Category Articles & Interviews

The Americans begins its fifth season with a pair of new faces: Pasha, a Soviet boy who resents his new life in the United States, and Tuan, a Vietnamese adoptee who is eager to help his new classmate adjust.

They’re both newcomers. Tuan and his family just moved from Michigan, while Pasha and his family have defected from Moscow. He is struggling, not the least of which with the language.

“Okay, understand,” Pasha says. “Speak, not so good.”

The boys take a trip to Tuan’s house, where they meet his parents – an airline pilot and a flight attendant, Mr. and Mrs. Eckert. Finally, we see someone we recognize – Philip and Elizabeth.

At the end of last season, they faced the possibility of giving up their lives as the Jennings family and fleeing back to Russia, since they were unsure if their identities had been compromised by the capture of the bio-weapons operative William.

Now, we see that they have doubled down on the American dream. They have a new mission – and a new family. Pasha doesn’t have much to say to them. That’s okay. He will. Continue reading ‘The Americans’ premiere recap: ‘Amber Waves’

Starting tonight, “The Americans” joins the short list of shows that have had the luxury of plotting out their series finale storylines over multiple seasons.

The FX drama, which received a two-season pickup last year, opens its fifth year with intrepid Soviet spies Philip and Elizabeth Jennings juggling yet another set of identities — this time with a set up that is elaborate even by their standards.

The planning of the season’s plot engines was made easier by the fact that showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields now have the season-six finish line in sight. The momentum the show built up in season four — with its first Emmy nom for drama series and Writers Guild Award win for drama series — didn’t hurt, either.
Continue reading ‘The Americans’: Stars, Producers Talk Beginning of the End With Season 5

The best drama on television continues to ratchet up the tension while pushing purposefully toward the end (and no spoilers here).
One of the great difficulties writing about long-running series with complicated and hard-earned twists and turns is that you can’t go anywhere near them. Nobody likes a spoiler — and far too many people these days think even the smallest detail revealed is a spoiler. The longer a series is on the air — especially one, like FX’s The Americans, that is arguably the best drama on television — the harder it is for a critic to say anything new of substance about it.

And yet, there’s an obligation to write about the best drama on television, because, well, people will want to read it.

You see where we are here.

There won’t be anything that’s an actual spoiler revealed in this review. That would normally only leave the door open to something along the lines of, “Wow, the start of the fifth season is really great — nothing I can tell you about, but, wow, some amazing things happen.” Continue reading ‘The Americans’ Season 5: TV Review

One of best moments on The Americans last season came in the opening minutes of “The Magic of David Copperfield V: The Statue of Liberty Disappears,” when Martha (Alison Wright) is being taken to her drop-off point to be sent to the Soviet Union. It’s a stunning, hypnotic scene that is completely wordless until she tells her husband, “Don’t be alone, Clark.”

It sounds — and probably should be — interminably boring, but it’s precisely the type of thing at which The Americans excels. No show produces taut, compelling tension through omission better than the FX drama. And it’s a skill the series deploys — more confidently than ever — in its fifth and penultimate season.

The final act of the Season 5 premiere has Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth (Keri Russell) just digging a massive hole. The second episode features Elizabeth standing solo in a lab surrounded by insects, and the third episode released to press features a beautiful scene of the pair in their latest cowboy disguises. I won’t say any more — it’s truly one of the most moving sequences the show has ever done.

That naked human intimacy is a testament to showrunners Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg’s commitment to crafting this acutely complex portrait of marriage — to each other, to family, to country. Perhaps armed with the knowledge that next year is the show’s last, the stakes in Season 5 feel even higher even as its trademark slow burns decelerate to a purposeful crawl, and the personal and the professional lines blur further. Continue reading The Americans Is Better Than Ever as the End Nears

With rumors of Russian involvement in American politics dominating the news again today, the excellent penultimate season of The Americans feels chillingly much closer to the bone than last year. Debuting on March 7, Season 5 of FX’s Reagan-era spy family drama starring the stronger-than-ever Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys has more tricks and schemes up its narrative sleeves than a Cold War intelligence case officer, which as I say in my video review above is why one of the best shows of the age of Peak TV is feeling more passionate and compellingly convoluted than ever.

Set to end after six seasons, the 13-episode fifth season of The Americans, from what I’ve watched, is simply not prepared to go gentle into that good night without showing how much fight it still has. Amidst the perils of teenage dating, agricultural warfare, new families and faces, and corruption on the shelves and among Moscow’s Soviet elite, one blow of many that The Americans brings in this increasingly darker cycle is a new poignancy.

For those of us who grew up when the Soviet Union existed, the tale of Russell and Rhys’ ruthless but conflicted KGB agents posing as travel agency-owning D.C.suburbanites has always had a masterful touch, playing into the paranoia of the ever-simmering superpower conflict (real and imagined). While written and filmed months in advance, this season of the series executive produced by Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields has found new lifeblood as the real-life relationship between former Cold War adversaries the U.S. and the Russian Federation as ruled by Vladimir Putin, bringing spy craft, deception and intentional interference in the American way of life to the fore.

You can see more of why I think this new season of The Americans is so good by clicking on the video review above. But let me give a shout-out to the performances of the better-than-ever Holly Taylor, Costa Ronin, the never-to-be-underestimated Noah Emmerich, Frank Langella and Emmy-winning Margo Martindale. To play on as high a level and high a wire as Russell and Rhys do is a challenge for the best of the best, and these cast members rise to it.

Source: http://deadline.com/

When viewers last saw the Jennings family on The Americans, dad Philip (Matthew Rhys) was walking teenage daughter Paige (Holly Taylor) back to their house, angrily insisting she avoid hanging out with Matthew, the teenage son of their FBI agent neighbor, with whom she’d gotten increasingly close. Even though Paige now knows the truth about her parents — that they’re Russian spies — the question remains whether she’ll join the family business. Still, she’s already been collecting intel (and reporting back to her parents) on her minister, Pastor Tim, after revealing the family’s secret identity to him. And she reported back to her parents what Matthew told her about his dad’s work.

So is Paige romantically interested in Matthew or just using him to get information about the FBI as a prospective spy?

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter at The Americans’ season-five premiere in New York over the weekend, Taylor said “it’s a little bit of both. And, as teasers for season five show Paige continuing a relationship with Matthew, perhaps knowing what she does about her parents makes her feel like she can push the boundaries as a teenager. Continue reading ‘The Americans’ Season 5 to Feature More Family Bonding