I’ve been excited for FX’s The Bridge, an adaptation of a joint Danish-Swedish television production about detectives from each country investigating the death of a murder victim found on a bridge that marks the border between their two nations. FX made a smart move in transferring the countries in question to Mexico and the United States, and in casting Demian Bichir, nominated for an Academy Award for his performance as an undocumented immigrant in A Better Life, to play the Mexican detective and Diane Kruger to play his American counterpart who, in keeping with the original interpretation of the character, is somewhere on the Autism spectrum:

I can understand why those of you who are feeling overdosed on violence against women as a means of generating drama might be wary of The Bridge. But I’m willing to give it a chance precisely because it’s addressing a real-world epidemic of violence, the murders of at least 370 women in Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, since the spate of killings seems to have begun in 1993. The crimes are ongoing, and the investigations of individual murders that have resulted in prosecutions and convictions have raised serious questions about police misconduct. And it’s possible that there are multiple perpetrators who are killing women who come to work in the clothing industry that’s grown rapidly in the wake of the North American Free Trade agreement, or that some of the homicides are related to drug trafficking.

It’s one thing to take on real crimes that have taken place and are continuing to take place, especially those that have had their moment in the public eye and then receded from view, and particularly ones that raise valuable questions about flaws in the criminal justice system. It’s another to bring new visions of atrocity into the world, which is one of the reasons I find the proliferation of increasingly baroque serial killer shows such a turn-off. I’m all for confronting the world we actually live in, or for images and storylines that remind us of realities we’ve tried to put solidly in the past. But I’m losing my desire to imagine what it could be like if there were many more of the most violent sorts of people living in it, for the aesthetic pleasure of consuming that violence. I don’t know that The Bridge will be immune from television’s fascination with the gruesome details of the crimes its main characters are investigating. But my hope is that the focus will be less on a luxurious exploration of the specific acts of violence done to women in Ciudad Juárez and more on the social conditions that make them vulnerable, and the structural problems that make it harder to bring their killers to justice. In other words, I hope that The Bridge and its very different detectives will be a vision of the way the world could be better, rather than a celebration of the means by which it could be much worse.

This post discusses plot details of the season finale of The Americans.

And so, we end where we began, with the music. Back in the first episode of The Americans, when Phillip and Elizabeth made love in their car after dumping the body of the man who raped Elizabeth during her training in the Soviet Union, “In The Air Tonight,” a distinctly unromantic song was unsettlingly perfect for that tentatively romantic moment—and as a frame for the rest of the season. “I’ve seen your face before my friend, but I don’t know if you know who I am,” Phil Collins sings in perhaps his most famous single. “Well I was there and I saw what you did, I saw it with my own two eyes / So you can wipe off that grin, I know where you’ve been / It’s all been a pack of lies…I know the reason why you keep your silence up, / oh no you don’t fool me / Well the hurt doesn’t show, but the pain still grows / It’s no stranger to you and me.”

The Americans is deeply concerned with questions of complicity, intimacy, and the difference between them, and fittingly for a show interested in those questions, it’s often its best when the camera is lingering on two people, capturing the claustrophobia or wide-open possibility that marks their relationship at any given moment. When The Americans began, Elizabeth and Phillip were the only pair who were both complicit and intimate, in murder and in marriage. But by the end of the show, their children Paige and Henry had attacked a man who may have meant them no harm and fled from the scene, and their neighbor Stan had become entangled with Nina, a staffer at the Rezidentura, at considerable cost to his own marriage. The characters on The Americans draw charmed, poisoned circles around themselves and their collaborators and lovers, and not just because some of them are spies or cops. It’s almost a condition of adulthood, the show argues, to have secrets, and a test of true intimacy to share the full extent of those ugly secrets with another person, and to accept that they won’t reject you for them. Stan’s inability to share his secrets with Sandra dooms his marriage. And it’s an expression of truly withering contempt for Claudia to tell Elizabeth “I know you better than you know yourself. And you don’t know me at all.”

The spread of that secret-keeping like a disease makes Peter Gabriel’s “Games Without Frontiers,” his scathing critique of international affairs, a triply appropriate song to close out The Americans‘ first season, and not just because Gabriel’s description of figures “Dressing up in costumes, playing silly games,” is a great shout-out to the Jennings’ wig collection. “Hans plays with Lotte, Lotte plays with Jane / Jane plays with Willi, Willi is happy again,” he sings. “Suki plays with Leo, Sacha plays with Britt / Adolf builts a bonfire, Enrico plays with it.” The description of spreading nuclear knowledge in that first verse is the perfect conclusion to an episode that reveals that Elizabeth and Phillip have been risking themselves for information that is truly “incredibilis,” and that the world is gearing up for an arms raced based on clever fantasy rather than substance. Just as countries cascade into the game, The Americans‘ characters have been pulled into deception, whether as a condition of their jobs, or because adulthood is a disease that infects us all with secrecy. And for a show that depicts its main characters having a lot of unprotected—both physically and emotionally—sex with people not their primary partners in the years before AIDS became a visible public health catastrophe, there’s something chilling about the viral nature of the song.
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As Netflix has launched its big original series House of Cards and Hemlock Grove over the past few months, their choices of genres and styles has indicated a great deal about what that company thinks is worth emulating on broadcast television. House of Cards is a clear attempt to enter the anti-hero genre that’s done so well for networks like HBO, while Hemlock Grove is a nod to the emergence of horror on television, mostly thanks to FX’s wildly inventive American Horror Story.

But when Amazon put out eight original comedy pilots last week as part of a process by which viewership and viewer reviews will help the company decide which projects to turn into full-fledged shows, their choice of material actually suggested more about the holes that Amazon sees in the television ecosystem and is trying to fill. The eight pilots currently under consideration have a great deal in common, and for good and for ill, they do differ with broadcast television in ways ranging from use of language to genre. Given that Netflix is ramping up its original content offerings more slowly, it may take some time for that company to develop a brand that’s anything like HBO’s or CBS’s. But Amazon’s selections give us a much clearer sense of who Amazon thinks its core consumers are, and what kind of identity Amazon wants its original content to have. Here are four throughlines that were most striking:

1. “Adult” content: All of Amazon’s originals come with warnings about adult language and content. And all of them make use of the leeway apparently granted them by the warning, from the cussing Congressmen who live together in a Capitol Hill townhouse on Garry Trudeau’s Alpha House, to Moby telling an app developer in Silicon Valley start-up comedy Betas “You ever fuck an octopus? I fucked an octopus. It’s why I’m a vegan now,” to Zombieland’s introduction of a character who explains that her name is “Regina. Kind of like vagina, but with an R,” and then counts how many times another character can’t resist joking about it. It’s no question that the show that uses its license to be naughty most judiciously, musical web journalism intern sitcom Browsers, gets the most mileage out of it in a number in which Bebe Neuwirth, playing a riff on Arianna Huffington, explains in song that ” I’m smart but I’m hardly a genius / And I can’t say I’m good with a buck / But throughout my career / I’ve made perfectly clear / I’m someone with whom not to fuck.”

But permission to use the F-word is not the same thing as having genuinely grown-up ideas, or using explicit content to get at the reality of adult experience. And the ability to swear and to be sexual and somewhat gross on television is hardly new. FX has made use of its ability to go there so successfully in shows like It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia and The League that it’s spinning off a second network so it has more room to develop and to air original comedies and dramas. Nothing in Amazon’s pilots is nearly as explicit as the sex scene in the first episode of Girls. If Amazon wants to beat its competitors by expanding the realm of what its characters can say and do, it’s not enough to let them cuss. The company’s going to think about what its shows do with the leeway it’s granting them, and what ideas and experiences aren’t making it onto other networks.
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This post discusses plot points from the April 17 episode of The Americans.

“They kill us. We kill them. It’s the world we live in,” Stan’s boss says to kick off this episode, in an apt description of both the not-so-cold war between the FBI and the KGB and the approach The Americans is taking to its first season. One of the things I appreciate about The Americans is how lean and clean the show is—it’s the shark of television dramas. But “Covert War” left me with my first significant concern about the show: that it’s burning through characters and plot lines a little bit too fast.

One of the best things about “Covert War” was how much material it seeded for the future by reaching into the characters’ pasts. “He was the first guy I slept with. Of two,” Sandra told Elizabeth about Stan over Harvey Wallbangers—the orange juice in that cocktail repeats in Phillip’s dismal hotel room—when the two of them went out to drink, dance, and blow off some steam about the state of their respective marriages. It’s a revelation that clarifies how devastating it is that Sandra is coming to believe that her her husband is cheating on her, given his late nights, and the discrepancy between where he says he’s spending them and his office knows about where he is. And it also underlines the gap between Sandra’s more global innocence and Stan’s broader experience, something he’s tried to shield her from at the expense of their marriage.

The expansion of the relationship between Zhukov and Elizabeth was a nice touch, too. His lecture to her on the meaning of love was simultaneously a striking and adult definition of the emotion, and a good bit of spycraft training in how to play the long game. “Malish has taught me what it means to love,” he told her in Moscow. “Do you know what love is, Elizabeth?” “It’s a feeling,” she advances cautiously. “The most profound feeling,” Zhukov encourages her. “He isn’t particularly smart, he isn’t pretty, but I love him. You know why? Because I take care of him, every day, and in his own way, he takes care of me. If you take care of something, one day you will discover that you love this creature and your life would be empty without him.” And Zhukov also helps Elizabeth understand life in both the United States and Russia better. “She’s in a play group,” Elizabeth tells him of Paige at three. “There are no demands on children in America, no chores. All we do, all day long, is watch them play.” “Play is serious. It’s how we learn to read one another, and the world,” Zhukov tells her gently. “I don’t remember much of that as a child,” Elizabeth insists to him. But he tells her “Because of the war you never had the pleasure of playing,” reminding her that for all Elizabeth’s zeal, her rigid absolutism isn’t necessarily the Soviet ideal the two of them are fighting for.
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Alan Sepinwall has a great post up about one of the best problems a person can have, the fact that there’s too much excellent television airing right now, and that the number of shows overall, much less excellent shows, is growing far too fast for anyone to keep up. He’s got the numbers on just how big the television marketplace has grown:

Because FX keeps track of this, I asked their research department for some hard numbers on how many shows we have now versus then. In 2002 — the year “The Shield” debuted on FX — there were actually 28 original scripted dramas on premium and basic cable (some of it famous stuff like “The Wire” and “Monk,” some of it long-forgotten like “Falcon Beach” and “Breaking News”) and 6 original comedies. In 2007, there were 42 original dramas and 17 comedies. By last year, that number had ballooned to 77 original dramas and 48 comedies. And in the first four months of 2013 alone, there have been 34 dramas and 19 comedies. And that’s on top of everything that ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC and the CW are doing. That pace will slow down somewhat as we shift into summer, but I’d still expect 2013 to top the 2012 numbers, and to keep rising. Netflix is making its own original shows now, and releasing all the episodes at once. Amazon has pilots in development. The amount of television expanding, but so is our definition of what counts as “television.”

But while Alan is discussing this challenge mostly in terms of being a critic who is expected to keep up with as many things as possible, and as a consumer, I think these numbers hold the key to a larger business insight: the number of television shows has proliferated far faster than the amount of time we could dedicate to new programming could possibly expand.

I couldn’t find exactly comparable data, but television viewership doesn’t appear to have fluctuated enormously in response to this boom in content. During the 2006-2007 television season, the average American viewer was watching 4 hours and 34 minutes of television a day. Today, that number is close to five hours, 98 percent of which is watched on a traditional television. An increase of 26 minutes, give or take, isn’t bad, but it’s a rise of 9.5 percent over six years, even as there are 275 percent more original scripted drama on premium and basic cable. And 26 minutes is an increase of a single sitcom per day, which is not nothing, but not keeping pace with the rate of new programming development, either.

Or in simpler terms: the cable networks which previously relied on reruns, movie content, or other forms of programming have hours to fill with original content if they want to. But we don’t have hours to offer up to watch them—the networks seem to be responding to their own schedules rather than to ours. Five hours a day is a lot, and for most employed people, it’s hard to imagine where they’d find more hours in the day to television watching than that. Maybe the ceiling is higher. But I wouldn’t put money on it being that lofty. It’s hard to imagine that oversaturation is totally unrelated to the ratings woes so many networks are facing now. As a viewer, it’s great to have more options, an embarrassment of riches, really, though the diffusion of the marketplace means I have fewer people to discuss some of my favorite shows with. But the networks need to realize that it’s rare that they’re going to get a show like The Walking Dead that enters the marketplace and siphons off a truly impressive number of viewers. More likely, something depressing is going to happen: the product is getting better and better, but there are simply fewer people who have available time with which to consume it. There’s something tragic about the idea that television’s arrival at maturity as an art form could coincide with the implosion of its business model, and that one could directly contribute to the other.

This post discusses plot points from the fourth season of Justified.

I’ve been frustrated at times by the intrusion of Detroit into the hollers of Harlan during the last two seasons of Justified. But the finale of the fourth season of FX’s Western was a lovely hour of television that simultaneously seems to have cleared out the interlopers and showed us what happens when the things that make Harlan so indelibly itself snatch at Ryalan and Boyd. And it was a reminder of just how different Justified is from much of the rest of what’s on television, despite its relationship to anti-hero dramas, and how much it gets out of those differences. Here are five things that other television shows—and networks that are considering what to develop next—could stand to recognize as valuable from last night’s finale:

1. Location, Location, Location: I’ve written before about how dull it is for television shows to rely heavily on New York, Los Angeles, and Miami as settings without considering what it means for the stories they’re telling to be set there. Justified both is refreshing for being set elsewhere, and considering it setting in every decisions its characters make. The development of coal mining, an industry very different from politics, policing, media, or advertising, as a major theme has both provided short-hand for how well certain characters know each other—”I dug coal with him” is a phrase that’s endowed with devastating meaning—and a repeated image of a descent into hell that provided a perfect sense of dread as Boyd’s carefully-made plans to extract himself and Ava from Harlan came unraveled. From Noble’s Holler to Clover Hill, Justified has given us a geography that it’s endowed with rich meaning, so the green vista of a backyard or patched drywall can speak more than any dialogue. And when Brad Paisley sings “You will never leave Harlan alive” as Raylan contemplates Arlo’s grave, we have a sense of what it means for Raylan to have left town, and what it means for him to have been pulled back to it, for Boyd to have dreamed of cleansing his name, and to be left breaking into the dream he once thought was within reach through the front door.

2. True Love: If Homeland had really wanted to tell an epic love story about Carrie and Brody, they might have done well to take a page from Justified, which is simultaneously one of the most romantic shows on television, and one of the most realistic about the limits of romance when dashed up against the rocks of law and circumstance. “You know that you and the baby are safe, right?” Raylan asks Winona after he takes care of the Tonins and gets his family, such as it is, off the mob’s hit list. “I know,” Winona tells him. “That’s why I love you.” I’m sure she does, but it’s an illustration of the inadequacy of love when the mobsters who held Winona hostage have thought in more detail about what it means to be up nights with a baby than Raylan has. And it’s a reminder that the idea that a man can provide safety to his family is a minimal requirement for a modern, equitable relationship. Boyd’s storyline is a reminder of how hard crushingly hard that obligation, often equated with masculinity, can be to fulfill. He refers to Ava repeatedly as “my woman” in this episode, but he can’t protect her. Raylan won’t let Boyd kiss her goodbye. And when Paxton double-crosses him and gets Ava arrested, Boyd goes beserk at the sight of her on the way to jail, agonized by the sight of her in danger, and by his own failure. “I’m going to get a lawyer, the best money can buy, and I’m going to have you out of here in 24 hours,” Boyd promises her. But Ava sadly, and realistically, tells him, “We both know that ain’t going to happen.” Raylan may be skeptical that that Boyd truly loves Ava, asking him if he loves her “Like how you loved the Lord? Or that lovely white skin? Or Arlo? I know he meant a lot to you.” But Boyd’s been more present for Ava than Raylan has for Winona, dreamed for more of them together, and it makes the pain of his disappointment all the sharper. Justified knows better than any other show how making even the basics of a good life can be an epic challenge.
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Over at Buzzfeed, Adam B. Vary is absolutely right to suggest that, as the late-night television lineup seems poised for another reshuffle as NBC’s relationship with Jay Leno deteroirates, it would be awfully nice if the networks considered candidates for the positions about to be opened up who aren’t the interchangeable white men who have largely dominated those time slots since time immemorial, or at least since Johnny Carson. And I think it’s worth making a larger point in conjunction with his argument: it’s going to be disappointing if the spaces opened up by Leno’s canning and subsequent reshuffling produce not just the same faces, but the same formats, particularly given the waves of experimentation that have been taking place outside of the major networks for years.

There’s the political model, which started in its current incarnation over at Comedy Central. Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert may not hail from exactly the same schools of comedy as David Letterman, Jimmy Fallon, and Jay Leno, but they’re marked by the same general demographics. It’s what they’ve done behind the desks on their respective sets that’s different. While Stewart and Colbert take on a wide array of topics, they’re doing so not from a general interest perspective but from carefully honed political ones. Their business model aims for ferocious loyalty among a segment of the population they’ve chosen to pursue specifically, rather than pulling from across the political spectrum as a whole. It’s worldview, rather than schtick that’s the initial selling point, Stewart’s righteousness and Colbert’s gleeful satire rather than signature bits like David Letterman’s top ten lists or Jimmy Fallon’s rapport with his musical guests, though of course Stewart and Colbert sold those, too. FX has subsequently taken a step beyond the innovation that Colbert and Stewart represented with Totally Biased With W. Kamau Bell, the intensely political African-American comic who honed his act in the Bay Area stand-up scene before moving to late-night, where he’s ditched the suits and the presumption of white dudeness, and brought along correspondents who don’t look much like the men in ties who largely dominate Stewart and Colbert’s shows, too, like lesbian comic Janine Brito.

And Bell isn’t the only person of color in late night in recent years, nor is Brito the only woman or only non-straight person. Vary called out George Lopez’s TBS show, cancelled when Conan O’Brien moved to the network, as an example of innovation both with hosts and format. T.J. Holmes is attempting to make a go of it on BET. And Arsenio Hall is rolling out a new late-night talk show that will be distributed through CBS syndication sometime later this fall. Wanda Skyes had her shot at late-night hosting in 2010. Chelsea Handler and Kathy Griffin have hosted late-night talk shows, if not the conventional late-night variety standards. And over at Bravo, Andy Cohen has built a successful franchise out of his Watch What Happens Live recap show, which features Bravo talent as well as other guests, and is known for a boozy, playful atmosphere—one of his bits of schtick is to have visitors play games with Cohen as a way of loosening them up. The fact that show has worked is one of the reasons we’ve seen things like The Talking Dead on AMC: as is the case with political shows, other niche late-night programming that lets fans process ideas they’re intensely interested in has become a viable alternative to the general interest show. But these alternative experiments in late night programming seem to be off in their own world, rather than acting as a farm team for the existing business model, which means that diversity of format as well as of hosts is off percolating elsewhere, rather than rising to the networks.

Laura Bennett is right, of course, that the internet and the possibility of content going viral has had an enormous influence on the way late night shows structure their bits—it’s almost a reverse response to Daniel Tosh’s clip shows, where the late night hosts want to manufacture the videos that go huge, rather than discuss and drive traffic to someone else’se work. Jimmy Fallon’s recruitment of The Roots was probably the biggest staffing innovation in recent years, a reason to come for the house band rather than just the host, and in keeping with Fallon’s determination to be a musical tastemaker, rather than simply responding to musical trends. It makes sense that late night hosts would want to be drivers of the culture, active aggregators and curators, rather than simply party hosts riding the hot new trend—you’ve got a better argument that audiences should tune in during the time slot if they might witness the emergence of Odd Future on the national stage, rather than if your’e going to interview Tyler The Creator six months after he emerges onto the national consciousness. But I’m curious to see what different kinds of hosts would choose to elevate if given the chance, and curious for someone who’s going to offer a new way to stage those debuts. Suits, desks, and white guys are all fine on their own. But they aren’t the only way to do things.

This post discusses plot points from the April 20 episode of The Americans.

“None of the agencies are working to share the information,” Phillip in his guise as Clark tells Martha in last night’s episode of The Americans. “Each one wants to be the hero.” His weary description of bureaucratic breakdown and self-interest is a perfect framework for the episode. Interagency communications troubles have created the problem that Elizabeth and Phillip have to solve tonight, stopping a KGB agent who isn’t available to have his orders countermanded. Stan and Nina’s relationship is first enabled by the needs of one bureaucracy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and then complicated by the workings of another, the Rezedentia. And Elizabeth and Phillip, after a thawing in their marital Cold War, are forced to reckon with the extent to which their relationship is a bureaucratic arrangement rather than an organic, living thing—and to confront the possibility that they may need to engage the legal bureaucracy to dissolve their union.

“We have to stop an assassin,” Elizabeth says when she explains their assignment. “They need to straighten things out at the Center. Ordering hits, then countermanding them?” Phillip asks her in the understatement of the year. Part of his reaction is to the Center’s apparent incompetence—how do you hire an assassin and not retain the ability to stay in touch with that person? And part of it is that the organization is acting emotionally rather than rationally, making one decision and then changing its mind. It’s hard to devote your life to fulfilling the missions you’re given if they can alter at a moment’s notice, forcing you to be as dedicated to one goal at one moment as you were to its antithesis a moment before.

And the KGB’s display of incompetence is juxtaposed with the FBI’s reaction after three of its agents are murdered by the explosives expert Phillip and Elizabeth could shoot, but not neutralize, given his penchant for time bombs. Stan and his colleagues are personally shattered by the news, and how could they not be? Working for a large bureaucracy doesn’t actually strip the component employees of that organization of their humanity or capacity to react. But they don’t allow their feelings to dramatically shift their mission or operational playbook. You don’t go to war over the loss of three men, however badly you might feel about their deaths in your personal capacity as a functional human. If the Soviet Union and the United States are locked together by the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction, a concept that’s more promise than threat, the United States just demonstrated a command and control that could help it avoid self-destruction.
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This post discusses plot points from the March 13 episode of The Americans.

Last week, I posited that on The Americans, the working definition of marriage is that “the person you love is the person whose secrets you keep.” The show seemed to double down on that theme this week, showing what happens to marriages, the real one between Sandra and Stan, and the one between Elizabeth and Phillip, which Elizabeth wants to become real, when one partner in each relationship carries a secret he can’t share with his wife.

The possibility of Irina has been there since the early episodes of The Americans, when we watched Phillip crumple up a photograph of her and commit with a bright-eyed enthusiasm meant to transmute grief into joy to getting to know Elizabeth. I’m torn on the idea that the KGB would have taken the risk of pairing the two of them for the assignment, unless either the organization doesn’t know about their romance, which seems unlikely, or it needs to use it. If much of The Americans has been concerned with Phillip’s reaction to the news that his wife is a survivor of sexual violence and his difficulty dealing with the fact that he can’t protect her from it happening again, this episode reversed that dynamic. Phillip may be the only person Irina could handle doing something tremendously ugly but necessary to her, beating her face and then having sex with her to leave evidence that would make it plausible that she’d been raped after she was unable to seduce the Polish dissident who was their target. Trusting someone to hurt you without going so far as to render the pain, emotional or physical, unbearable, is the flip side of trusting someone to protect you.

And the assignment leaves Phillip with two secrets. First, he’s had sex with Irina again, though I think it’s an open question whether or not the context of it means Phillip is telling Elizabeth the truth when he insisted that “Nothing happened.” And second, Irina has raised the possibility that she and Phillip have a son. I’m not sure whether I believe it’s true that they have a child. Irina’s decision to go off the grid would have terrible consequences for her son, if only likely forestalling his military career, once her KGB handlers realize that she’s given them the slip. And when Phillip asks if it’s true they have a child, Irina’s bitter response that “Only duty and honor are real, isn’t that what we were told?” is ambiguous. Maybe she means the boy doesn’t exist. Maybe she means that while Phillip got her pregnant, she can’t really think of her son as his child. Maybe the idea of him is a test for Phillip, to see if he’s still loyal to Elizabeth after their shared ideal. But in any case, he’s an unresolved question, and it’s difficult for me to imagine Phillip exorcising the possibility of another child of his from his mind, much in the same way he never really forgot Irina. What consequences that shard of an idea has for his ability to commit to Elizabeth remains to be seen.

Elizabeth doesn’t know about Phillip’s newly-acquired secrets, but back in Washington, as she, Henry, and Paige join the Beemans for dinner, Sandra Beeman confesses that knowing Stan has secrets is eating at their marriage. “I miss talking,” she confides in Elizabeth. “I mean, I understand. The crazy hours. National security, it’s not like you can turn it on and off.” When Elizabeth commiserates in the understatement of the year that “Marriage is hard,” Sandra lays out her philosophy of building a family: “Well, it’s not for sissies. That’s for sure. But at the end of the day, you just choose to keep going or you don’t…we’ve been married for 20 years. That’s a lifetime. It has to count for something.”
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This post discusses plot elements from the March 6 episode of The Americans.

Since its very first episode, The Americans has used its baroque scenario, which takes two KGB spies in an arranged marriage that serves as their cover as an ordinary American couple and plants them across the street from an FBI agent coming out of deep cover with white supremacists, as a way to blow out the biggest issues that face even ordinary marriages. This week’s episode took the idea that your spouse knows you better than anyone else—or as Curtis Sittenfeld would put it, ““Was this what marriage was, the slow process of getting to know another individual far better than was advisable?”—and reframed it a different way: what does it do to people to share profound secrets? What does it mean to betray them? And what happens if you share those secrets, as Elizabeth does with Gregory and Stan now does with Nina, with someone other than the person you’re married to?

Stan may have been drawn to Nina from the beginning because she’s an attractive woman who is apparently more independent than her fellow Soviets in Washington. But increasingly, the two of them are pulled together because Nina, unlike Stan’s wife, though in a situation of Stan’s own making, understands what he went through when he was undercover with the white supremacist groups he was investigating in a way Stan’s wife does not. “Listen to me, Nina,” he told her when they met in the museum. “I’ve been where you are. I’ve lived it. I know what it is to feel fear in every fiber of your being and not be able to show it. I can get you out. But you have to stay with me, okay?” When he tries to quell her fears about being caught, shot, put on a plain to the Soviet Union and being found inevitably guilty, Stan tells her “You won’t be. You can do this, Nina. We can do this,” with a conviction that’s born out of doing it himself. When Stan and Nina pull off the caper that plants the diamonds in Vasili’s tea and the camera with pictures of documents on it in his radio, Stan is simultaneously proving to himself that, despite his boss’s belief that he’s not a good liar, he still has the wit and skills to protect himself should he need to, demonstrating to Nina that he can protect her, and freeing her from having to sleep with Vasili—which potentially makes her sexually available to him. As awful a thing as it’s been for Stan to put Nina under this kind of pressure, The Americans has done a subtle, careful job of demonstrating how tied up Stan is in the idea that she can survive. Giving her a new life is a proxy for returning to his own: the success of each enterprise seems to depend on the other, and if Nina were to be caught or killed, I can imagine Stan withdrawing deep into himself.

That’s a risky equation for the health of Stan’s marriage. And the impact on his wife of not knowing about his life undercover and his work at present is clear, even though she’d likely be even more wounded if she knew how much he was sharing with Nina. “I get that you can’t tell me things, the secrets and stuff. But there has to be something you can share with me from work. Your boss gets on your nerves, your partner thinks he’s funny,” Stan’s wife asks him a little wistfully. And in return, he relaxes a little, but only enough to tell her the safe version of the story. “Sometimes what I do get scary. Not for me,” he says, avoiding revealing the emotional connection between himself and Nina. “You don’t have to worry about that anymore. But I have to worry about people. And today, it got pretty scary. But it worked out. It was a tough day, but it was a good day.” Stan may be in bed with his wife, but the relationship he’s putting work and emotional investment into is the one with Nina.

Elizabeth and Phillip, by contrast, find themselves torn from their homes by forces who first appear to be American agents, because while Phillip thought he and Elizabeth were functioning like a real couple, she was doing her duty and reporting her doubts about him to their superiors. “You told them. You told them I considered defecting. That’s why this is happening,” Phillip realizes, horrified, after finding out that Elizabeth wasn’t tortured, simply pressured with pictures of Paige and Henry, while Phillip, by contrast, was beaten and waterboarded. Elizabeth tries to convince him otherwise, but given what we’ve seen that Phillip hasn’t, we know she’s being partially untruthful when she insists “If I said anything that made them think, if I said anything, it would have been so long ago….I told them that you liked it here too much.” Elizabeth may have convinced herself that she wasn’t indicting Phillip by acknowledging that she had had doubts about him. But in reality, telling their superiors that she was no longer experiencing doubts about Phillip’s loyalties likely made Soviet higher-ups more suspicious of her than secure of him.
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