I couldn't update an older thread, but The Americans is getting a lot of positive press from reviewers who have seen the first few episodes of the second season. I think I'm going to have to binge-watch Season 1 and come to my own conclusions.
Here are two reviews with excerpts from The New Yorker and The Daily Beast.
This is a quick post to deliver one message: watch “The Americans.”
It’s not a critic’s job to be a P.R. flack, to sell a show. We’re supposed to maintain healthy boundaries, gazing at art from an Olympian distance. But there are certain TV series that bring out the evangelist in any writer, and, in a world of hype for “prestige cable dramas”—the Internet’s favorite topic to obsess about—FX’s smart thriller “The Americans” came in way too far under the radar last year...
You can certainly start with tomorrow night’s episode and catch up by way of Wikipedia. But I’d recommend skipping work, ignoring your family, going directly to iTunes or Amazon, and watching the first season, binge-style, while drinking vodka. Tell the Jenningses I sent you.
The Daily Beast article compares The Americans to Homeland, with the latter suffering in the comparison:
The second season of The Americans—the hourlong FX drama about a pair of married Russian spies (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell) masquerading as an apple-pie American family in suburban Washington, D.C. at the height of the Reagan Era—is just as smart, gripping, and propulsive as the first. And that's no small feat.
Sophomore seasons can be tricky. Back in the day, a show could limp along for a season or two before finding its voice. In fact, that's how some of the best shows ever started out. Go watch Season 1 of The Simpsons, for example. Or Seinfeld. They're kind of ... uncomfortable...
At first glance, The Americans seems like Homeland's retro cousin. The spies. The international intrigue. The bureaucratic infighting. Even the basic structure is the same: a man and a woman struggling to keep their relationship alive amid the slings and arrows of outrageous counterintelligence. But Season 2 of The Americans makes none of the same mistakes that Homeland made, and the reasons why are revealing. The Russian spy saga was simply better crafted from the start...
Another reason Weisberg set The Americans in the 1980s is that he served as a CIA spy back then, and he brings a granular, first-person knowledge of tradecraft—interrogation, surveillance, encryption, dead drops, disguises, and so on—to bear on every episode. Homeland is at its best when it veers away from soapy romance and returns to its roots, but actual espionage got less and less screen time after Season 1. The Americans, in contrast, never strays far from the operation at hand, and it's more grounded—and fascinating—as a result...
For three seasons, Homeland was too terrified to cut its Carrie-Brody life-support system. By playing it safe, the show suffered. But The Americans is already reinventing itself. Why? Because it has the confidence to know that it's about more than the relationship between two specific characters. Rather it's about the idea of relationships in general, in all their intricacy and weirdness—the secrecy they require, the comfort they create, the confusion they entail, the danger they can unleash. And that never gets old.
I'm not going to record any more shows. As I tend not to watch them on the DVR anyhow. Instead I'll watch them on Netflix, or Amazon Prime. Netflix has ruined me on watching traditional TV. I want the whole season and I want it commercial free I know I can use alternative sources like torrent sites to nab the shows, but I want them to get money from me watching the show. Hence why Netflix and Amazon Prime.
I'm reaching the point where I'm waiting a year for this year's crop of new CW shows to watch via Netflix...
Yeah, I might have to wait until rerun season to do some catching up on some of these shows. I only had time to watch Justified on the DVR last night, and now Arrow is sitting there, and Grimm ends its Olympic hiatus tomorrow.
I meant to mention this earlier but I also love the music they have woven into some scenes...most notably 'Tusk' in the opening episode to 'Games Without Frontiers' at the end of season 1.
Good to see Margo Martindale (Claudia) back in the mix. She was also an excellent villainess in a season of Justified.
And I like that way that she doesn't give a crap about what HQ says when things get personal. She killed that CIA employee in season 1 ("you won't be able to move for 20 minutes, but you'll be dead in 10" ), and now she wants to go after the killer of her team without HQ's blessing).
What an awesome episode this past week -- so many layers of deception, so much tension between believing in "the cause" and murdering for the cause finally getting to you (that's you, Phillip).
It's always such delicious irony to see a couple whose external and internal lives are based on lies yelling at their daughter to be honest with them. And that closing scene with the pastor...
Edit: apparently he provided so much detail and color that none other than Ollie North was given a story credit for this episode.
