The Americans

It is distinctly its own fascinating thing. And with the addition of great supporting performers like Frank Langella to a narrative arc that grows more captivating with each episode, it could end its third season as the best drama on television.

Every shot and cut seems timed for maximum impact; you get a little bit of beauty here and there, but for the most part it's go, go, go, comrade, onto the next thing, and don't look back.

The first four episodes of Season 3 are every bit as taut and finely crafted as the stellar prior season of the show.

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.

As the pressure rises, The Americans, already one of TV’s most astute shows about marriage, also becomes more and more a show about parenting and how parents invest themselves in their children.

Meticulous detail makes the difference between competent television shows and instant classics, and The Americans teems with period minutia, and treats it with a solemn respect not often paid to the ’80s.

What sets The Americans apart is the weight it gives to the other side and its ability to make us feel it.

The first four episodes of Season 3 of The Americans, which returns Wednesday night on FX, are just as absorbing and dark and impeccably realized as what we saw in Season 2.

The Americans is only getting better with age, answering its questions as it builds upon them--even if the solutions don't come easy.

The juxtaposition of domestic banality with covert, often erotic peril has never been more unsettling. [19 Jan-1 Feb 2015, p.14]

This remains a superior TV drama.

[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.

Mostly, the misguided lead the misled; action devolves into misadventure; and every season gets more complicated, and is all the better for it.

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.

The Americans remains one of prime time's best series, the only negatives at this point being how complicated the plotting is, to the degree at which we almost need a flow chart to keep up. It's a headache, but a great one to have.

Working with a uniformly subtle and expressive cast of players, the writers sneak in small, unassuming truths about family life and the benefits of modulated pride.

The Americans remains one of television’s very best drama series. Still, this season so far is not up to the fly-high level of the first two.

This might be a philosophical season of The Americans, but like any good countercultural force, it still gets its thrills from sex and violence.

The moral quicksand that made The Americans so compelling for its first two seasons is deeper than ever.

As is The Americans way, ideas and ideologies—Philip and Elizabeth’s soft- and tough-love approaches--start to ping-pong off each other, and contemporary mores, in satisfying ways.

That spy-story [how skilled next-door neighbor and FBI agent Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich) is at putting two and two together] part isn't unique. The other parts still feel fresh.