It's funny that I'm watching both The Americans and Spy X Family (can't wait to talk about that one) in the same year because they have very similar premises about a secret agent family in the Cold War. But what's especially interesting is that despite their drastically different tones and mediums, they prioritize telling a story about their respective families over a simple spy thriller.
The Americans is a show about two KGB agents (Philip and Elizabeth) undercover in the US pretending to be a standard suburban family, two kids and all. They spent much of the season going on missions and interfering in the currently-occurring Cold War, all the while trying to keep their cover and not getting caught by their new neighbor, Stan, who happens to be an FBI agent. There's a decent chunk of The Americans that's basically a spy thriller, with a bunch of gritty Bourne-esque action scenes and a decent main storyline about the threat of Reagan's infamous "Star Wars program". But personally, all of the episodic missions and that SDI storyline was probably the least interesting part of the season for me. Personally, the best parts of the spy storyline involved the more personal conflicts. Subplots like Philip and Elizabeth almost getting their cover blown by Stan, Stan's mole-turned-love-interest Nina, and Philip and Elizabeth's shady new KGB supervisor Claudia (played excellently by Margo Martindale) were a lot more interesting to me. Speaking of which, it's hilarious that the first thing I saw Margo Martindale was Bojack Horseman, where she plays a complete parody of herself, because it means I keep getting surprised that she's actually really great at acting.
As I mentioned earlier on, The Americans isn't primarily a story about spies. In its simplest form, The Americans is about marriage. Philip and Elizabeth's relationship gets the most focus here, and Season 1 takes a lot of time to really delve into their complicated feelings towards their technically fabricated marriage. Philip and Elizabeth are very different people, with the former getting attached to America and the latter having a fierce loyalty to Russia, but they both end up getting more attached to their family, which ends up causing things to completley spiral out of control between the two as the season goes on. Starting in Episode 6, where the couple gets tested by the KJB to make sure they're not moles, Season 1 of The Americans really starts to get gripping and intense entirely because of the personal drama between Philip and Elizabeth, amplified even more when they start contemplating "divorce" a few episodes later. Also, and I can't believe I'm saying this, I actually like their children Paige and Henry. It's so hard to get children right in TV shows but these actors are really solid and their sibling dynamic is genuinely really fun to watch.
Highlights:
Safe House: Easily the most tense episode of the season, Safe House kinda just keeps spiralling further and further into insanity, right from the moment Phillip runs into Amador and knocks him out. It all culminates in Amador's increasingly inevitable death, though it still came as a shock since we hadn't really had any major characters bite the dust yet.
Only You: And then right after Only You, we get the death of yet another side character in Gregory. This episode wasn't as chaotic as Safe House and I didn't care about Gregory quite as much, but I'd be lying if I said his suicide by cop didn't hit hard. Maybe it was the music.
The Colonel: While it doesn't really end up resolving much, The Colonel was still a great and action-packed way to bring the first season to a close. The final car chase that culminated in Elizabeth getting shot was super intense and fun, and the last few minutes toss in cliffhanger after cliffhanger after cliffhanger, hopefully setting up an even better Season 2.
Overall, though it took a few episodes to really get going and the main threat isn't super compelling, The Americans still got off to a pretty great start in its first season thanks to a fascinating and well-developed core duo, some great action, some incredibly tense moments, and a killer score
3/5 Stars
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