To describe The Americans’ series finale would make the ending sound vaguely anti-climactic: long-established relationships end without much resolution, characters are only given half-hearted farewells, and deep-seated emotions are still sort of left hanging in the air. But in this half-digested…

The Americans’ penultimate episode, titled “Jennings, Elizabeth,” perhaps serves as little more than pure rising action, but its phenomenal sense of drama keeps the suspense character-rich and inundated in the show’s main theme: the conflict between national and personal identity. Until…

“The Summit” may very well mark the beginning of the end for The Americans; Stan Beeman is now fully convinced Stan and Elizabeth are the two Soviet spies he’s been trailing, the brooding spy couple finally find some common ground,…

The seventh episode of The Americans devotes a good chunk of its running time to an extended heist apprised in the previous episode, “Rififi,” as one that’s destined for failure. Here it ends with four dead bodies and one remarkable…

We’re now about halfway through The Americans and already the show is beginning to commit to the catastrophic implications reinforced by the show’s previous four episodes. Aside from a couple deviances involving Oleg and Stan, “The Great Patriotic War” is…

In the fourth episode of The Americans, Philip and Oleg talk about the dissolution of the Soviet government, but what hangs more desperately over the show is the possible dissolution of Philip and Elizabeth’s relationship—brought up in the conversation with…