That’s not saying much since it’s just a few days into the new year and so far this TV season there hasn’t been much interesting on, but the first episode of The Americans is very good. I like how much opportunity for drama there is in this show about Soviet spies living in Washington DC in the early 1980s — will the spy couple’s (played by Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell) marriage collapse? Will the husband defect to the US? Will the wife kill him for defecting? Will their kids find them out? Will they make a mistake revealing themselves to the FBI agent next door… And whatever problems I might have had with the series Lost, the creators of that show did give us one thing that’s a benefit to other shows; the flashback which is used to great effect here in The Americans. While the main story plays out present day in the early 1980s US, we also flashback to the couple’s first meeting in the USSR and them infiltrating the US in the mid-1960s too.
My ONLY concern here is that the creators of the show might feel the need to add more action to The Americans than it needs. I’m hoping that The Americans stays the course of its pilot episode and doesn’t become a weekly The Bourne Identity kick to the head TV show. If it does stay the course, The Americans could become one of the great ones.
