The Americans

Unlike in "Homeland," the show's main conceit grows even more complex and fascinating by including the Jennings kids.

Based on these first five episodes, The Americans shows every sign of maintaining if not exceeding the high bar it set in Season 1.

Season 2 finds ways to introduce even greater tension, even as [Philip and Elizabeth are] a more fundamentally sound unit, while also adding a whodunnit element that spices things up nicely.... Absolutely dynamite.

[It] promises to be a dizzyingly clever season 2. [3 Mar 2014, p.39]

All of the elements that made it must-see last year are working at full throttle in season two, which kicks off Wednesday night: intrigue, deception, sex, duplicity, spy vs. spy stuff and, most of all, irony.

Still excellent, still hard to love.

Season 2 is just as brainy and twisty and kinky [as season 1], and it ratchets up the suspense by making the threats to our "heroes" even more personal.

[Phillips says] "Money, guns, America's going to get you whatever you need." And so--at least for those who prize artful ambiguity over dull certainty--should The Americans.

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.

It’s not that that second What It’s About--the emotional heart of The Americans--is better, more noble than the first. But it’s the difference between an exciting thriller premise that flames out fast and a story with lasting power--demonstrates better than ever.

The Americans redefines domestic espionage with its multiple layers of emotionally charged suspense.

It's these deeper questions [Deciding to live the day-to-day performance of an ideal, a belief, an emotion, a set of principles, a faith?] that give the action and melodrama a bit of existential heft, and redirect our vicarious enjoyment away from fantasy and back towards reality.

Everyone in this layered show has cover stories, divided loyalties, mixed emotions and hidden motives. The complexity of the characters drives the narrative as much as the car chases and ultrasecret missions.

Very few shows are able to combine pleasurable episodic storytelling so deftly with solid character building and delicious suspense, but the first five episodes of the new season do that with style, not to mention period-perfect wigs.

Watching, it is almost impossible not to root for these two Communists as they do any and everything they can to undermine America. In this regard, The Americans works its American audience as effectively as its heroes work their marks: It makes double agents of us all.

As the new season begins, this series continues to be among the best of the extraordinary number of great TV dramas vying for attention.

FX's The Americans does the near-impossible of making viewers cheer for Russian spies in America and at the same time for the American FBI agents who are trying to unmask those Russians living in suburbia. It's an incredibly deft balancing act that's accomplished through strong character development all around.

The new season--suspenseful as ever, more brutal in its violence, perhaps, and more expansive in its reach into history--easily upholds the standard of the first.

The program is physical, visceral, and consistently intense. Even the dialogue sounds smarter.

The Cold War may be over, but this addictive spy thriller is just heating up.

what these two characters, so fabulously played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, are about to realize as this excellent series returns is that their jobs put their children at risk.

This thriller is a fast-paced ride through the minefields of domestic and international relations.

The series is at its most potent when it reframes the everyday in the context of the Cold War, like Philip comparing notes on home life with a Mossad operative or Elizabeth displaying a flash of vulnerability in front of a government-contracted dupe. (And then betraying that parental bond by turning it into a threat.) Other aspects of the show would do well to find this middle ground; they’re getting there in season two.

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.

The Americans can be wrenchingly emotional, and it’s terrifically well paced. But it doesn’t take itself overly seriously, and while the show looks pretty good it’s not the most cinematic series on the block.

The first five episodes of Season 2 are as good or better as what we saw in Season 1.

The real heart here is the Jennings family. It's what make The Americans a better show than most, and what keeps it a show to watch heading into its second season.

Regardless of some of its structural weaknesses, The Americans's second season brims with subtle psychological insight into the grinding machinations of Cold War espionage.

Series creator Joe Weisberg--who wrote the Thomas Schlamme-directed season premiere along with Joel Fields--and company have done about as well as is possible in keeping the plates spinning while adding new ones to the act. Even so, it’s hard to escape a sense that if this series runs much beyond a second season, it’s less about serving up art than it is about bowing to the needs of old-fashioned capitalism.