The Americans

TV:At its best, mostly in the first three seasons, Americans was biting, gritty and challenging drama with a killer concept, and had a lot to say about both decades past and the world today. Though the ensemble cast was consistently great, latter seasons got lost in the weeds and felt more like staging for a dramatic conclusion the next year rather than advancing the key plotlines in itself. Undeniably worth watching, just be forewarned that the writer-room came down with 'one-more-season'-itus.

Could've been a season shorter and been tighter overall, but it's still very compelling. They also accomplished a slam dunk ending where other shows fall flat on their face. A niggling criticism is that apart from a couple of their disguises, no-one looks like they're from the 1980's. Where's the big hair, and all the terribly fitted suits for the Russians?

I absolutely do not get the critical hype and acclaim. At all. I find this to be one of the most drab, gray, visually and tonally monotonous, emotionally inert, and glacially-paced TV shows I've ever seen in my life, blandly adhering to the most basic cable antihero formula there is. Hope you're ready to see stories unspool snail-like over two seasons that could have been done in four episodes.

good series

That killing grandma scene (first one) is one of the saddest bleakest god damn things.

S2-4>S6>S5>S1

Season 1: 73

An almost perfect TV series. Tremendous acting, writing, production value, direction and music choices. I have just a small personal criticism (why I don't rate it 100).

-2 points for ending with a U2 song

As much domestic drama as spy thriller, the Americans makes marriage and spycraft seem like two varieties of the same thing. Each has its lies and playacting. Each has its own expediencies. Each holds together or fails to based on its own tenuous forms of trust. Rhys and Russell bring this toxic, co-dependent work marriage to vivid life.

Season 1: 80, Season 2: 75, Season 3: 75, Season 4: 85, Season 5: 75, Season 6: 90

S1: 82, S2: 85, S3: 85, S4: 88, S5: 85, S6: 85

Rating for seasons 1-4

The idea seemed really interesting, but i left it at the end of the first season. Maybe because i decided that only the very best series deserve 10-20-30 hours of my time, but indeed at the end of the season 1 it looked already trapped in the same mechanisms, love-stories drama, with the spy-story that sometimes looked as a secondary plot. I don't want another soap opera-like american tv series, thanks.

It kind of sink after a couple of seasons.

The characterization and relationships of Beeman has an odd similarity to the dynamics driving Ozu's Tokyo Story.

Did something interesting happen in the first half of the episode? Let's talk about it. How do we feel about that thing happening? Are we done yet? No, we still have a few minutes to fill.

It's just so impossible that you can't take the whole thing seriously. Suspense is not that bad etc. But it all feels so childish.

S1:85 S2:75 S3:80 S4:75 S5:70 S6:85

This show is phenomenal and it doesn't get nearly as much recognition as it deserves. It does suspense extremely well and the setting/tone is brilliant. Take notice: the wife in this show is far from the "shrill harpy" nonsense that you get with most shows feebly trying to portray a strong woman, she's the best character in the show. It's is at it's weakest when dealing with drama involving the children, and hopefully they steer clear in the upcoming seasons (reviewed after season 3).

Great series. What a ride.

The series had been hinting and teasing the big finale since episode 1, that for me ended in a disappointing "....so what?". Along the way, episode after episode, season after season, they had long dialogue-less sequences that I called "spy stuff". As in: "What are they doing?" "I don't know...spy stuff." "Why are they doing that?" "I don't know...spy stuff." I like the heist films that explain the mission in detail and watch it carried out. This is the opposite. Felt aimless.

Süper

Starts of quite interesting but by the end of season 3 you just wish they would go back to Russia

What's good: the show works; it's a good idea; the tension between spying and life is a good theme for a show. The chemistry between Rhys and Russell is great and the acting in general is really good when it could have been really bad -- it's really easy to do a spy badly, and even easier to do a spy's dupe badly. What's bad: a lot of the plotting is pretty loose, some of the big character decisions feel emotionally wrong, and the American propaganda element is pretty heavy-handed.