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Mixed:
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Critic Reviews
Uncle BarkyMar 28, 2018
Season 6 Review:
Frankly, a little boredom sets in at times. ... How The Americans resolves their fates will be key to whether this series is remembered as a superbly rendered morality tale or a distinct disappointment after setting its bar so high. Season 6 so far is rife with both possibilities.
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Mar 28, 2018
Season 6 Review:
If watching a TV show is like being in a relationship, The Americans is the closest thing to a domestic partnership that modern TV drama has ever given us. ... The actors simply do whatever their characters would do in that situation, and the camera watches them. Not a single shot calls attention to itself. ... But you can’t exactly claim that things were left unsaid, because you read this couple’s faces like words on a page.
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IndieWireMar 28, 2018
Season 6 Review:
The stakes are high, and the rewards are plenty. It’s why The Americans has been and remains one of the best programs on television: It challenges viewers for all the right reasons. It pushes back on expectations to make you dwell on many fleeting moments that build who you are overall.
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Mar 27, 2018
Season 6 Review:
The drama picks back up with a strong trio of opening episodes. ... The actors simply do whatever their characters would do in that situation, and the camera watches them. Not a single shot calls attention to itself (even a surprising angle on Philip looking down through the open sunroof of his car has a tossed-off feeling), and the editing is unobtrusive, carrying us from point to point.
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Mar 27, 2018
Season 6 Review:
There should not be a seventh year; the fifth occasionally lacked the forward momentum to power through all 13 episodes. The fact that the Jennings’ story is ending gives this season much of its dramatic heft and importance, as characters who haven’t seen each other in ages come together again, and as each choice in each personal and political maze carries more finality.
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Mar 27, 2018
Season 6 Review:
Fans of the show’s intrigue will immediately notice an uptick in tension and momentum from last season that feels like a comeback. And fans of the complex love story between the show’s married pretenders, Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, will pick up on a new layer of iciness that may never thaw.
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ColliderMar 27, 2018
Season 6 Review:
Russell is exceptional in these early episodes as Elizabeth tries to juggle so many jobs that she’s swigging coffee and popping pills to keep herself awake, all while holding onto an incredibly dark secret. But even though their stories aren’t yet as dynamic as that, Rhys, Taylor, and others continue to be emotionally compelling pieces of this grounded (though sometimes a little overly complicated, especially in early episodes) final season.
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Mar 26, 2018
Mar 22, 2018
Season 6 Review:
There’s a feeling in the first three episodes of final-act hyperbole that left me a bit dizzy. After a slow-paced fifth season, the final year begins with a parade of bloody deaths. ... But The Americans gets more patient when it examines the widening cracks in the Jennings marriage.
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Mar 22, 2018
Season 6 Review:
In the final season of The Americans the Jenningses--the KGB spy couple dedicated to unremitting war against the U.S.--are at war with one another, and a bitter, masterfully dramatized war it is. ... It comes as no surprise that one of the greatest drama series in television history should come to its end as powerful as ever.
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Mar 22, 2018
Season 6 Review:
The body count is high in early episodes and Philip gets pulled back into spying, just not in the exact way as before. This new avenue threatens to upend his family, which, of course, lays the groundwork for one of the show’s psychologically intense Philip-Elizabeth relationship-defining scenes early in the season’s third episode.
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TV Guide MagazineMar 19, 2018
Season 6 Review:
I watched the first three episodes in a state of panicked admiration, fearful of the consequences yet eager to see how it all resolves. [19 Mar-1 Apr 2018, p.13]
Mar 7, 2017
Season 5 Review:
As always, The Americans does complex work that never calls attention to its complexity. The associations and connections are there if you care to make them, but the show maintains plausible deniability as a good spy should, walking briskly from scene to scene as if it’s just here to get the job done and get out.
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Mar 7, 2017
Mar 7, 2017
Season 5 Review:
Knowledge that the Cold War, obviously drawing to its close in 1984, will reopen in grand fashion in the 2010s would have been some consolation for true believers, those who were convinced of the rightness of the national cause. And yet it'd likely mean little to Philip and Elizabeth, whose loyalties, rewardingly, are as convoluted as ever.
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RogerEbert.comMar 7, 2017
Season 5 Review:
By now, it feels like we know Philip and Elizabeth, but there are shades to these characters that the writers and actors are still exploring, still developing, and still revealing to viewers. They are two of the richest characters not just on TV now, but in the history of the medium. And they still have more stories to tell.
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UPROXXMar 6, 2017
Season 5 Review:
It is still one of the very best shows on television. ... The first [episode] is more of a table-setter than some past Americans premieres have been, but the next two are outstanding, filled with the usual agonizing mix of spy thrills and family drama, and superb performances by Keri Russell, Matthew Rhys, Noah Emmerich, and the rest of the gang.
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Mar 6, 2017
Season 5 Review:
The Americans, through the three episodes of season 5 that FX made available to critics, continues along the same ground it always has: It's extremely well-constructed, with slow-burning storylines that are paying off in superb dramatic depth; it boasts consistently top-tier acting from stars Keri Russell, Mathew Rhys, Noah Emmerich, Holly Taylor and more; it has artfully crafted visuals that emphasize the mundane work of everyday spies while simultaneously revealing things about the characters.
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Mar 6, 2017
Season 5 Review:
Episode one spends an awful lot of time on digging a huge hole in the ground with fairly predictable results. And in episode two there’s a lot of wandering around a greenhouse buzzing with insects that’s supposed to be ominous but instead comes off like a homage to “The X-Files.” ... The third episode moves all the stories forward at a better clip.
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TV Guide MagazineMar 2, 2017
Season 5 Review:
[A] taut fifth season. [6-19 Mar 2017, p.21]
TV Guide MagazineMar 17, 2016
Season 4 Review:
You'd be insane to miss The Americans, operating at its highest level of dramatic intensity. [21 Mar-3 Apr 2016, p.18]
ColliderMar 16, 2016
Season 4 Review:
That’s the beautiful thing about The Americans; its exploration of identity and loyalty is unmatched, because of how it focuses on the human element so eloquently. Yes the spycraft can be fun and tense and exciting, but it’s the emotional conflicts that set the show a cut above.
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Mar 15, 2016Uncle BarkyMar 15, 2016
Season 4 Review:
The Americans in my view is the best TV drama of this season. It excels to even greater degrees on levels large and small, with the intimate details of human interaction mixing with the humanity-at-stake, cloak and dagger goings-on that keep Philip and Elizabeth tenuously on point.
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Mar 15, 2016
Season 4 Review:
It’s a good thing that viewers can’t immediately binge-watch FX’s The Americans, arguably the best ongoing series on television, because there are moments in the first four episodes where it feels like there’s a vice tightening on your chest. And there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for that feeling: The first four episodes (that’s how many were made available to critics) are among the best the series has ever done.
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Mar 15, 2016
Season 4 Review:
It has a knack for creating metaphorically or symbolically rich situations that never strut about announcing themselves as such. It’s all there if you care to delve into it, but it’s never in the foreground and affixed with a tag; often you catch it hiding behind, or within, the characterizations and plot twists, as spies hide in plain sight.
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Mar 15, 2016
Season 4 Review:
The Americans remains a superior American drama and--admittedly, without having a working knowledge on the subject--possibly one of the best Russian TV dramas, too.... These four [episodes] also feel weighted and forlorn, as the chain of lies loop around and around the ankles of Paige and Martha, or those others unlucky enough to know Philip and Elizabeth, with an anchor just waiting to be tossed overboard.
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RogerEbert.comMar 14, 2016
Mar 11, 2016
Season 4 Review:
Through the first four episodes of the new season, the ever-excellent spy thriller explores the parent-child dynamic, introduces the concept of biological weapons and plays on the suspicions of FBI neighbor Stan (Noah Emmerich). The Americans is mostly adept at surprising viewers by not tacking in expected directions, although one plot results in a dead end that left me to wonder, why did the writers spend so much time on that?
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Mar 4, 2016
Season 4 Review:
The fourth season of FX’s Cold War spy drama is a bit of a step down, especially from the near-perfect second and third seasons.... But noting that The Americans is showing some signs of wear isn’t to say that the show is no longer stylish, delightfully off-kilter, panic-attack-inducing entertainment.
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RogerEbert.comJan 29, 2015
Jan 28, 2015
Season 3 Review:
The Americans is also the best show on television, by a fair amount.... The show now has the best of its first season — when Philip and Elizabeth were often at odds--blended with the best of its remarkable second--when the two found common cause but discovered that made them less effective spies.
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Jan 28, 2015
Season 3 Review:
[Elizabeth is] coming to terms with her own strict upbringing, her longing for her homeland, and her profoundly ambivalent feelings about American permissiveness on the one hand, and the strict discipline of turning her own daughter over to become a tool of the Soviet state. These are the elements that come together in the fine new season of The Americans, giving it more emotional power than ever.
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Jan 23, 2015
Season 3 Review:
The Americans returns for a third season packed with tension, raw-nerve melodrama and enough levels of ambiguity, moral and psychological, to satisfy the most gluttonous appetite for the stuff. With, in short, all that has distinguished this series from its beginning.
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TV Guide MagazineJan 16, 2015
Season 3 Review:
The juxtaposition of domestic banality with covert, often erotic peril has never been more unsettling. [19 Jan-1 Feb 2015, p.14]
Feb 27, 2014
Season 2 Review:
Elizabeth and Philip react with the appropriate amount of fear for and protectiveness of Paige and Henry. No doubt, this will further widen the cracks already forming in their political/professional resolve, but there is no going back: The Americans puts the kids front and center.
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The Daily BeastFeb 26, 2014
Season 2 Review:
The Americans is already reinventing itself. Why? Because it has the confidence to know that it's about more than the relationship between two specific characters. Rather it's about the idea of relationships in general, in all their intricacy and weirdness--the secrecy they require, the comfort they create, the confusion they entail, the danger they can unleash. And that never gets old.
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Feb 26, 2014
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