Category Articles & Interviews

This episodes picks up moments after the last, with Philip coming back into the house after Stan roughs him up in the garage (with a vial of deadly pathogen in his front pocket).

Elizabeth (Keri Russell), naturally, wants to know what’s up, so Philip (Matthew Rhys) explains that Stan is angry because he was hanging around with Stan’s ex-wife at a meeting of the new-age-y EST self-help group.

These two regularly sleep with informants and subjects to discern information, but suddenly Elizabeth feels…betrayed. What was bothering Philip so much that he needed the therapeutic embrace of this group?

In the next scene, Gabriel (Frank Langella) discusses ways to smuggle the pathogen back to Mother Russia while suggesting that Philip and Elizabeth need to find a contact at the Fort Detrick bio-weapons lab who has higher security clearance than their current contact, William (Dylan Baker).

Gabriel also offers the Jennings family a personal computer. Their first. Welcome to the mid-1980s!

Back home, Elizabeth is listening to recordings from Pastor Tim’s telephone line and discovers their daughter Paige (Holly Taylor) has told him all about her secret agent Soviet parents.

Mom’s first reaction: kill the pastor. Dad suggests they wait. Killing Pastor Tim will send Paige fleeing from them.

He breaks into Pastor Tim’s home and figures out that he goes to a cabin to write his sermons. Elizabeth thinks it’s the perfect place for a hit. “If you’re going to pull her into this job, and she gets even a whiff of what we really do…she’ll figure out we killed him,” Philip protests.
Continue reading The Americans recap: ‘Pastor Tim’

Philip is having some not so pleasant dreams: It’s about a young boy (apparently him) beating another kid to death with a rock. Oh, the hazy crazy days of youth.

He wakes with a start and Elizabeth asks if he’s all right. “You were right about Martha,” he says, passing it off as regular workplace restlessness. “I need to tell her about Gene before she finds out at work.”

So begins season 4 of The Americans. Gene, of course, is the FBI computer technician Philip murdered at the end of last season so he could plant the recorder at his apartment that would absolve his other wife, Martha, of spying on the same office.

From there, we see Philip (Matthew Rhys) head to his other home, his other bed, that of Martha (Alison Wright), the well-meaning but somewhat gullible secretary who thought he was her husband “Clark.” And he is. Sort of. At the very least, it becomes clear in this season premiere that he cares about her as more than just a KGB source.

“In the next day or two you’re going to get disturbing news at work,” he says. “Gene Craft is dead. He’ll be found in his apartment. It’ll look like he killed himself.”

“I don’t understand,” she tells him.

“The recorder will be found in his apartment.”

This is too much for her. “My recorder?”

“It was the only way to protect you.”

Martha begins melting down the way any fundamentally decent person would when informed they’re responsible for the death of another person. “I didn’t agree to this. I don’t want this …” She weeps, she pushes back, she tells him to stay away.

“Clark” informs her that he can’t visit her home, their home, anymore. But he has one of his own she can visit.

While he’s away, Elizabeth (Keri Russell) is at their home with teenage daughter Paige (Holly Taylor) , who is still getting used to life with parents who are secret Russian agents. She wants to know where her father is.

“He’s with what we call a source. He might get some information,” Elizabeth says.

Paige doesn’t understand. Is he lying to this other person, tricking them?

“It’s more about getting people to trust you,” Elizabeth says. “To help them understand that you want the same thing they want, which is to make the world a safer place. Continue reading The Americans recap: ‘Glanders’

The Americans is heating up.

When the spy drama starring Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys returns with its third season this Wednesday, it’ll bring several conflicts to a head, say the showrunners.

“Really all the major storylines that have been going on for all of these years are reaching boiling point,” says creator Joe Weisberg, with executive producer Joel Fields adding: “Because the characters now are so fully formed and rich and there’s so much history there, we can finally reach the crisis point in some of their conflicts that we’ve been waiting to see.”

While Weisberg and Fields have a vague idea of how they are going to end the series, they still aren’t sure when that will be, though they’ve noted that it will likely run five or six seasons. The pair doesn’t seem too worried about not being able to give the show, which has long been critically acclaimed but never a major ratings draw, its rightful conclusion. Continue reading ‘The Americans’ Bosses: Season Four Reaches “Boiling Point”

Exec producer Joel Fields said Saturday during the Television Critics Association press tour that the writing staff has been surprised at how long it’s taken to move through the early 1980s. The FX period drama revolves around covert Soviet spies played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys.

Fields was pressed as to whether he and exec producer/creator Joe Weisberg have an end date for the series in mind — in terms of the number of season on FX and the chronological year in the storyline. In the past the pair have hinted that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 would be a logical end point for the story rooted in the last gasp of the Cold War.

The upcoming fourth season, which bows March 16, returns with the storyline picking up in 1983. Using the three-act drama metaphor, Fields said he feels like the show is “coming to the end of its second act” at the close of season four. He suggested that the tale of Philip and Elizabeth Jennings might be wrapped up with a fifth or sixth season, but he also stressed that there was no concrete decision on the span of the series. Moreover, there’s no certainty about renewals from FX.
Continue reading ‘The Americans’: Producers, Stars Talk Season 4 and Possible End Date

The pressure is building in The Americans.

When the FX spy drama starring Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys returns for a fourth season on March 16, it will largely focus on the threat of bioweapons and the Jenning’s big secret getting out. Executive producer Joel Fields, on hand at the Television Critics Association winter press tour to promote the series, suggested that he and creator Joe Weisberg are about two-thirds of the way through the story they want to tell.

Fields acknowledged on stage that he isn’t sure how long the series will run. “What we do know is that if you were to think of it as a three act story structure, it feels like we’re coming toward the end of the second act. Whether it takes a fifth season or a sixth or fifth season to tell the rest of that story, we’ll discover as we start to dig into next season’s work,” he said, adding later in the panel: “I really don’t have an answer about how many seasons except that we’ll do what’s right for the storytelling and we always seem to surprise ourselves.” Continue reading ‘The Americans’ Could End After Fifth or Sixth Season, Says EP