I’m not gonna pretend I didn’t basically know what this show was about before I watched it originally, and I’m not gonna pretend I haven’t seen every episode of this show already. The goal of this thread is to go back through TV history and see whether the believers in this show were mostly right, mostly wrong, or somewhere in between. I come down heavily on the side of the believers in it being mostly wrong.
I had numerous problems with this show when it aired that I felt undermined the potential of it constantly. I only found the show boring in the final two seasons and kept hope alive it would become something good or even great in season 2. It never reached the bar of great for me, and only was occasionally good for me. A show that was similar in style that began airing about a year and half later was Halt and Catch Fire, which took a full season to get in gear but became a great TV show. This could have done that, too, but its quality stagnated throughout its run despite some of the accolades it received.
This first post is going to serve as background before the real posts I make about each episode (if I live long enough) begin. I always think it’s good to share context on something like this before diving in. It helps the viewer understand how much they should take seriously and how much they’ll need to suspend their disbelief. This show is about constantly suspending your disbelief. If you can’t do that because of the constant insidious conveniences, contrivances, and coincidences this show will never ever work for you. If you find it easy to suspend your disbelief, it is quite possible you will love this show. I generally am somewhere in the middle regarding suspension of disbelief but this one pushed the wrong edge so many times it became beyond laughable to me while so many people were praising it.
I hope to make you rethink how you feel about this show to see it for its true flaws, which are many. That doesn’t mean I won’t point out the good. It just means the bad in overall storylines so grievously undermines the good for me, that I find it hard to believe I’ll like it better this time around 13 years after it originally began airing. But I’m older and wiser now, so it will either be much better or much worse for me. Only time will tell.
The show first aired on January 30, 2013 and I’ll put the original air date in each episode’s post. It was created by Joe Weisberg, and I’ve read at least 10 pages of his largely insufferable Pilot script that breaks so many screenwriting rules I’m amazed it got made. Weisberg was a CIA officer in the 90s, which means he has absolutely no first hand information of the CIA in this era or of FBI Counterintelligence where this show is set. His inspiration was a scandal that came out at some point in the 2000s about Russians posing as Americans during the 2000s. This show is basically completely invented out of whole cloth from his intrigue addled brain of what he probably wishes he could have done vs. what he did in his time at the CIA.
One of the biggest sins in TV is being a ‘try hard’. That’s the same in book writing and movies. You cannot force your way into making people think you know what you’re doing. You need to show it. I never once got the impression this guy knew what he was doing, even though he’d been a previously credited writer. Some of it is just so hacky. If I were to choose which character I think is most like him in the show without knowing anything about his personality, it’s FBI Agent Chris Amodor. That’s the try hard character in the show and Weisberg went to great lengths to not undermine his myth. I’ll be pointing out in all his episodes how the character is clearly a try hard pathetic loser. Previous to creating this show, Weisberg had written one episode of Damages in 2011, and three episodes of the pitiful Falling Skies in 2011-2012. Maybe Spielberg helped him contact someone to get his show off the ground. His biography is way too light for someone with his level of success and that’s probably just the way he likes it.
One of the most irritating things about this show is that it is filled with impossible dumb smart characters, which I’ll begin exploring in the first episode. Sometimes I wonder if Weisberg created this show to make fun of the FBI, because it makes Ka$h Patel’s version look sooper genius.
The stars of the show, without doubt, are Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell. Matthew was unknown to me at the time of this show, and he is spectacular in it. He is dark af and very few actors can plumb the depths of being likable and hateable at the same time. His range is off the charts in this show and you see some of it in the first episode. Keri Russell was most famous for Felicity and had done a rebel cutting of her hair at one point in her career to get away from that character. I didn’t watch that show, or any of her other work previous to this, so who she was before it meant nothing to me. It will take her a while to hit her stride in this show, but once she does, she’ll have a hard time ever playing a likable character again because she’s so good at playing a ‘bad guy’.
At the time this show began, Homeland, another crappy critical darling that had been airing since 2011 had just wrapped its second season. That was also a soap opera masquerading as a spy show but I hoped this one would be better. When comparing the two, there’s no doubt to me The Americans is better but this show was the most overrated show since Homeland, in my opinion.
Throughout this show’s run, it had almost no ratings. Because FX was right wing, I think they felt it had something useful in it to use as propaganda, even though the actual Americans come off as idiots more than successes. You’d almost think Weisberg wanted the Russians to win in this with how sympathetic it is toward them in this show.
The other biggest sin in television (Legends on Netflix is guilty of this) is writing with hindsight (Sorkin’s favorite thing to do). Your goal in any suspense or thriller story based on real events is to wonder what will happen even if you know the outcome. Great storytelling makes you question what you know about the outcome (Chernobyl is a great example of doing it right). Bad storytelling makes it seem like it was inevitable when at the time there was absolutely nothing to suggest we were going to beat the Russians without ending up in nuclear war, specifically because of how insane Reagan was.
I think a show like this plays much better to people my age, who grew up on the terror of WarGames, rather than someone who lived through the Cuban Missile crisis (true stakes that would be hard to beat) or wasn’t old enough to remember how on the brink it felt in 1982, 1983, and 1984. Any show like this should be tapping heavily into pop culture and this one botched a lot. We never saw one ‘Where’s the Beef?’ commercial, when that campaign had quite possibly the best anti-Russian commercial to ever air in the history of television. I could just imagine how much that commercial would have pissed the ‘protagonists’ off, butnah.
I was specifically pissed about this show’s success and another horrible right wing show, Tyrant, because their success with the exact same ratings came at the expense of The Bridge which I loved. That may be part of why I’m so unforgiving of The Americans. I guess we’ll see as I go through the episodes.
Anyway, I think I’ve said enough in the introductory post. I’m going to watch the first episode again for the second time and will give my breakdown of it once I have. From that point, if anyone wants to follow along watching, I think it would be fun to have energizing discussions about each episode since there are numerous fanbois of it on this site.
Thanks for reading.
