The Americans: Season Finale

If you like Homeland, you will enjoy The Americans, which airs its season finale Wednesday at 10 p.m. on FX.  The show comes from Joseph Weisberg, with help from Graham Yost (of Justifed, and HBO miniseries like Band of Brothers , John Adams, The Pacific and From the Earth to the Moon)

Far from being the poor man's version of a successful show that we see so often on the networks, The Americans takes positive aspects from shows like Mad Men (period drama) and Homeland (spy/terror thriller) and makes them their own rather than provide a diluted imitation. Set in 1981 Cold War America, the basic premise is Soviet intelligence officers are planted in the United States to play married couple, have American kids and blend into society all while performing their duties as Russian spies.  

Similar to Homeland, viewers are often not sure who is gaming who or where the characters motivations lie.  This is especially in the last few episodes where the series quickly gained a lot of momentum.

I took a class on the U.S. Intelligence community in college * , taught by a former CIA counsel and member of the directorate of operations .  At the time he served advised a senator on the Intelligence committee.  The class focused on a lot of things including spycraft and what he called the 'labyrinth of mirrors.'

* Which makes me an expert

Here is an attempt to explain the labyrinth of mirrors by an example:
A spy recruits an agent as a source by blackmailing him.  The spy is gaining intelligence from that source.  But then the source reports that he is being blackmailed into being an agent.  So the agent's original side feeds bad intelligence to the agent to feed to the spy.  But the spy has another source inside who knows the first agent reported that he was compromised.  So the spy has to treat the information gained from the first agent as false, or blackmail the source again with some darker secret.  And now the source has to game his own side again as they feed him bad information.  In another scenario, the agent could be discovered by a third party rather than by turning himself in, and could be fed bad information without his knowledge of it being bad information.  And so on, and so on.  It's like facing two mirrors to each other and the reflections descending into infinity. 

The Americans touches on examples of this and it creates an organic tension (like Homeland) where the full extent of the characters knowledge is not explained, or is slightly ahead of the audience's knowledge by half an episode.  If there is a word to describe the opposite of dramatic irony, it would be that.**

** Suspense?  Drama?  Tomato Surprise? (If you read the Lost examples on Tomato Surprise, you'll remember why that show was so awesome.)

There are three main conflicts driving the show:
1) Conflict within the spies, mainly the husband Phillip who has taken a shine to the American way of life, never more evidenced than by an early scene where he enjoys a pair of quintessentially American cowboy boots at a shopping mall.  He laments his feelings to his more patriotic, hard liner of a wife "Air conditioning isn't so bad." 
2) Conflict between the husband and wife in their sham marriage ***
3) Conflict between the Soviets and the Americans, overall.  Subset by the conflict between their FBI counter intelligence officer neighbor and the spies themselves. 

*** One of the weaker points of the show, to be fair.  They are so hot/cold toward each other it is practically bipolar.

While I wonder if they blew their music budget in the pilot there's still a few cool period-related aspects of the show.  Mainly that the show is set against the Cold War, and the technology exists mainly to aid the spies on the ground, rather than do all the work for them. 

The series is renewed for a second season, so, Homeland fans, buy it on Amazon or iTunes or perhaps Netflix later on to tide you over until Brody returns on September 29, a date already marked for Breaking Bad fans.