The Americans Review

The Americans is a Cold War thriller that gets better every season, which almost nothing does, and by the end it is among the most highly rated dramas of its decade. The spycraft is exact and unglamorous, all wigs, dead drops and terrible improvised violence, but the reason the show works is that every operation costs the marriage something. Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys play Elizabeth and Philip as two people who were assigned to each other and fell in love anyway, and the slow divergence between her conviction and his doubt is the real plot.

Noah Emmerich as the FBI neighbor and Holly Taylor as the daughter tighten the vice from either side. Critics praised the patience of it, the willingness to spend an hour on a conversation, and that patience is also the common complaint: whole stretches move at a crawl, and several supporting threads exist mostly to fill a season order. The final episode, a confrontation in a parking garage and a train ride north, is among the best endings television has produced.