Joe Weisberg’s Cold War drama is a spy series that turns out to be about a marriage, and it is as good at both as anything television made in its decade. Slow to begin, patient throughout, and worth every one of its 75 episodes.
The Americans ran for six seasons and 75 episodes, from 30 January 2013 to a final run beginning 28 March 2018, and it is the rare long series that knew from the start what it was about. Joe Weisberg’s premise is simple. Two KGB officers live in the Virginia suburbs as a married couple with two children and a travel agency, and an FBI man moves in opposite. The espionage is real and often brutal. The subject is the marriage. We would tell a stranger to watch it, and we do not say that about many things.
Elizabeth (Keri Russell) believes. Philip (Matthew Rhys) is no longer sure. That is the whole engine, and the two leads run it for six years without a false note between them. Russell plays Elizabeth almost without softness: a woman who has decided that feeling is a luxury and who is furious whenever it turns up anyway. Rhys plays Philip as a man whose face keeps giving him away, in the car, at the dinner table, in bed. They were assigned to each other, and the series is about whether two people who began as a cover story can end up as something they chose. It never says that out loud.
Across the road, Noah Emmerich gives Stan Beeman a decency that makes him more frightening, not less, because he is good at his job and he likes his neighbours. In the Soviet embassy, Lev Gorn’s Arkady Ivanovich Zotov runs a fluorescent-lit office full of men in bad suits, and Annet Mahendru’s Nina Sergeevna Krilova, a clerk Stan gets his hooks into, is the first sign that this series will not let anyone stay a pawn.
It is made with the patience of a series that trusts its audience. Richard Rutkowski and the other cinematographers keep the light low and brown, so that even daylight looks like it has come through net curtains. The production designers, Diane Lederman, John Mott and Dan Leigh among them, give the Jennings house wood panelling, beige carpet and a kitchen no one would photograph. Jenny Gering and Katie Irish dress Philip and Elizabeth in the clothes of people trying not to be looked at, and then in the disguises, which are worn with total seriousness and are sometimes hard to take seriously. Nathan Barr’s score is mostly low strings and a cello that seems to be holding its breath. The editors, Michael Berenbaum, Daniel A. Valverde and Amanda Pollack among them, let silences run far past the point where most television would cut away.
What horrified us, more than once, is how quickly the violence happens and how shabby it looks. Nobody fights well. People are strangled in car parks and stabbed in stairwells, and it takes longer than it should, and then Philip goes home and helps Henry with his homework. The series puts the killing and the parenting in the same episode and refuses to tell us how to hold both. We sat with that for six seasons and it never got easier.
It is not flawless. The first season leans on a mission of the week for longer than it needs to. Keidrich Sellati’s Henry is given remarkably little to do for years, and when the series finally notices him it is almost apologetic about it. The fifth season slows to a pace we would call deliberate if we were being kind and stalled if we were not. And the wigs are the wigs.
Most critics scored it more cautiously than we do. The reviews so far were written off the pilot, when the comparison everyone reached for was Homeland, and several worried aloud that the momentum could not be kept up over 13 episodes. It was kept up for 75. It is closer to le Carré than to anything with a car chase, and it gets better as it goes, which almost nothing on television does.
Watch it two episodes a night, not more, and do not skip the first season because it starts slowly. It does. That is where the marriage is built, and everything after depends on it.
