It’s way better than any basic cable TV show had any right to be. Plus, all seasons are streaming on Hulu, so you don’t have to worry about whether the story will be completed.
https://www.hulu.com/series/the-americans-6deba130-65fb-4816...
Then, a couple years later, I needed something to watch during long exercise sessions and I checked it out again. It was getting much more interesting by the end of the first season.
And every season got better and richer. By the very end, I experienced it as actually deep, especially in the way the Keri Russell character unexpectedly evolves. It was a real pleasure and I'm very glad I had the chance to enjoy it. Recommended!
I only know of a few examples where writers escape this. The first is to have the episodes be essentially disconnected from one another (e.g. Star Trek). The other is what "The Wire" did by having each season have its own plot that is properly resolved at the end of each season.
Some people like episodic TV, some people prefer serialized.
There are lots of mini-series which do book adaptations but it's hard to come up with examples that span multiple seasons: "My Brilliant Friend" did it I think and maybe you could argue early "Game of Thrones" but the story was never finished in book form either so it couldn't be said to be telling a complete story.
I don;t think "The Wire" gets enough credit for creating a format that conformed to the constraints of TV production while still being able to tell stories that spanned many episodes. You could have ended the series at any season (had it been cancelled) and it wouldn't have felt incomplete and yet the final season did feel like it completed an even larger story arc.
They’ll set up what feels like a season finale in most episodes, then instead of resolving it in the next, quickly toss it aside or even just ignore it. It’s not good, and I would not recommend it at all, but it’s maybe the weirdest show I’ve seen.
I remain unsure whether the writers were aware they were writing one extremely-long joke about television writing, or if they thought it was actually good.
Watching without the cliffhanger/socializing "what's next" discussion, and seeing them discard 87.3% of all plot points with reckless abandon made me hate the show after watching 2-3 seasons.
It’s nuts. If that sounds awesome, I assure you, it’s not, nothing ever matters in that show. Fascination at its commitment to a particular way of being terrible, and a little bit of joy from trying to describe the show to people who haven’t seen it (often they think I’m making stuff up) is what got me through.
I get that Lost is a show with a lot of problems, but this is a show dedicated to having a lot of problems. It’s swinging for the fences of having-problems. It’s astonishing. It’s… an achievement? It’s terrible. It’s the inverse of a miracle that it exists.
I watched a couple episodes of The Diplomat and couldn't get into it. I'll give it another try.
If that show had aired on a real broadcast network (as JJ Abrams' next shows were) and not on The WB, she would have been nominated for Emmys out the wazoo. As it was, she won the Golden Globe for that first season, but she should have at least been nominated for the Emmy for her work on that show, because she was every bit as good or better than her peers on cable or network.
I have a running theory that The Americans and The Diplomat are in fact set in the same universe. Keri Russell is still playing the same character, a deep-cover Russian agent, and now she has infiltrated the upper echelons of the US government...
We're at season 5 atm and up until this point, I can confirm the ratings.
...I just wish I could find that reddit post again. Can't remember if there were others good shows on it.
Strong advice for any show.
I now follow this advice with all shows. I’ll give it a full season to see if they develop something I’m interested in following.
Is he the hunchback brother of Bob Iger, Disney CEO?
It's a fantastic show and while there are certainly some smaller arcs that could have been written better as is the case with any long-running show, especially one made for cable, it doesn't spend the two seasons completely destroying its reputation like most do. It ended at just the right time.
- take a year or two to find their footing or
- have a large cast (some mediocre) that get their own story lines of no consequence occasionally or
- introduce cast members that don't make it or
- implode towards the final season.
I have done this for many series that are somewhat uneven:
- The Americans
- How I Met Your Mother
- Fringe
- Orphan Black
- Halt and Catch Fire
- House of Cards (watching the ratings allows you to miss all of season 6)
- Arrested Development
- Bojack Horseman
- Veep
- 30 Rock
- Jane the Virgin
- Black Mirror
- The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
- Suits
- Six Feet Under
- La Femme Nikita
- The Blacklist
- Peaky Blinders
- The Romanoffs
- Ozark
- Westworld (sometimes dropping episodes does not matter)
- Succession
- Borgen
And all of these series have lots of strong episodes.
Series I would not do this with:
- The Bear
- Breaking Bad
- Money Heist
- The Serpent
- Fleabag
- Chernobyl
- The White Lotus
I'll go through this list and start from episode 1, though, so I appreciate the list of good shows!
Albeit, we got bored of money heist after season 1.
- outstanding performances by Spanish actresses Ursula Corbrero, Itziar Ituno, Alba Flores, and Najwa Nimri and
- humming Bella Ciao to yourself for two months.
There were always a few "filler" episodes that didn't move the story forward much, if at all.
But sometimes those filler's are just good tropey fun! :-)
I did watch half the first season years ago and wasn't too captured, will give it another go.
EDIT: someone else mentioned Tinker Tailor (either the '80s BBC miniseries or the Gary Oldman movie - once again he's killing it) which is far more grounded. That might be more up your street? I enjoyed both a lot. Bleak as hell though.
It's called Realism.
Alec Guinness owns Smiley. Just perfect. Absolutely gripping yet low budget [+] it actually demands that you use your intellect to keep up. If you haven't seen those I say whip up ye old torrent client and get some.
Anyways, I did say "too greatly". Someone up there says "no spoilers" so ..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezekuICeYlg&list=PLSpG6jj23V...
Watched with my father growing up, may even have some home copies myself.
I mean this is just American politics in general.
I've just started season 3 so no spoilers please :)
I had read and enjoyed the first two books. After the first couple of episodes I had to admit I was watching it for Gary Oldman more than anything else. I'd watch just a supercut of him expressing disdain for and disappointment with his subordinates.
This is why I could never get into House of Cards, it's just so over the top compared to something like Borgen which for me to this day is still one of the best political dramas ever made, also sadly went somewhat under the radar especially across the pond.
Until Season 4?. Whenever the re-election campaign started. Joel Kinnaman, while a great actor (loved him in Altered Carbon) was a massive miscast as a plausible candidate for the GOP. Mostly due to youth. And the last season was a Game of Thrones-level utter disaster.
The Last Envoy? What? That did not even become a plot point (at least in season 1, I bailed pretty early in S2). Also, Envoys are terrorists and not the ultimate-special ops forces?
The remake just drags on and on and on. Tons of irrelevant detail and uninteresting sidestories.
That's how I felt about Succession for 3 seasons.
I felt it just dragged and dragged and I couldn't understand what was the fuss.
Then I started watching some YouTube commentary and starting to understand that the irrelevant and uninteresting was actually relevant and interesting.
ATN, the succession, that was all bogus for character development, a setup.
I feel like House of Cards may fall in a similar category there. It's not much about the action but character evolution and dynamics.
The scope and pacing in the original was just perfect. Just because you can layer on more, doesn't mean it's gonna make it better. Much was pure tedium and seemed to serve filling time first and foremost.
That's a very way to express that idea. I'll be reusing that, if you don't mind.. :-) I've always expressed it more crudely as having the feeling of being forcefully lobotomized by the producers..
You'll know when you see a show or a broadcast that gives you the impression your brain is leaking out of your ears.
"Tehran" (Israeli spy thriller) is another really good spy series. You really get a feel for the oppressive environment in Iran under the thumb of the IRGC.
Also "The Spy" with Sascha Baron Cohen is excellent too.
So many good series made involving the subject though. Both drama and documentary. I mean, you do want drama and not documentary? Cause the story The Americans is inspired by is documented.
For drama, check Deutschland '83 and the two successors. Has a great cast.
And of course there is Clifford Stoll's book about how he caught Hagbard Celine (see the movie '23' with a young August Diehl who later broke through in Hollywood).
German cinema, both West-German and modern, has gems regardless (I am not German btw, subs are easy to come by).
South Korea also has a cinema scene. I once saw a Korean horror and it was unlike anything I saw before. Like, really weird. But it had nothing to do with spy drama.
A lot of spy drama or action from the Cold War era is very over the top and/or propagandist/fear mongering. Drama is dramatized, but can easily be regarded as overdramatized, bending the truth too much in the process. At such point, a good documentary on the subject is probably preferred. The faith I have in a country like China or North Korea being authentic on such matters in documentary is near zero, and thus I assume their drama on the matter will equal the low effort American cinema we saw previous century.
That a band like Laibach was allowed to play in North Korea is very much telling to me.
As drama, it excels in the drama around the marriage rather than the actual fact of them being spies, and has been praised as “fundamentally a show about a marriage”. If you’re looking for a spy thriller, you might look elsewhere. It’s very “American TV” and doesn’t really stray from the formula
Illegals were/are special assets that would never be concurrently running so many different operations and engaging in risky wet (i.e. assassination) operations right and left. More likely they would spend many boring years cultivating their positions in society and a select few important contacts. That doesn't make for good television.
The Sopranos was not especially realistic. But realism wasn't the point; there was just enough verisimilitude to serve the narrative, which was a kind of morality play. It's the same with The Americans, which is at bottom more of a relationship story than one about espionage. (We agree, I think.)
A lot of research went into the show, but it shows up in the same ways research shows up in Mad Men.
Don't watch it expecting to learn a bunch of stuff! That's not the point.
(A top 5 series for me.)
Maybe I'm wrong but IIRC there's a sex scene in the first five minutes of the pilot. Like, don't insult my intelligence.
For me it's just boring filler and I skip them.
I chuckled and thank you for the compliment!
Also: I agree. It's pretty much always a tedium. Now, American series almost always suffer from that: not just the sex scenes are used as filler, and could be replaced with a line or two suggesting the events if relevant. House of Cards is my go to example: just take the British original for how you can condense the story by a factor of 10 without any loss. Putting it that way: it'd be hilarious if a compression format would work this way.
The real Americans was you, all along
Masha Gessen did some work on making the spoken Russian be more authentic https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/translating-th... ( She must have given up on Keri Russell )
Peter Jacobson (FBI Agent Wolf) appears in comedy Russian TV show inspired by the Americans "Adaptation" https://www.poconorecord.com/story/entertainment/2018/05/26/... . I've seen episode 1 available on the internet, full series is hard to find.
Here is a couple from Germany: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/15/married-pair-r...
They had an oblivious daughter and everything.
While it has it's ebs and flows, it never got bad or dull for me.
And it contains a ton of details you might think is for dramatic effect or cinematography, but often it turned out to be based on actual practices, historic fact or just have a practical purpose for the characters.
Back in Soviet Union if you ever get a blessing to visit another country, you have interviews with KGB, one before leaving and one on return. Upon return they asked if you bringing any contraband, currency and one of the question is "Why did you return?".
So, my parents lived with me in NZ for last few months. When they got back dad's boating mates decided to grill him - Why did you return?
To be allowed to leave you had to sign a paper promising to "tell" the secret service on your travel companions after the trip. So everybody on the trip was living in paranoia of one another.
It was mostly to later have some blackmail material on you if you became opposition - you signed the paper so you're an agent of the system.
And when (if) you returned - regular people assumed you have some connections to the regime and treated you like an enemy.
Don't do FX like that.
They had a juggernaut lineup of great shows at the time (which is why The Americans kind of got pushed to a backburner).
IIRC, there's a bit of sex in The Americans, and a fair bit of discussion of how the spies had to sleep with targets as part of their training, and in the field. The father character also has a pretty dicey relationship with a much younger woman/girl, in order to access her father's home office.
1: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/tv-reviews/the-americans