A thread for The Americans on FX

Just got screeners for the first 3 of S3, will report on quality level

J Hoberman did a short review of the s2 video release on Sunday, was mildly spoilery but not fatally.

finished s1, was hoping for a M Martindale-Richard Thomas death fight really.

On the commentary either the creator or a producer said Spielberg reads the scripts and looks at the edits as DreamWorks is involved. He helped w/ editing of finale's car chase.

Did not know that!

The first 3 of S3 are very solid, though more of a slow boil than the start of S2 was. And just when I thought they'd run out of suspenseful ways to shoot cars driving within the speed limit...

am I the only viewer who sees this show as amusingly inconsistent? alternately exciting and campy. the family angle is underdeveloped to say the least. gets a bit better as the daughter gradually becomes aware of her parents double lives, still too often it's like the kids are props. and the disguises! love the "clark & martha" subplot but it's so silly.

no, you are not the only one. I do like stuff such as Martindale donning helpless-granny drag for a hit. I guess the KGB sent its agents to some Moscow theatre seminars.

i mentioned this upthread but i see the show as a sort of fever dream of what the 80's felt like to a child: inconsistent, angry parenting; cold war paranoia; the madness of puberty; hypersexualized everything; the general confusion that is being part of a dictatorship beneath parents. if you think of Page as the main character, things shift.
but realistically, yeah: it's campy and that's fun.

I think it's borderline impossible not to chuckle about some of the disguises but other than that I never felt anything veered into truly distracting camp territory. there are a number of moments where the artifice of the disguises falls apart in some way - most notably in the s2 premiere - and the consequences of it are almost always devastating, and fascinating

it's like 1000% less campy than mad men

The masters of disguise and seduction aspect of it is partly what caused me concern upthread. We've still only dipped into the first few episodes of season one, and I wanted to make sure it didn't just keep getting sillier and sillier. Like, I can handle it as silly as it is at the start, but I'm not sure I could stick with it if it got any more ridiculous. So, you know, if she dolls up like Nancy Reagan or he goes in drag and seduces Oliver North ...

lolwut? no, nothing remotely that silly happens

if anything it only gets a whole lot darker, the stakes higher, and the disguises are something you accept as a given. season 1 is also much more episodic by comparison to the more taut/serialized 2, so that could also be fueling your doubts

oliver north is a co-writer on one of the episodes so anything can happen

the episode he co-wrote is great! and with little to no jingoism snuck in that I could notice

It's just a story credit iirc

yeah I don't know of anyone who doesn't significantly prefer S2 to S1

i like the idea of oliver north getting a job in the writers' room as part of a ploy to film a scene where he is seduced by his secret crush matthew rhys

NYT ran a piece awhile back on this clarifying his role
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/arts/television/oliver-north-now-in-the-service-of-tvs-kgb.html

Some fun stuff in here on the logistics of getting the rights to Soviet footage

http://www.hitfix.com/whats-alan-watching/the-americans-producers-were-thinking-about-a-long-story-that-were-telling/single-page

my girl just binge watched the first season; i think she'll get through the second by next week.

OMG I just remembered this is tonight!

btw USA has been kickin' out Russian spies IRL this week, apparently sans car chases.

no car chases, no credibility

glowing review of season 3 http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/the-americans-season-3-fx-best-show-on-television/

Have now seen 4th episode as well. I think everyone will be pleased.

Stop it, I cannot wait!

hell of a premiere. still the best show on television.

those preview scenes look unnerving as fuck (one word: suitcase)

Really wish I'd stuck with this but for whatever reason I stopped watching about halfway through season 2. Could I watch season 3 despite missing 5 or so episodes?

You're gonna want to try to catch at least the S2 finale first if you can.

Right I'll do that thanks

yeah you need to watch all of season 2 I think. for one thing, it is excellent; plus some things will not make sense.

We're still creeping along through season 1, but I think we're hooked. Sure, there's some silliness, in the plausibility sense, but it does offer a smart twist on the will they/won't they dynamic. They start out married, with kids. The question becomes, will they fall in love, or end up killing one another?

oh jesus. the suitcase.

kinda wish they'd had the chutzpah to give the finger to Mad Men and call that episode "The Suitcase"

was just thinking that!

I like mad men and sometimes love it but this has a greater place in my TV heart

ha, my girl did the "is it over" "is it over YET" "GOD HOW IS IT NOT OVER" thing
show is in a real groove; so many good scenes

lol I watched these on screener before they had titles and did not relize this one was called "Baggage." I can settle for that.

also, the screeners open with a note about unfinished sound mixing/fx, and the notes open with "Greetings, Comrades!" <3 <3

That was the most uncomfortable viewing in this series since that scene with the Mossad agent taking a shit.

btw one of the highlights of s1 for me was when Philip was transcribing from a "numbers station," cuz WFMU strted playing tapes of that stuff probably in the late '80s.

I am not looking at recent posts cuz spoilers of stuff i'll see 8 months from now.

Do you think the barscene with the boxing match might be a hint to The Suitcase?

Good episode. This show is really working in it's very own grove.

last scene was like a dance, the way philip slowly pushed the filing cabinet drawer closed and got in the seat. yow. and this shot:
http://f.cl.ly/items/1n3D223Q3t290W2B0v2C/Screen%20Shot%202015-02-07%20at%2011.40.43.png

i am so consistently amazed by the quality of this show, it just keeps going up a level in every way

the way you held your breath as the camera panned to a cell you knew would have nina in it...how it made you steel yourself for something horrifying but just got a mundane, minor degradation

the framing of the statue w/outstretched hand as philip talked to yusuf

just brilliant in every way

just about had to walk out of the room for the tooth extraction scene

is it safe?

not as bad as the suitcase scene for sure!

I feel like a lot has occurred so far considering it is only 3 episodes old.

What a fucking brilliant series this is, a week seems too long.

I just caught up with "Baggage" last night and that was some of the most uncomfortable television I've ever seen. (Misshapen bodies due to bone breaks is one of the grossest things in my whole world, so I almost didn't get through it.) Sounds like another gross one this week, huh?

just a bit of amateur dental work with pliers, no biggie.

Deleted scene from last night's episode

This might have been my favourite episode yet. This show is just so sure of itself at this point. There were all the amazingly suspenseful spystuff, but that is almost besides the point. The dentistry scene could have been done by no other show ever, the way it was both so gross, but also played as this image of how much trust and love there still is between these two - after the earlier bedtime scene had showed how apart they are being torn by the Paige-thing. But the scene I REALLY loved was the first one, the scrabble-scene. This is when I love a show, when it's world and it's characters are so fully developed, that you can let a main character play a game with a character you only introduced a few episodes before, and you know so much history of this world, that you are coloring in all the stuff to make it riveting. Again, this is why I love tv.

Season 2 probably had a better plot, and probably was more important in leaping up a level in quality, but I like it more when plot is just something in the background, not why we watch the show.

A lot of great stuff this week; the closing Philip/Elizabeth conversation was a bruiser.