Author: Tim Goodman / Source: The Hollywood Reporter
One of television’s greatest series, FX’s marital spy drama heads thrillingly and ominously toward its end.
It’s a weird thing to be proud of a TV show. To understand the difficult decisions the writers make in the face of expectations and to feel it’s important to acknowledge terrific and sometimes surprising acting and directing.
The hardest thing in all of television is making a great series season after season. And as The Americans begins its sixth and final season, the first three episodes sent by FX to critics elicited that kind of admiration, that confidence that, at least in the early going, the enormous weight of expectations hadn’t crippled the show but given it a certain exhilaration as it began its end game.They were, all three of them, exceptional — clear examples of one of television’s greatest dramas still very much on top of its game.
Viewers are all over the map on what they consider to be a spoiler, so all a critic can do in a situation like this — watching the last moves of a complicated chess match, the strands of a long-building pattern emerging for its last reveal — is to promise to hew more toward appreciation than actual review. And honestly, with only three episodes to judge from, all the truly enormous twists have yet to be seen, so realistically there’s not much to spoil (and does anyone want to do that anyway?). Besides, The Americans is a drama about the Cold War, and we all know how that ends for that period and how, in 2018, the word “Russia” seems to be ominously everywhere (giving this series an intriguingly twisted place in history — far different from what could have been predicted when it launched in January 2013).
But a couple of elements are unavoidable to the discussion and won’t take away much from the experience. When we last saw Elizabeth and Philip Jennings (Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys), their craft was taking its toll. The Soviet-era spies, recruited as teenagers and eventually joined together in a pretend marriage so that they could be sent to the U.S. and deeply embedded, has been a very long con. They had a daughter, Paige (Holly Taylor), and a son, Henry (Keidrich Sellati), who grew up as Americans knowing nothing of their parents’ work. An enormously successful piece of The Americans‘ storytelling was that Paige, as a curious teenager, would eventually find out what her parents were doing, highlighting a crack in their now very real marriage: Elizabeth, ever the purpose-driven operative, more willingly agreed with the designs of Mother Russia to indoctrinate Paige into the spy game, while…
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