A thread for The Americans on FX

Is this show actually based on anything real? Like, are there examples of undercover Russian spies living amongst Americans in this way during the 80s, etc? It wouldn't affect my enjoyment of it, I'm just curious to know how much of it is sourced in fact.

http://www.ibtimes.com/americans-true-story-who-were-real-life-spies-inspired-fx-show-1798070

there's dozens of explainers like this, just happened to be my first Google hit. Short answer is yes.

Thanks, that article seems to suggest this is a more modern phenomenon though. They've basically taken something that's happening now and transplanted it back to the 80s.

The other thing is the real deal never killed people, they were more just eyes and ears, but I suppose that makes for way too boring TV.

the dinner party scene and every reaction was so well done, this show makes such good use of pauses in conversation. not just the obvious raised eyebrows from tim at russian spies introducing him to an fbi agent but stan's barely disguised "wait you're...leftist radicals into direct action" disapproval.

OTM and this is a really delightful plot twist that I hope they run with.

Well goddamn

Not watched ep12 so apologies if this was already posted but did anyone else recognise 30 rock's Kathy Geiss as Gabriel's wife in ep11?

yeah this was covered upthread

the way the ep just ends with Paige's bewildered, fed up "great." was awesome.
Is Phillip off to his doom meeting William now the Feds have William worked out!?

Aderhold is way smarter than he's ever been given credit for on the show. I think most anyone would've taken all the facts about the old lady at the robot shop dying at face value after adding them all up, but he went from hunch about the robot to finding the recorder in one episode. And the FBI in general went from vague tip from Oleg to finding William in the space of one evening. It's insane how efficient they suddenly became.

yeah tbh that stretched the bounds of believable for me, but hey its a TV show not a documentary.

Yr right about Aderhold tho. Compared to Stan (ffs the guy LIVES NEXT DOOR TO THE RUSKIES AND HAS NO IDEA) he's a spy god.

Some miscasting with Oleg's ma, she looks no more than 4 years older than him.

The contrast between Aderhold's superspy competence and his strong physical and auditory resemblance to Cleveland Brown (of Family Guy and The Cleveland Show) has been cracking me up lately.

And yeah, this episode's ending was pretty much perfect, starting with Paige's "You killed a guy in front of me - I think I deserve to know everything!" and ending with "Great."

yeah, that was hysterical and all too true to me... "so you ARE murder spies, just AWESOME, thanks a lot MOM"

does Paige WANT to join the family business?

Cannot believe this season ends next week

I want it to end, because I think this show's perfected the 13-episode season, but I also don't because it won't come back until next winter/spring and that's too far away.

paige's "great", delivered so perfectly, was one of the best final lines of any tv episodes ever, right

poor william

According to the director, they shot Paige saying "great" more than 20 times just to get it perfect. They succeeded.

I was distracted by the casting of Dylan Baker at first but William has slowly grown into possibly their most tragic character

Henry's awakening seems imminent? My next-season theory speculates Paige "enters the family business" and Henry gets turned by his buddy Stan. There was a moment last season or the one before where Stan looked questioningly thru the window at the house next door but otherwise he doesn't seem to suspect anything about his naughty neighbors. Figure that can't last forever.

Aderhold will scoop him.

Huh.

I appreciate your less-spoilery initial reactions, P <3

lol, yet you still check the bumped thread before you've watched the episode.

I always forget what day its on! Its only 2Pm thursday here.

somewhat anticlimactic ending somehow!

man some of the cast are wringing mega mileage out of their chosen tics. stan quite literally with the cheek twitch, oleg with the eye squint/o face/tongue lick combo, paige with the lip thing and the helpless frown.

yeah I was expecting more from this episode! like what happened to Don?

it was still good

I love that Paige is wanting to turn into Elizabeth Jr. and both Elizabeth and Philip, but especially Philip, are like "cut this shit out right now!"

are they ever going to give the son anything to do except watch TV and play computer games?

He seems sullen now because Paige has stolen his only friend.

Matthew looks like a chunkier Mark Arm, there, I said it

I don't think it was anticlimactic at all. For a show that specialises in constantly rising clammy dread this was a real ratcheting up of tension.

Philip totally bottled it at the end though, he should have taken advantage of Stan's state of mind and opened a beer with him. He'd have spilled about the dead prisoner within minutes.

I thought the very end was great, in a subtle way. If Elizabeth instead of Philip had gone over to get Paige, she would have encouraged the match with Matthew as a way of getting information, and then Paige would be Marthaing Matthew. Which Philip knows and doesn't want.

I thought it was great too! William's monologue was heartwrenching.

It's the first time we've actually seen Phillip's Russian son, right?

Yeah, he was only seen in a photo before iirc.

this was a p good ending and i'm interested to see where the philip's son storyline goes, among other things. philip's tone and expressions in the last few minutes are so goddamn affecting and intense

i will say that as great as the show is and as masterfully as it's evolved into an engine of internalized dread, i wouldn't mind a few action scenes next season, yanno?

mostly being tongue in cheek when i say that, but at the same time it /would/ be nice to have a little escapist respite from the excruciating emotional brutality that dominated this season, like say, the chases in seasons 1 and 3.

AND YET, what i said about it last season is even more true this time around - that it's one of the only espionage fictions in any medium that's on par with the depth and political insight (hindsight in this case) of john le carre. the honourable woman is really the only other one i can think of that's as good.

The way Stan reacted to springing Paige and Matt was... odd. Almost hysterical laughter? Are we to assume that was the result of extreme sleep deprivation and general weirdness.

He did seem oddly giddy after spending day and night in an observation room watching a man die a, by all accounts, very gruesome death.

Which BTW I am very relieved they didnt show :/

the entire episode was strangely elliptical--wouldn't go so far as to say dreamlike but it did up ante on a show that is often heavy with tone and mood. stan's reaction plausibly an emotional release at finding two people making an intimate connection. given the monologues he'd just been listening to I can imagine seeing the kids that way gave him some hope.

Yeah thats most likely.

It was interesting that despite Williams dying mutterings about the perfect amercian couple, wish he'd been them, no one'd ever guess them being right under their noses, Stan also seemed completely not-suss of his neighbours.

But why would he be suspicious of them? They've never given him any reason to be. They've never asked him probing questions about his work and he's never caught them snooping in his briefcase or anything.

I felt that his glee over Paige and Matthew was because it would give him an extra connection to really the only humans he seems to have contact with outside work, as well as it being a completely normal thing in a week of horrors and weirdness for him. Again, it's a nice bit of irony that his Russian spy neighbours are providing him with the most ordinary suburban American experiences in his life.

what a very in-character americans finale. that last shot of the jennings house, from an angle that i'm sure we've never seen before, that reveals their house to be built completely differently to how i'd imagined it, added to the dreamlike quality ryan talks about. and of course the cliffhangers that aren't; most other shows would have let the curtain fall on gabriel telling them they should flee, or perhaps of them pondering it in the car, but here it's all but resolved before the episode ends (obviously not totally, just another added source of chronic tension).

and the actual cliffhanger being philip's son, someone it had been tempting on occasion to suspect was a fabrication, suddenly and with no warning there as a character with a huge arc ahead. and how perfect that he's a dissident (actively, philosophically anti-communist or merely disillusioned?)

there was definitely a moment when it seemed half the cast was about to decamp for russia. i doubt we've seen the last of oleg but i hope we haven't seen the last of arkady.

and AAAAHHHH at paige asking elizabeth to show her how to defend herself

henry = running joke at present, ticking timebomb for the future, right?