May Day

The Americans kind of splits the difference between Alias and Homeland, which sounds dismissive but is actually a sincere endorsement. Alias was great at building tension whenever Sydney (Jennifer Garner) went on missions, but meandered around a little too much in all the sci-fi Rambaldi business and with soapy storylines regarding who was whose parent and whether people who died had actually died for reals. Homeland offered compelling real-life spycraft...except when characters lost their minds or made nonsensical decisions. And The Americans has borrowed the best of both shows: from Alias, nervewracking missions-of-the-week, carried out under the watchful eye of a potentially mortal antagonist (there, SD-6 head Ron Rifkin's Arvin Sloane; here, Noah Emmerich as FBI agent Stan Beeman); from Homeland, real historical enemies of the state carrying out mayhem on an America real enough for the viewer to recognize.

I really enjoyed the first season, for the most part, but watching the finale, I couldn't help pulling at a few threads. Okay, one thread, and the most problematic element of the show: the marriage of Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell), who seem to be a perfectly normal American couple who run a travel agency together and live happily in the suburbs of D.C. In actuality, "Philip" and "Elizabeth" were recruited as teenagers by the KGB to learn how to fake it as Americans and thus carry out spy missions on an as-needed basis. Who would suspect such a nice young couple? They're so normal that they're boring!

Okay, so in the pilot (remember that cold open sequence set to "Tusk"? damn, that was cool), it's established that when Elizabeth and Philip are offstage, as it were, they don't really bother acting like a couple. But, just in time for the series to start, Philip is starting to feel like he does want to have a real marriage with Elizabeth. Meanwhile, they obviously had sex at least twice in order to produce their children, Paige (Holly Taylor) and Henry (Keidrich Sellati). So why would that be part of their spy orders? My personal feelings aside, having children has proven over the course of the season to be such a huge crimp on Philip and Elizabeth's spy activities that I can't imagine why the KGB didn't actually forbid them from procreating. If the whole point of pairing up two previously unacquainted people to play at marriage for intelligence-gathering purposes is so that personal feelings for one another won't distract them from their missions, why give them a shared interest in a couple of  humans to whom they're biologically related? Okay, it makes them fit in better with their neighbours, I guess, but even in 1981, some married couples didn't have children. I even knew some and I never assumed it was because they had anything to hide, national security-wise. Granted, I was only six at the time, but I was pretty sharp.

Anyway, someone must have thought it would be very interesting to show these two conflicted people pondering (after many, many years together) hooking up together emotionally, against a backdrop of their mission. But, as on Homeland, the stories that revolve around spy-related marital conflict are super-duper-boring. Admittedly, I am always biased toward the character in a TV series who is the most ruthless (in this case, that would be Margo Martindale's Claudia, of whom more later), but when you're essentially undercover enemy combatants at the height of the Cold War, maybe less talky-talky about who's being distant from whom and more getting people whatever microfilm they may need.

All that said, Rhys and Russell are good enough that I was able to get hooked on the show despite this central flaw. (I particularly like that it's Elizabeth who, when she's not being Elizabeth, remains the more rigidly pro-Motherland, and Philip's the one who keeps letting himself be seduced by the comforts of American life; it would be expected to make her the squishy one.) And watching this spy business at a safe historical remove makes it a lot more fun than Homeland. That we're still kind of in the middle of fighting with the sorts of people Brody (Damian Lewis) is working for is what gives Homeland its power, but it can also be a depressing bummer. When we watch The Americans, though, we do so knowing that this conflict ended (I mean...basically), and the good guys (depending on your perspective) won. So we can root for our protagonists to succeed (even if, should they do so, the world may never see the advent of the Double Stuf Golden Oreo) because we see them the most; but we also root for Stan to succeed because AMERICA!!!!1! (I'm joking but also serious. Remember, I live here by choice!)

Producers will have to do a lot of work to make Stan an antagonist of the stature that, say, Hank (Dean Norris) now has on Breaking Bad. It's hard to care about him that much what with the way he's been scumbagging his beautiful wife Sandra (Susan Misner) with his asset Nina (Annet Mahendru). And he will have an even harder time prevailing now that she's a triple agent and he has no idea. But he does have the law on his side, not to mention the burning flame of vengeance on behalf of the slain Amador (Maximiliano Hernández), so that will make him an interesting foe in Season 2.

Assuming that her transfer goes through even though she was the one to make sure the mission was aborted, Claudia will be hugely missed by me. Like Russell, Margo Martindale's characterization defies expectations viewers may have based on her appearance, and producers were smart in the way they portrayed the specific kinds of cons a spy who looked like her would pull -- not just "mother" to "Clark" at his wedding, but a confused old cottontop knocking innocently at an apartment door in the finale last night. The degree to which Elizabeth loathed Claudia, when Claudia resembles nothing so much as anyone's ideal grandma, was the kind of running joke/non-joke that makes the show so surprising.

And speaking of black humour: oh, Martha. Alison Wright's portrayal of poor, credulous Martha was so earnest and so willfully ignorant that this viewer's response to her was similarly complicated. I hated her for being such an idiot...but I loved her sense of hope. The little we saw of her in the finale gave tantalizing hints of what a problem she may turn out to be next season. I am optimistic that Clark and Martha's marriage will just continue to get weirder and weirder. Sure, on a show like this, producers always have the option of just killing off the problematic character. But that would be expected.