virginia KGB operation and sends Philip, Elizabeth, and Paige (Henry never knew about their Russian ties) on the run. While stopping at a McDonald’s in disguise, Philip can’t help but glance over at a family of four sharing their American meals and laughing as a collective unit. It’s an image he’ll never again be able to attain, but it was always eluding him anyway.
“The Magic of David Copperfield” is probably the closest they ever came to finding suburban bliss on The Americans. Even before the activity-laden time skip, the group gathered around the television to watch David Copperfield make the Statue of Liberty disappear. In this iconic illusion, Copperfield practically becomes the embodiment of corny American exceptionalism, fourteen years after the Space Race concluded. However, he also preaches a fair bit of wisdom, stating how quickly our freedoms can vanish if we take them for granted. Philip is awed by it and he buys into the sentiment completely. After all, he’s an Americanized man who has always believed in the impermanence of his best values anyway. But while he leans over the couch and connects with Henry in the moment, Elizabeth hardly cares; she knows it’s a trick.
These explosive, moving-the-pieces moments were rare on The Americans, which was mostly a slow burn. However, just because the majority of the series was a straight up drama with intermittent (but no less valued) thrills, that doesn’t mean The Americans was any less of a must-watch. Not even the period status could reduce this status for the series because The Americans spoke to the debunking of America’s “number one” mentality across all times, not just the lengthy Cold War.
In the season five episode, “The Committee on Human Rights,” Elizabeth explains to Paige that “the world doesn’t work the way people [in the U.S.] think it does.” She details the non-single story of internationally inflicted poverty and a scorched earth strategy against their resources in Russia, illuminating Paige to the truth that lies behind foreign diplomacy. (Paige, who took after Claudia, always struggled with allegiance as their relationships with Russian culture were among the series’ most fraught, in spite of Claudia’s imbuing of the homeland into the D.C. suburb and Paige’s later affinity for vodka.) It’s not that Russia wasn’t guilty of doing bad things in the past, but rather that the American narrative of “good versus evil” was missing the point. This wasn’t Captain America v. Red Skull; it was two massive global empires bullying each other and hurting the civilians along the way. The U.S. was far from innocent and Paige can’t help but feel her loyalty divided, if she should possess it at all.
The slow burns throughout The Americans finally exploded for good in the aforementioned series finale (one of my all-time favorite television finales), “START.” As tense, dreadful, and riveting as ever, “START” begins with Philip calling Elizabeth and covertly signaling her that their operation is concluding (following the FBI nabbing of the surreptitious Father Andrei (Konstantin Lavysh)) with the phrase that “things are topsy turvy at the office.” Against all odds, The Americans finally concluded with Philip and Elizabeth staying together and yet, this was not even the episode’s most surprising moment. That honor belongs to Paige, who forewent their escape to Russia in favor of making a life for herself, independently, in the U.S. (Following this, how could Philip and Elizabeth “divorce”? They deeply needed each other; they were all they had.)
The feeling derived from the finale of The Americans is not a happy one; it’s hardly even a bittersweet one. Yet, despite the surprises and the uncertainty (seriously, what the fuck is Paige going to do?), it still felt proper. As if this was the ending each character deserved, no matter how heartbreaking or full of betrayal the actions to get them there might have seemed.
What’s most brilliant about “START” is that it centers the two central conflicts of the episode around the discordance among the Jenningses and the confrontation they’re due for with Stan. The Americans was always at its best when it grounded these stakes as humanly and as friendly as possible. In “START” they both climaxed brilliantly.
Beginning with the family, Philip is the only one whose instincts are to advocate that they do not take Henry back with them to Russia. He begs Elizabeth to understand that Henry’s life is with his friends at home because the idea of Russia being his home was too jarring to justify. It’s a tragic moment as they recognize they must leave without him, but they know it’s the right thing to do, even if he’d never be able to fully comprehend or forgive them for it. Even Philip and Elizabeth can hardly forgive themselves for it, as Philip’s decisive monologue ends with a pained, “It’s awful, but” and he trails off. The idea of never seeing his son again is too sad and his grief is devastating, immeasurable, impossible to quantify.
Paige is much easier to convince to flee, but it’s much more challenging to convince her to leave Henry behind for his own good, too. When Elizabeth assures Paige that she loves Henry, Paige hits back with a pointed, “Do you?” Immediately, Elizabeth assures Paige that she, of course, loves her children, but the response seems to be the result of her training to be a mother; it’s as automatic as any lie she came up with while wearing a wig. The reason it hits her so hard is because she doubts her own capacity for love, too.
Still, Paige finally manages to convince her parents to at least call Henry before they leave, even if they can’t explain anything to him. The sequence leading up to this is scored by the Dire Straits’ “Brothers in Arms” (seriously, if you ever want to evoke specific feelings from audiences on a dramatic, emotional television series, just use this song; it works every time), which is the perfect harbinger of the tragic moment to come. Philip emphasizes the pride and love he feels for Henry and Elizabeth is reassured that he’s hanging out with his friends for the rest of the evening. The true tragedy comes in the fact that Henry just wants to get back to the games they played at his boarding school, far away from his family and now for forever.
The scene is brilliantly acted by all involved and it packs an entirely different kind of wallop from a previous scene in the episode, which arguably maintains the best acting ever seen on television. (If you take one thing away from this essay, let it be that I know very few synonyms for “acting.”) I’m referring, of course, to the other high-stakes moment of “START”: the final confrontation between Philip, Elizabeth, and Paige and Stan.
It’s an all-time great television moment as Stan finally cracks down on the Jenningses being the white whale of his entire career and he points a gun at them in the parking garage from which they’re trying to escape. Upon seeing Stan, Philip and Elizabeth immediately and effortlessly slip back into the characters of “Philip” and “Elizabeth,” greeting Stan with warmth and pretending they have no earthly idea why he would ever want to hold them at gunpoint or doubt that Paige has a stomachache.
Instead, he finally refuses to listen to them, calls them pieces of shit, and demands they all lay down on the ground. For a moment, it feels as if Stan is ready to be positioned as an American hero who took down the most dangerous Russian transplant family the country he’s sworn to protect had ever known. But quickly, as the Jenningses refuse to relent and give Stan the chance to follow through on his nerve, he sheds his stoicism. “You were my best friend,” he achingly quivers to Philip, who seems genuinely wounded when Stan confesses that he would have done absolutely anything for them.
It’s a whole different kind of tragedy unfolding here as the dissolution of a friendship doesn’t just fade away. It splinters irrevocably. We know that Philip means it when he says that Stan was his best friend, too, but we also know that Philip recognizes it’s a lost cause to try to convince him. (The only reason they get away from Stan is because he knows his own feelings for the family were, at least, abundantly genuine.) Instead, he launches into an emotional, confessional monologue during which he vents his entire cavalcade of feelings from the entire series, as if he’s attempting to justify himself to himself since there’s no repairing his friendship with Stan.
It’s six seasons of anguish, betrayal, and devastation pouring out in the gunpoint conversation and just like Stan, we can’t help but listen intently. (It’s how Stan was similarly convinced to allow them to leave with a message that would, according to them, prevent World War III.) The only salve in the moment is Paige’s evocation of Henry, asking Stan to take care of him and promising with what little credibility she has left that Henry didn’t know anything about their spying (along with the assurance that her feelings for Stan’s son, Matthew (Daniel Flaherty) were not fake). He may be skeptical about this, but when Stan sits down with Henry at his hockey game (ah, hockey, another fraught divide between the U.S. and Russia in the 1980s), we can relax at one sweet bond persisting.
Ultimately, Stan steps aside, demolished by the weight of losing his best friends and the trust he has for his wife, Renee (Laurie Holden), whom Philip thinks might (or might not) be a KGB agent, as if he needed to twist the knife in Stan’s back any deeper. Not that he’ll ever trust anyone ever again. It wouldn’t be in character for him to do so because, even though he let the Jenningses slip away, he always behaved in character. The Americans never flanderized a single figure in the series.
The fact that Stan acted within his character was a blessing for the Jenningses, who would have received no such mercy from literally any other FBI agent. However, the fact that Paige acts within her character is what levels the final shockwave through Philip and Elizabeth’s emotional fracturing. When traveling to Montreal via train, the Jenningses stop at the border to have their passports checked against “wanted” sketches of themselves. The security agents can’t see past the disguises, but in the interim, Paige takes the opportunity to step off the train and onto the platform; she’s not going with them.
In Paige’s penultimate scene in the series, she stuffs her hands in her pockets and stares into the train windows, waiting to give one last goodbye look to her parents, knowing there’s nothing they can do to convince her, secure her, persuade her, grab her. In that moment, it’s over. Bono wails over “With or Without You,” making his own vocalization more chilling in the context of The Americans than it had ever been on the radio airwaves. (If we really want to stretch it, Bono’s home country of Ireland is in between the U.S. and Russia, mathematical distances excluded.)
On the cusp of becoming as cold and detached as her parents, Paige steps off the train to give herself a chance at something more than Russian oppression and misery. When they called Henry, Paige couldn’t muster the courage to say goodbye to him, but when she was finally forced to choose between the two separating, floating glacier sheets of her family, she sided with the American purview. (It’s no less an impossible call to make and Paige is hardly heartened by the departure of her parents, but “With or Without You” is all about an impossible decision.) Paige was always mature, unconventional, and resolute in her convictions, so the decision to look after herself over her parents made perfect sense for her arc, as Russia is hardly Paige’s home.
And if we want to talk about the characters on The Americans acting as they always did throughout the series? When Paige dips out of the Russian extraction, Elizabeth clings to the window and sits back in slack-jawed shock. When Philip sees her, he immediately leaps from his chair and sits next to Elizabeth. In that moment, he needed the comfort. Even if Elizabeth was already thinking about how to move on.
The Americans never orchestrated the most insane plot developments possible or tried to generate storylines that might have been most at home on a soap opera. Instead, Fields, Weisberg, and the entire creative team kept the series grounded and relied on the flawless acting and the intrinsic stakes of FBI and KGB agents living next door to make the story masterful and riveting. Will Paige survive for any tangible duration on her own in the U.S.? Will Philip and Elizabeth be able to make it in Russia for an interminable amount of time? We don’t fully know, even if we can infer or make predictions; The Americans was always about the text. It was Philip and Elizabeth’s job to support Russia and usurp the United States, but it was our job (and Bono’s) to give ourselves away.
