'The Americans' Season Premiere Review: Powerful Secrets And Lies
The third season of The Americans finds suburban spies Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell) at odds over one of last season’s more poignant cliffhangers — their KGB bosses’ plan to recruit the Jennings’s 14-year-old daughter, Paige (Holly Taylor), as a second-generation asset in the war against America. One of the most interesting dynamics show creator Joe Weisberg has set up in this series is Elizabeth’s more doctrinaire, hard-nosed approach to all aspects of life, in contrast to Philip’s more curious, open-minded attitude toward the America his family lives in.
The world-historical events that America is, in the new season, confronting include the implementation of the Reagan Doctrine in Afghanistan and the 1982 death of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Closer to home, however, the Jennings and their FBI neighbor Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich) are grappling with pernicious ’80s-America phenomena such as Erhard Seminars Training (EST), the fad self-help scam for which Stan’s wife Sandra (Susan Misner) has fallen. (Poor straight-arrow Stan gives an EST seminar a try.) Also making witty cameos this season: Tantric sex, as practiced by two of the show’s more unlikely sex-perimentors, and the Brit-pop singer Yaz, whose music is enjoyed by Paige and used as clever spy tradecraft by Philip.
Related: 'The Americans' Season 3 Preview: Will Spying Become a Family Affair?
Indeed, what continues to make The Americans more than just Mad Men crossed with Spies Like Us is the way the show uses espionage as a metaphor for the way people conduct their marriages, raise their children, and deal with workplace problems. Three words: secrets and lies. The long hours Elizabeth and Philip spend at work running the world’s most nonchalant travel agency, the furtive conversations they try to conceal from their children — these are, in exaggerated form, stresses most parents and children experience, especially when the kids become nosy, time-consuming adolescents.
I’m especially glad to see The Americans place more weight on Russell’s Elizabeth, who has really surged to the forefront of this show. Where Philip is torn between opposing theories of how countries should be governed, Elizabeth embodies that tension and more — passing as an American women in an era strained by the contradictory impulses of second-wave feminism and Reagan-era conservatism. And it’s not a theoretical for Elizabeth: She’s 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.
Season 3 of The Americans premieres Wednesday, Jan. 28 at 10 p.m. on FX.
