‘The Americans’ Season Finale: All In The Family

Ken Tucker
·Critic-at-Large, Yahoo Entertainment

The Americans wraps up its fourth season on FX Wednesday night with an hour in keeping with everything that has preceded it. Which is to say, tightly-coiled drama that doesn’t need to raise its voice very frequently to generate suspense and high emotion.

“It’s been a hard year,” Matthew Rhys’s Philip says to Frank Langella’s Gabriel at one point in the finale, written by show-runner/creators Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields. Philip ain’t kiddin’ — you try to keep your teenage daughter from blabbing to the local minister that her mom and dad are Russian spies, while also dealing with a depressed biochemical warfare scientist who may not turn out to be the most reliable traitor the Motherland has recruited.

Add to this the idea that the FBI man who lives across the street (Noah Emmerich’s Stan Beeman) might be getting awfully close to figuring out just what’s going on, and our protagonists, Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell), may soon have to decide whether to invest in a whole new selection of wigs, mustaches, sideburns, and trenchcoats to keep up their deadly charade.

The season has had some great moments of surprise — the abrupt killing of Richard Thomas’s Agt. Gaad; Alison Wright’s Martha whisked off to some burg in Russia where I really don’t think they have enough hairspray to maintain her ‘do to its desired degree of Bride of Frankenstein-alertness. And the aforementioned biochemical rat-fink, played with a marvelous blend of condescension and self-pity by Dylan Baker, is bound to bring his little vials of mass destruction into perilous play again.

The Americans, while critically lauded, has had a tough time attracting a large audience for its nuanced take on 1980s espionage and its portrait of a pre-iPhone-era family in the suburbs. Thus it is to the great credit of FX that the show has been renewed for two more seasons, at which point I don’t want to hear any grousing about how the show is ending “too soon.” The great accomplishment of The Americans this season is to have made the show a metaphor for growing-up — whether it’s the maturation of the Jennings’ teen daughter Paige (Holly Taylor, who works more variations of emotion out of wounded eyes than many veteran actors) or the increasing extent to which Philip and Elizabeth have out-grown the firm-daddy approach of their Russian handler, Gabriel. “The job wasn’t meant to be forever,” says Gabriel to the duo. I hope he doesn’t mean that Mother Russia is beckoning the Jennings too firmly. I don’t want The Americans to spend its final seasons as The Russians.

(Photos: FX)

The Americans airs Wednesday night at 10 p.m. on FX.