TV #58 of 2021:
The Americans, season 5
I feel torn about this penultimate stretch of The Americans, which in general is serving its deep-cover protagonists quite well. Their share of the story is richer than it was in the previous year, and sees the operatives drawing closer together and experiencing ever more remorse and frustration with the actions required by their far-off superiors. For a long time this series seemed content to not overtly pick sides in its Cold War setting, encouraging us to care about Philip and Elizabeth without rooting either for or against the larger espionage mission. Lately, however, there’s been a definite sense of bleak corruption throughout the Soviet Union unmatched by anything in the U.S., which pushes the pair’s cutthroat assignments from distasteful to downright unjust. And they realize it too, which adds great shading to the personal conflicts, especially now that their daughter Paige is taking some initial, faltering steps into the family business.
On the other hand: a lot of that extra definition to the motherland is being delivered via scenes with irrelevant figures like Oleg Burov that hit a few tedious notes over and over again. I groan whenever we cut away to that blue-tinted nation of subtitles, because the happenings there are just not interesting to me in the slightest. If you think of this as a show about the Jennings couple, as I would certainly argue it is, then Stan Beeman is only a supporting character in that drama. And Oleg was only a supporting character in Stan’s life, having no immediate contact with the Directorate S agents even when he was stationed in the same country as them. Now that tenuous link is severed completely, and the man is limited to interactions with people yet further afield of the core spy action. I suspect a potential version of events exists that could have gotten me invested in his troubles back home regardless, but it’s far from the boring investigations into grocery store kickbacks that The Americans has actually given us.
FBI headquarters has been pretty dull since Martha left last season too, and with a handful of additional subplots popping up sporadically as well, that probably leaves us with around half of the narrative to our nominal heroes. I still really enjoy that part of the program, but as it shrinks in relation to the rest, I find myself checking out to a degree overall. All the right ingredients are here to deliver a truly excellent concluding arc, but we’re wasting a lot of script space on weaker material in the build-up to that.
[Content warning for gun violence, graphic self-harm, and mention of rape.]
★★★☆☆
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