Any television viewer who wants to be captured by a great dramatic series remembers the moment.
What is the moment? It’s the point in time when a show makes that leap from “merely” being tremendously entertaining and well-crafted to something much more. The moment refers to an episode or a sequence when you realize that you’re not just enjoying a dramatic product on the tube (or computer screen). You’re now privileged and honored to be alive at the same time a television show is on.
Very simply, in season three, FX’s The Americans found its moment.
It’s no longer a show I enjoy. It’s a show I revere, a show I must respect by giving it full emotional energy and attention every Wednesday night.
Showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields have given something very precious to television viewers, even though the whole of the country isn’t beating down doors to see this show — it only does that for comfort-food shows on broadcast networks. (Sigh.)
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Before going forward with an explanation of why The Americans has reached a much higher place in the television pantheon, get some more input and context from the best TV reviewer in the nation, Alan Sepinwall of HitFix. He reviewed the season three finale here, and he interviewed Weisberg and Fields here — note in the links that there’s a one-hour video with a discussion involving the showrunners and the lead actors.
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https://youtu.be/8F4-24oVNHk
For me, the moment when The Americans became something more than just a really good television show was episode nine of this glorious third season, “Do Mail Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?”
The episode is defined by one sequence: Elizabeth Jennings (played by Keri Russell) has to kill an old woman named Betty in order to keep from being identified. It is, on one hand, just the latest case of the Jenningses having to kill to serve their country, playing the long game of being deep-cover spies. However, the context and method in which Elizabeth offs this sweet, old woman — one who misses her husband and knew the pain of war — creates a situation too powerful for Elizabeth to ignore.
Here is the central insight of this piece and of what we’ve seen the past 13 weeks:
The Americans soared this season — especially in the final five episodes — precisely because Weisberg and Fields (and their team of gifted writers) created so many scenes in which silences spoke volumes.
As you might know, I love writing about Mad Men in addition to The Americans. It is not an idle coincidence that both shows are knitted together by track records of being the favorites of critics, but not viewed in overwhelmingly large numbers across the country.
What The Americans has generally managed to do — but truly mastered at the end of season three — is use silences to say a lot. Mad Men is probably the signature 21st-century show in terms of mining the meanings and magnitude of silences to convey emotional impact and carry along the story. The Americans became great on MM’s level this year, and while each of the last five episodes were loaded with loud silences, that Elizabeth-Betty scene from episode nine felt like the opening of the door to a far deeper and richer emotional universe than the already profound world laid out in the first two-and-a-half seasons.
Realize this about Betty’s act of calling Elizabeth out on her evil, an evil which flows from the misguided (ideologically programmed) belief that anything for the cause is, ipso facto, good and noble:
Had an American spy or some other hardened pro-American character (Ronald Reagan?) met Elizabeth and called her out on her bullsh**, Elizabeth would have been able to respond combatively, knowing that she was encountering a person she could easily recognize as “the enemy.”
In Betty, though, Elizabeth meets someone who is frail — like her own mother in Russia. She meets someone who is a mother and knows the pain of motherhood, of being responsible for someone else. Kind and non-threatening, Betty is an American who is really not an enemy, but she’s caught in the web of (in)convenience which requires spies to do very nasty things without compromise or an allowance for gentler alternatives.
No, Elizabeth doesn’t use a bullet, but as the debate over the death penalty’s methods reminds us, choosing to kill is the essential act of moral significance, not the choice of how to kill somebody. It’s important to underscore the point that the scene captures the monstrous nature of Elizabeth’s act, as opposed to portraying the pill-based killing — far less graphic than blowing Betty’s brains out with a gun — as somehow sympathetic.
What is (or at least might be) sympathetic toward Elizabeth in that seminal scene is that the production work shows Elizabeth realizing that she’s caught up in an act she really rather wouldn’t have wanted to perform… but still views as absolutely necessary. There’s an exquisite and heightened sense of conflict there, and that italicized phrase in many ways is a perfect summary of the final five episodes of season three.
The Elizabeth-Betty scene is the first of several roundhouse punches delivered straight to the guts of both the viewers and the three central members of the Jennings family — Elizabeth, Philip, and Paige (sorry, Henry — enjoy playing football games with Stan). In a masterstroke, the Elizabeth-Betty scene — through its powerful silences and potent simplicity — perfectly prepared viewers for the even more wrenching agony of seeing Paige come to grips with her new reality when she finds out that her parents have been living the ultimate lie.
The revelation of Elizabeth and Philip to Paige as Russian spies — which can easily be likened to Don Draper revealing himself to Betty Draper as Dick Whitman in Mad Men (damn, these shows are similar… and I realize why I love them so much) — is the central revelation of season three. It clearly sets the stage for the almost-certain fourth season to come (and hopefully, at least a fifth season to give this show the more complete story arc it deserves — I’d love as many seasons as possible, but right now, I’d feel genuinely cheated if FX didn’t give us at least five). Yet, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that the scene between Elizabeth and Betty is what lifted The Americans to a much higher place in the annals of television history.
The fact that Elizabeth is the emotional rock in the Jennings household — the ice queen who displays a more unshaken control of her emotions — makes that ever-so-slight glimpse of heartbreak in front of Betty an even more compelling window into Elizabeth’s internal sense of conflict. The fact that Elizabeth is then so shattered and overwhelmed with sadness (mixed with an abiding love and gratitude) when seeing her dying mother in the season three finale only adds to the power of that previous encounter with Betty.
(Side note: Russell’s acting is stupendous in that scene depicting Elizabeth’s encounter with her Russian mother. This ideologically fierce and methodologically ruthless woman becomes her mother’s “little one” on so many levels. It was the best scene from the season finale, hands down.)
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You have read about 1,200 words up to this point. Nothing’s been said about Martha or Clark or Gaad or Oleg or EST.
Do you feel cheated? I don’t — not at all. I do agree with Alan Sepinwall, in his linked commentary above, that too much is going on in these episodes, and that the side dramas other than Stan-Oleg-Nina just aren’t compelling enough to take time and attention away from the central drama of the Jennings family. However, like Sepinwall, I don’t feel those instances of clutter take away from the power and greatness of this show’s central tensions and the scenes which elicit those tensions in such a moving and textured way.
We watch dramatic shows to feel something powerful, and to feel that powerful feeling with depth and authenticity. We want to step inside the minds of characters living lives and facing situations we can’t easily identify with… and gain a taste of what that might feel like.
After season three of The Americans, I feel more deeply invested in — and aware of — the excruciating internal conflicts and pains being felt by Elizabeth, Philip and Paige Jennings. Like Pastor Tim, I care about them very deeply and want them to find a place of peace, a place in which they can love themselves honestly (much as I want Don Draper to do the same — yep, one more Americans-Mad Men connection).
Yet, the way Pastor Tim reacts to the new world created by Paige in the final scene of season three might reflect a set of actions that no longer manifest Christian nonviolence and love. While we wonder what’s going to happen next in season four, I’m going to simply cherish how real these characters and their agonies have become.
One can’t paint a higher compliment to a television show: The Americans — aka, the Jenningses — are the fictional human beings I care most about right now… and will continue to care about for the next few seasons, now that Don Draper is about to leave my life.
The Americans met its moment in season three… it is now the kind of show for which each night of weekly viewing is more than a pleasure. It’s a profound privilege, something close to a responsibility.
Excuse me while I go and say a prayer for Paige… and her parents and grandparents as well.