Just finished the Americans yesterday, after six seasons spread out over more than a year. I'm a little ambivalent, since the finale left a few things open that I'd have liked to see addressed. But even if I can't put it up in my top 5 all time great shows alongside the Wire, the West Wing and Justified (plus the Simpsons and Deep Space Nine), it was a well-done show that certainly belongs with the greats.
In terms of the plot, the cat-and-mouse game between Stan Beeman and the Jennings family was probably the best part of the show, better than the one between Hank and Walt in Breaking Bad. But the 80s soundtrack and visuals also drew me in episode after episode - seeing the houses and hotels that the characters inhabited was like delving into some kind of genetic memory for me, since it reminded me so much of the built environments I grew up in.
The other notable thing about the show was its brutality. Early on it struck me how every episode featured at least one fucked-up thing happening, from Philip and Elizabeth helping a South African anti-apartheid activist give a racist countryman a Soweto necktie, to Philip covering up various murders and deaths that happened around him.
Now, I promised spoilers, so spoilers will come after the jump:
The other thing that made it such a great show was that it talked so intelligently about what it meant to be American, in a way that resonated both with the setting and with our current era. Watching the final season, where Philip has retired from Directorate S and is just managing the travel agency, it was striking how his failure in "normal" life showed the ugly side of the American life he'd been coveting since the start of the show.
You could argue the travel agency was doing well in the early seasons because it was being helped by the KGB, or simply because Philip and Elizabeth didn't have the time to devote to expanding it. Regardless, it's a nice touch that when Philip can focus on it, he sees the dark side of the American dream, which is that you can still fail.
Having Stan confront the family, and then let them go, was a nice choice - unexpected at least, which is the most important thing when wrapping up a show like this. But I would have liked to have seen more repercussions for them after they did escape - instead Philip and Elizabeth waltz back into Russia and don't seem to suffer any consequences, while Paige makes it home to DC and isn't even met by Claudia.
What that all comes down to is, Philip and Elizabeth killed so many people during the course of the show (she was averaging almost one per episode in this final season) that it's surprising the writers didn't decide to balance the books by killing off one or both of them. Or that Paige or Henry might have suffered the consequences - Henry in particular was a weirdly underused character, though it would have been so heartbreaking if he'd been the one to die.
Still, the ending does a nice job of continuing the theme I followed throughout the show, in which we see how Philip and Elizabeth (and by extension the Cold War "game") wreak havoc on the lives of everyone they encounter. It's more subtle in the case of Paige and Henry, but you see it building over the six seasons in slow-motion - unlike how Marsha gets packed off to Russia midway through and then is seen once or twice in her dismal new life.
The other thing I kept wondering about during the show was the future for the characters. It ends in 1987, so just a few years before the fall of the USSR. Would the ones who went to Russia involuntarily have been able to come back? Would the Jennings's? It would have been cheesy to have a "where are they now" segment at the end of the show, but I was really curious how the 90s would have treated all these characters.
In any case, the show was just about as good as the buzz had led me to believe, so if you get the chance you should catch it. As I've mentioned before, I was watching it on DVD Netflix, since it isn't currently available for streaming there. I don't actually know where any of the FX shows can be streamed, so hopefully the DVDs don't go away soon, as I still need to catch the end of The Shield, What We Do in the Shadows and Legion - probably among many more.
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