MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > OT: "Ozark" and "The Americans"

OT: "Ozark" and "The Americans"

posted 6 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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Not terribly enthusatic about what's "at the movies" these days, I am trying to watch some streaming series.

Ozark, I'm done with, for now. The series is fairly new, been on the air for two years. Two ten-episode seasons are done. There will be a third, next year some time, likely in the summer.

The Americans is a show that ran 6 seasons, 13 episodes a season. I'm working through it more slowly and with diligence.

Watching the shows back to back, I'm intrigued by the similarities.

Their bloodline of "bad guys as good guys" goes back to The Sopranos in general, but more specifically to "Breaking Bad"(which I never watched all the way through.) Having watched all these new shows and looked back over some Sopranos episodes, I have to say The Sopranos has them all beat in a coupla ways: humor(bigtime, attempts at humor are weak on Ozark and The Americans), and the lack of innocents getting ruined or killed(it didn't happen much on The Sopranos, it happens a LOT on Ozark and The Americans.)

The Americans has the more original and tricky plot. An "all-American" couple living in the DC suburbs were long ago planted as "sleeper spies" by the Soveit Union, set up in an arranged marriage at a young age. And yet: they made two real children together, who have grown up as real Americans with no knowledge of their parents' true loyalties, and their fake marriage can't help but inspire real feelings of marital love sometimes. But only sometimes.

The Americans is set in the 80's, which is a very clear memory to me, and it takes off from something I remember at the time: President Reagan's hellbent for leather determination to treat the USSR as exactly the bad guys it had been in the 60's, as if he were out to reboot the paranoia of Strangelove and Fail-Safe for a new generation.

The Americans posits the Russkie sleeper spies in DC as terrified by the "madman" Reagan and how he is coming after them. And yet, it is established that they are there to do what they can to indeed take over the US from the inside. Its a game of geopolitical mental twister.

The big gimmick of the show: each of these "spouses" has to stay home and take it when the other is sent out to have sex with some patsy "for the good of Mother Russia." So the hubby has to wait in bed for his wife to come home (in a wig) from having sex with some scientist; the wife has to wait in bed for the hubby to come home from having sex with some FBI secretary. Its rather brutal the sacrifices these people make.

Happily, I find all of this well-rooted in John Huston's The Kremlin Letter of 1970, which told the tale of US AND Russian spies having to have sex apart from their true loves. (Hitchcock touched on this with Notorious, didn't he? And a bit in NXNW, except Saint DID love James Mason, at first.)

Its all very cruel and tortuous and when coupled with "Ozark"(more on that anon), I have to ask: what's this deal with all these TV shows where the bad guys are the leads and what they do to people (and to themselves) is horrible? Honestly, it feels like the horrors of real political discourse nowadays maybe has to be reflective of a TV world in which "the bad guys win" in every episode. How'd it come to this?

"Ozark" is more familiar terrain. Jason Bateman and Laura Linney are upscale Chicagoans with two kids, a girl and a boy. Bateman accepts a job as a cartel's accountant - and the second he says "I accept" -- they kill the PREVIOUS accountant(who was skimming) in front of his eyes. (I liked that: the cartel claims no power over Bateman until HE agrees to the deal.) Well, soon Bateman's idiot partner is skimming too, everybody but Bateman is killed...and Bateman takes wife (Laura Linney) and family down to the Ozarks on a life saving mission: launder $8 million in cartel money in various backwater establishments: a bar, a church, a strip club.

"Ozark" turns on Nice Funny Guy Jason Bateman in over his head with cartel killers from Mexico and hillbilly psychos in his "safe haven." It seems in every episode, he's facing certain death unless he can outsmart the other baddies, but its getting a bit unbelievable.

Ozark and The Americans share this: in the criminal marriages that anchor the shows...the wife is the cold, careerist, calculating one...and the husband is the feeling, weak-ish one(though on The Americans, the husband is a trained killer, too, so he's not THAT weak.)

I also like how, on Ozark, the Bateman/Linney tough wife/weak husband team is "shadowed" by an older Ozark crime couple: the husband is a ruthless killer "for business," but his wife is a stone cold psycho, reminiscent of Mrs. Bates in her sudden-death attacks on people when they least expect it. And her husband, it transpires, is SCARED of her.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

On the one hand, I can't say that I like either Ozark or The Americans for their characters. These are venal, mean, merciless people who always manage to overcome their humanity in the clinch.

But these are the shows we have these days. They are part of a massive copycat web of series. Sons of Anarchy gave us biker gangs; Animal Kingdom gives us a clan of criminal surfer boys led by a criminal mastermind mom(Ellen Barkin). The bad guys win. The bad guys rule. Its what the cable networks think we want.

And I'm watching it. Somewhat as a "companionship move"with someone who wants to watch, but somewhat because of my lifelong love of thrillers, crime noirs(Charley Varrick prefigures Ozark, and QT has some influence there) and Hitchcock movies(The Americans sounds in his spy pictures; Ozark in his psychos; both shows feature body disposal scenes)

Recommended. Both shows. Though I'm not done with The Americans yet. And Ozark is not done.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

I need to check out Ozark. Laura Linney rules and if she's on a show you know it will be well-scripted. She's an Off-Broadway/Actor's Studio Baby and wouldn't be there otherwise.

both shows feature body disposal scenes

The Americans has some doozies. The Kashsoggi murder fiasco that's on-going brings that sort of scene a little close to home...

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I need to check out Ozark.

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I'd be interested to know what you think. The "evil Mexican cartel" thing has been done to death, but moving the action to a rural lakefront area gives the show a different flavor -- the Bateman/Linney family is in exile in a world "beneath them" in certain respects, but better than them in other.

One thing I like about the plot is how while Bateman is a financial advisor, Linney is a "political campaign specialist" -- and it turns out that SHE is well-trained accordingly for dirty tricks and nasty power moves. A nifty idea: a political campaign specialist is very close to a gangster.

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Laura Linney rules and if she's on a show you know it will be well-scripted. She's an Off-Broadway/Actor's Studio Baby and wouldn't be there otherwise.

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Well, she's from my 2000's fave "Love Actually"(with the sole tragic story among the happy endings, though the Rickman/Thompson story is sorta sad) and she's "got the goods." I find her a bit false in "Ozark," the character is too transparently ruthless to be fooling as many people as she does with her "smiley face mother" routine. Still, she's a name actress, this is yet another example of how " the stars are going to streaming."

There is a young actress playing a conflicted hillbilly girl (crook or good person?) with such authenticity that I see her roughly were Elizabeth Moss was in Mad Men -- the breakout star nobody noticed at first.

A great cast member on Ozark is Harris Yulin as an old guy named "Buddy" who is helpful at life-threatening moments. Yulin is another type of actor you find in streaming TV shows -- a very established, now rather old actor who trails decades of great roles behind him, and a heap of aged charisma. (He was the crooked cop shot by Pacino in Scarface who yells "F you!" bravely as he goes down.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

both shows feature body disposal scenes

The Americans has some doozies.

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Yes, I think I've seen one of them already.

Mr. Hitchcock gave us some intriguing body disposal scenarios before moving on to the greatest body disposal scenes of his career.

Early on, we get the body in the trunk in "Rope"(seen actually being killed before being put in the trunk, never seen again, but ALWAYS imagined.) And "Rear Window" busies itself with a body "going out in pieces" -- in Lars Thorwald's suitcases. Grisly...all in the imagination(not to mention the head that moves from the garden to a hatbox, while never even being CALLED a head by any character.)

But it is in Psycho and Frenzy that body disposal reaches a peak. How disturbing it is, in Psycho, to realize that the corpse Norman moves about and carries to the trunk of a car was -- just ten minutes before -- the living, breathing, thinking, CARING Marion Crane? Its terribly disturbing to realize that a body WAS a person, once.

This carries forward in Frenzy to an entire SERIES of body disposals. One comes to realize that part of Rusk's "job" as a psycho killer is to figure out how to get rid of his victims: in the Thames, in a potato truck, in a trunk. Rusk leaves Brenda Blaney dead in her office chair and again we get that horrible feeling: ten minutes earlier, she was a PERSON. Now, she is rotting matter. (Though I would contend that the bodies in both Psycho and Frenzy give us reason to ponder the absence of a "soul," too.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Earlier in Hitchcock, we got "comedy" body disposal in The Trouble With Harry(he's buried, dug up, buried again, dug up again) and the discomforting presence of a corpse that won't "go away."

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Still, Hitchcock would be a piker as the decades moved on and movie/cable audiences were treated to the psychotic and impersonal dismemberments on screen that marked Mafia movies and series like GoodFellas, Donnie Brasco, and The Sopranos. Bodies as meat to be "processed" in meat cutting machines; bodies with hands and heads removed to avoid ID. (Recall Tony and Chris dismembering a character in the bathtub and putting his head in a bowling ball bag!)

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The Kashsoggi murder fiasco that's on-going brings that sort of scene a little close to home...

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A reminder of the real life horrors that the movies can only emulate. This one has a mystery attached -- just how DID he die? The story circulating about his being dismembered WHILE STILL ALIVE is the stomach-churner.

What's missing is...a body. Or body parts. Word is they've been boiled in acid(another movie/TV staple.)

Oh, well, if there is one thing we know about real life it is that things are sometimes never fully explained. We have to live with it.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Trivia note in passing: Laura Linney was asked first by director Gus Van Sant to play Lila in his 1998 remake of Psycho. She turned it down(scheduling, not disliking it) and Julianne Moore got it. I think Linney would have been better.

Which reminds me: Imdb claims that Hitchcock himself offered Lila first to Heavy Method Emoter Kim Stanley, who turned down the role because she didn't want to work with Tony Perkins. Hmm...but wow, Kim Stanley was famous as difficult. Yet...Hitchcock still wanted her.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

What's missing is...a body. Or body parts.

The Saudis failure to produce the body or even to give an account of its whereabouts makes it highly probable that something truly awful transpired.

Of course, the ball's in the Turks' court: to create pressure they've been leaking all along info that they can only have got from bugs in the Saudi consulate. Evidently they could complete their humiliation of the Saudis and probably bring down MBS by releasing all the info. they have. Unfortunately (from a justice perspective) Turkey will probably allow itself to be bought off by the vile Saudis and the nearly-as-bad-because-so-complicit US, and so not release its info.. Damn it.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

SPOILERS for The Americans, Season One

I've completed Season One of The Americans. Which puts me back in 2013. I'm trying to remember my life back then, things all rather mush together in these later years. I find it weird catching up on old shows via streaming -- how I'm suddenly viewing in a "contemporaneous way" -- series that are pretty much old and done and wrapped. (The biggest mind bender of this nature recently has been watching Timothy Olyphant in Deadwood and then Justified and realizing they are BOTH old shows -- with Deadwood now a decade old.)

Anyway, five seasons to go. I don't know how long it will take me. Maybe the year? Just in time for Season Three of "Ozark" to come back?

The Americans sure is a mental mind twister of a series. I think it climaxed (in Season One) with the fake husband spy(Matthew Rees) marrying a duped FBI secretary...while having his wife spy(Keri Russell) play his SISTER, and his middle-aged Commie handler(Margo Martindale) play his MOTHER. Wigs galore, and the "real" bride not knowing that her husband, his sister, and his mother are...all fakes. (Legal question: just who IS this man now married to? Did he really marry his Russian "wife" -- has he really married this other woman?)

Meanwhile, the OTHER Russian beauty (the one who is publically Russian; Russell comes off as an American) who is being run by an FBI agent against her KGB embassy colleagues elects to confess her treason TO those colleagues...and get her life spared by agreeing to double-agent against the FBI man. A wonderful suspense bit: when the FBI man announces he'll get the Russian gal out of her embassy assignment, she inwardly panics -- if she is no longer useful as a double-agent, the Russians will kill her. But it turns out "alas" -- she has to stay at the embassy. Oh, darn. No -- great news.

Do you understand this? I did. With work and some re-winds. Its magnificently twisty and turny -- fine TV.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

SPOILERS

And of course, it is very "meta" about marriage itself. What's "real" about a marriage? How does bonding occur? This fake married couple in "The Americans" are told at various turns that they must NOT fall in love, must NOT honor their marriage as real -- or they cannot carry out their murderous missions with objectivity.

And they are murderous missions. "The Americans" makes the point that this couple, while trained for patriotic military action, are, essentially, psychopaths. They are sent to kill "American combatants," but they kill American innocents if they get in the way.

I've actually edged into Season Two and it had a great scene to illustrate this. Keri Russell in one of her wig outfits, is "caught" by a rather mild-mannered government warehouse worker looking at classified stuff. Russell -- still acting "innocent" -- grabs and brandishes a nearby crowbar and the warehouse worker gets it -- this woman could kill him, is likely going to have to kill him. Trying to get out of that fate, the man shows her photos of his children. The scene shows Russell somewhat enjoying the act of terrifying this man. Ultimately she asks the name of one of the children -- a boy -- in the photo. And takes the photo. She doesn't kill the man, but the message is clear: if he talks she'll kill the kid.

This is our heroine? No, not really. But of course the main FBI guy(Noah Emmerich) goes rogue and kills without sanction so ...we get that "equivalency" that is so necessary to these things.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I find myself thinking back to "North by Northwest" with The Americans, and how Vandamm's spy ring(suggested to be Communists, but never named as such), killed their way through Americans with a similar psychopathic lack of mercy. The undercover men before "Kaplan," Townsend, and -- as the film's continual target: Thornhill. (They never kill him, but its all they really want to do to him, and boy do they TRY.) I always found Vandamm's gang to be almost psychopathic in NXNW -- "kill first, ask questions later" -- and that's roughly how I find the Communists in The Americans. Its roughly equivalent to The Mafia in The Sopranos -- you never really know where you stand, but death is very possible.

Noteable: the actress who plays the FBI secretary seduced and married by Rees. She's got a great body and a great personality, but her face isn't "TV beautiful" and the series makes a sad point of it: she's easily seduced, desperate to get married, willing to put up with practically anything to have this husband who only comes around a few hours a week. She spies for him, but under the wrong impression that its her FBI bosses who are traitors. I wonder what will happen to her.

Noteable: Margo Martindale -- who I caught in an old season of "Justified" playing a backwoods hillbilly crime boss -- is here on The Americans playing a seasoned old heavyset grandma type who is really a Commie "handler." Both on "Justified" and "The Americans," Martindale plays her bulk and her massive face for menace...but manages to find the sympathy in both characters. She won Emmys for BOTH characters. She commits the most brutal of murders thus far on The Americans: she paralyzes a CIA boss on his apartment floor and says "That will keep you immobilized for 20 minutes. But you only have 10...." and then nicks his jugular vein for a bleed out. Yecch. Never trust Margo Martindale.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Seeds are planted for dangers ahead for those who are entwined with the Killer Married Couple: will the FBI agent get killed? The Russian double-agent(lovely, she is)? The FBI secretary who is "married" to the already married Russian spy?

And how about the teenage daughter who is starting to snoop around and investigate her own parents? Scary, that possible outcome(an old movie from the 80's called "Little Nikita" took up this very subject -- a boy who learns his American suburban parents are Communist sleepers. I never saw it, just read about it, guess I should rent it.)

A note on media critic Matt Zeiler Zoltz(I've guessed that last name wrong, and I'll keep using the wrong name for my post) and The Americans: I'm trying to avoid spoiling the series, but I read his Season One wrap-up and...what a great "reading companion" to have on this voyage(as with Mad Men, and , retrospectively, The Sopranos.)

This guy is my favorite critic on movies AND on TV(where he has more to write about.) His writing nails how and why The Americans works, and I appreciated his summary of the extremely well done sex scenes on the show: no "naughty parts" are shown, but a lot of flesh is on display, and the sex is constant, real and graphic enough, and very erotic. Zoltz wonders if the wigs worn by the married couple are ever gonna come off if a sex partner grabs their hair.

Zoltz also seems to nail (correctly) the married couple's "unwritten rule about sex with other people." If the sex is "for the job," they accept that their partner is doing it with someone else. If the sex is with, say, a former lover -- they get jealous. All this in a marriage that isn't REALLY a marriage.

These two psychopaths can only go crazier.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I am sticking with "The Americans" and ran into a "sequence"(two scenes spaced across two episodes) which rather tested my mettle.

I've noted that this FX series has a LOT of sex in it, and seems to play by censorship rules that allow for extensive nudity(briefly viewed), no R-rated body parts on view, and fairly enthusiastic simulated sex. (Though often the sex is between depressed, messed-up people who don't love each other; its bleak.) And I like the fact that the show tells us -- as everything from Notorious to NXNW to Bond to The Kremlin Letter to Red Sparrow has told us -- that the indisrcriminate having of sex is a necessary tool of spying, loving feelings be damned. (This ties in neatly to the idea of "casual sex" and prostitute sex among civilians, yes?)

Well, it boiled down(for now, I am sure more is to come) to a scene in which a beautiful young blonde woman had sex with her Pakistani lover and then revealed she had been spying on him, but loved him and wanted to be with him. In exchange -- he strangled her. At great length, beyond, I think, even the length of the "Frenzy" strangling and even more real. While she was nude, in bed, just after "loving sex."

Grisly enough, I thought, and disturbing in its mix of sex AND violence and i thought -- "Gee , what was rather taboo-breaking for Hitchcock in 1972 is part of a weekly TV series in the 21s Century, we've come a long way."

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

But by the next episode, it got worse. Our "anti-hero" spying married couple arrived to dispose of the beautiful blonde's body(so as to blackmail the Pakistani into their power), and they did so by breaking the woman's nude body up(not cutting it apart -- breaking it like breadsticks at the joints) and jamming it into a suitcase. The nude blonde body reminds us of Marion in "Psycho" when Norman buries her(except, unlike as in Psycho, here we can see the dead woman's FACE); the breaking down of her body so it can fit in a suitcase reminds of Lars Thorwald's cut-up work in Rear Window but honestly, this scene is stomach churning in its treatment of a human body as a breakable, pliable slab of meat and bone(its a little funny, too, to see the woman all stuffed at different angles into that suitcase, I wonder if a contortionist was used.)

Meanwhile, The Americans proceeds on its mind-twisting course of viewing American life through the eyes of Russians out to destroy it(or perhaps just to make sure the US doesn't destroy Russia?) and a thematic dynamic has arrived: the spy couple have learned that "The Centre"(Commie Russia HQ) has decided that the couple must recruit their 14 year old daughter to follow them up as a spy -- a "home grown plant" in the CIA. Daddy says no, Mama says "maybe" (she sees her daughter continuing on as a warrior for Mother Russia) but their handlers remind them: this real daughter born of a fake married couple belongs to "the State," not to the couple.

Interesting thematic discussions going on, in this series. Between all the murders, all the sex , and all the disturbing mix of both.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

But by the next episode, it got worse. Our "anti-hero" spying married couple arrived to dispose of the beautiful blonde's body(so as to blackmail the Pakistani into their power), and they did so by breaking the woman's nude body up(not cutting it apart -- breaking it like breadsticks at the joints) and jamming it into a suitcase.

OK, that's one of the two (or maybe three) great body disposal scenes in the show. I dare say that one of the great strengths of the show is that one of the two showrunners, Weisberg, is ex-FBI and worked in counter-intel, and as a result a lot of care is taken with the spy-craft. Lots of stuff is exaggerated from real life on the show - e.g., none of the real life long-term Soviet moles we know about were active killers like Phillip and Elizabeth - but all the details and killings on the show have real-world counterparts somewhere in the cold war world.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

OK, that's one of the two (or maybe three) great body disposal scenes in the show.

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Hmm...I wonder if I've seen the body disposals by now. I'll have to think.

You are in a difficult position, swanstep, in responding to any of this. I know you have seen(and liked) The Americans, and I've been watching it on your recommendation..but it took a long time to get it into my "watching life"(I only have so many hours)...and Ozark came first because its been a quicker watch(only the first two seasons exist.) Interesting: a breakout "older teen actress" from Ozark has now come into The Americans storyline and I have to keep reminding myself -- The Americans came FIRST, the "Ozark" actress (distinctive, blonde brillo hair and an elfin quality) was cast in Ozark FROM this.

Anyway, it is likely safe to me to shout out where I am as I go along...for those instances in which you might wish to comment, swanstep. Season Three, episode four, so far.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I dare say that one of the great strengths of the show is that one of the two showrunners, Weisberg, is ex-FBI and worked in counter-intel, and as a result a lot of care is taken with the spy-craft.

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I've read that and a lot of the things done...seem right. Spying is pretty basic stuff even with all the technology and gambits.

And I know that I have a "Hitchcock bias," but the show certainly does touch on the groundwork he laid in Notorious and NXNW...and more to the point(despite their low rank in the Hitchcock canon), Torn Curtain and Topaz(there is a defector angle right now that hasn't played out.)

Indeed, two Hitchcock quotes inform The Americans, I think:

QUOTE ONE: Hitchcock said: "What spies do is...they USE people."(He was talking about Topaz -- but boy does the couple in this show use a LOT of people, they almost inhumanly zero in on people with weaknesses, make friends or lovers with them...use them.)

QUOTE TWO: Hitchcock said, "A spy in one country is a hero in his home country". (We keep having to think about this as we watch the Soviet moles at work in the US.)

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Lots of stuff is exaggerated from real life on the show - e.g., none of the real life long-term Soviet moles we know about were active killers like Phillip and Elizabeth

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That's good to know...honestly, i see them as psychopaths with day jobs on this show.

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- but all the details and killings on the show have real-world counterparts somewhere in the cold war world

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No doubt. Well, I like the show and what it has to say, and what it makes one think about.

As Ozark has roots in Breaking Bad, The Americans has roots in The Sopranos. The "regular family"(complete with older daughter and younger son), where the parents are in a murderous business(except in this one, mom AND dad are killers.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I like the guy playing the FBI man...so bravely showing off his pockmarked face and accessing his inner nerd (this is the kind of character guy we get in the 2010s -- Martin Balsam was fairly handsome for his first coupla decades.)

And I'm kinda sweet on the young actress playing the Russian embassy worker who has been trapped as a traitor between the US and the Soviets for the whole series up til now. Sultry, vulnerable, sad..hopefully a survivor.

As for the lead couple, I must comment that the lead actress, Keri Russell(Felicity, I hear -- I never watched that) is one of those modern day "stick figure" women...whether its diet or genes, she turns sideways and disappears(which makes her kung fu killing skills are the harder to believe) and Matthew Rhys as the husband seems to have decided to hide his British accent with an "American nerd" high pitched voice(all the better to surprise his foes with HIS fighting and killing skills.)

In short...I like the support a bit better than the stars. But that happened a lot with Hitchcock movies, too.

I'll check in more on this as it goes along. Though The Americans has roots in all sorts of cold war films(and a specific root in Little Nikita, which I must now rent)...its ties to Hitchcock are certainly strong. Spy stuff, yes -- but also the quaint topic of body disposal...and how living, breathing human beings soon become lifeless matter. A Hitchcock subject.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

And of course, it is very "meta" about marriage itself. What's "real" about a marriage? How does bonding occur?

I have to be careful not to give away spoilers but....on one level the *whole show* is almost a teen comedy premise: what happens when the hottest girl in school is paired up with an average-looking nice/lucky guy and they go on capers together (surprise! she's a battle-scarred psychopath!)? But, beyond teen comedy, real relationships just *do* have these asymmetries built into them - someone's more beautiful, or smarter, or more responsible, or more social, or kinder - and those differences between you (and how you both negotiate your awarenesses of them) color *everything* in a marriage. Preventing the griefs these slight asymmetries cause from snowballing and eventually blowing up the marriage *is* much of what the famously 'hard work' of marriage consists in. The Amercians is in part just this serious relationshippy expansion of a teen comedy premise. All embedded in a cold war thriller of course!

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I have to be careful not to give away spoilers

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Oh, its OK if something pops out...I'm watching this with the series finished I'm bound to accidentally read something somewhere. I can take it.

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but....on one level the *whole show* is almost a teen comedy premise: what happens when the hottest girl in school is paired up with an average-looking nice/lucky guy and they go on capers together (surprise! she's a battle-scarred psychopath!)?

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You know, I'm not sure I ever quite saw the wife here as "out of the husband's league," but yeah, probably. Rhys plays his guy with such a high pitched voice all the time that when he "goes full nerd" (in disguise as with his "other wife" the FBI secretary), its hard to tell the difference. Key to it is that he seems like a perfectly harmless fellow, but we've seen how skilled he can be in a fight and in killing.

There was one funny bit where his daughter was singing the praises of her pastor for his "heroism" in chaining himself to a fence in protest. Rhys can't conceal his disdain for such low level heroics ("Chaining himself to a fence is heroic?") -- if only his daughter KNEW what he was capable of.

Indeed, way back in the pilot episode, Rhys and his daughter were bullied at a department store by a big guy who also made sexual innuendos about the daughter. Rhys (Philip is the character) couldn't do anything THERE...but got brutal bewigged revenge on the bully later in the episode. Philip is like a dark version of Superman -- he can't reveal his superpowers(in killing and fighting) to his children or to the public at large. Elizabeth has this problem, too of course, (that's Keri Russell, I guess I'll go with character names.) But she doesn't act like a nerd.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Whether spoilerish or not, I'd say the idea that Philip is more humane than the ruthless Elizabeth fits the pattern of Ozark,too(I guess that's why I joined the shows together)....in that series, two of the criminal wives are more ruthless than their criminal husbands. Here, too. I suppose this is Hollywood feminism in certain ways, but it has a sort of rueful male-based viewpoint as well: women are just plain meaner and more ruthless than men these days. Well, SOME women. (Hollywood executive women?) Was it not somebody's joke somewhere that if all wars were only fought by women, they'd be over more quickly?

Meanwhile, back at the "intersection of shows." I've ascribed Ozark as an offshoot of Breaking Bad(regular folks mixed up with drugs and cartels), and The Americans as an offshoot of The Sopranos(killers as your neighbors), but The Americans matches up with Breaking Bad in the character of the FBI man who is the neighbor of the Commie spies. On Breaking Bad, that would be the DEA agent who was the brother in law of the drug business kingpin Walter White.

"Everything old is new again."

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

But, beyond teen comedy, real relationships just *do* have these asymmetries built into them - someone's more beautiful, or smarter, or more responsible, or more social, or kinder - and those differences between you (and how you both negotiate your awarenesses of them) color *everything* in a marriage.

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Its true isn't it? At a certain point in time in any relationship, you realize that one of you has the better looks -- which means your friends either think "how'd he land someone as hot as HER? This won't last..." or "What is he doing with someone not as good looking as he is?" which can speak ill of you. Which is why...don't consider what your friends think. Looks fade. Love is the great equalizer.

But beyond looks, indeed, each partner brings different skills and smarts and experience to the relationship and making it work as a "cohesive whole" is difficult.

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Preventing the griefs these slight asymmetries cause from snowballing and eventually blowing up the marriage *is* much of what the famously 'hard work' of marriage consists in.

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Yep. Which is why The Americans has this great "meta" quality. Basically, Philip and Elizabeth are in an arranged marriage -- and those HAVE worked in various countries over centuries. But their marriage was arranged as a kind of business deal/government assignment. And yet...they sleep together. They have sex as a matter of real feeling(sometimes), even as they are assigned to have sex with others (another great recent irony: the daughter suggests to her mom that dad is having an affair. Well he is having lots of affairs -- all sanctioned by mom. And vice versa.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

And they needed to have a real separation that could have led to a real divorce -- not on paper, but one wondered: would "the Centre"(the great unseen Soviet power center) ALLOW them to split up, like a real divorce would do?

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The Amercians is in part just this serious relationshippy expansion of a teen comedy premise. All embedded in a cold war thriller of course!

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Yes, well, I suppose this is how a lot of the cable series have worked since The Sopranos. There the deal was: use the mob and murder as the "excitement" part of the story, but examine all the aspects of modern family life at the Soprano house, where the murders were left outside the door and a "real family" attempted to exist.

Whether or not the Sopranos children would "escape the Mafia life"(as Tony and Carmela wanted) was an issue throughout the series. Now in The Americans, the issue arises again, exept the Mafia(the Soviet Centre) is making a claim ON the children. Could the split decision, at the end of the series be: the daughter must be a spy but the son can go free? I have no idea.

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All embedded in a cold war thriller of course!

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I'm reminded that while both Torn Curtain and Topaz got their lumps as "Hitchcock films of age and decline," and seem rather dull and irrelevant now, back then, Cold War movies were all the rage, and manifested in different types: Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe(nuclear war); The Spy Who Came in From the Cold(real bureaucratic Commie vs the West struggles); Bond(fantasy, with the Soviets competing with organized crime SPECTRE as the villains), and then Hitchcock's two --- which seemed to mix the reality of LeCarre with Hitchcock's penchant for fantasy.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

In any event, The Americans proves that Hitchcock's films(as well as other Cold War films, like The Manchurian Candidate and The Ipcress File with Michael Caine, which were better than Hitchcock's as stories, I guess) WERE relevant then (in the sixties), remained relevant in the Reagan 80s(Reagan saw his Star Wars system as actually based on Paul Newman's ideas in Torn Curtain,) and are relevant today (when "The Russians" are villains again but for different reasons.)

Indeed...the plotline hasn't played out yet, but The Americans currently has a Russian defector to the US (thus, like the Russian official at the beginning of Topaz) who might NOT be a defector(thus, like Paul Newman in Torn Curtain.)

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

In any event, The Americans proves that Hitchcock's films(as well as other Cold War films, like The Manchurian Candidate and The Ipcress File with Michael Caine, which were better than Hitchcock's as stories, I guess) ... are relevant today

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

This reminds me that a new show from Amazon called 'Homecoming' (with Julia Roberts making her TV debut) is getting strong reviews and is apparently full of references to Hitch, De Palma, Frankenheimer, Pakula.

--

And once upon a time, all those other guys referenced Hitch. Now they get referenced WITH Hitch. And sadly, only DePalma is still alive. (Pakula was killed in horrible freak auto accident; Frankenheimer died having back surgery.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I know I've got a "Frenzy" jones going around here(why not, actually --its the closest Hitchcock movie to Psycho in type)...but I have to note this about The Americans:

One of the great conceits of The Americans are all the different wigs that the husband and wife team wear on their missions of long-term manipulation and short-term mission work(for disguise.)

There are actual "Wig of the Week" columns on The Americans (I'm only reading these columns for seasons I've seen.)

Anyway, in the Season Three episode where Elizabeth is passing Philip off as her "boyfriend" to a military assembly line worker...Philip's wig is "pure Bob Rusk." The curly mop top of butterscotch-red 70's hair. The big dark sideburns. You could say that Philip is trying to look "Michael Caine" but with his thin face and furrowed features, no, he looks Barry Foster. I think its on purpose. I'll bet that the Americans wigmakers are always looking at movies for inspiration. BTW: Philip doesn't do the Bob Rusk wig with a British accent.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Some more "Americans" episodes finished and...

...man it seems like "murder porn." In two episodes back to back.

One character , a South African white guy, had a tire filled with gasoline put around his waist and was set on fire by a vengeful South African black guy(the practice is called "necklacing"), and they showed the entire death by fire.

Yet another South African white guy -- a very young man -- was shot in the eye(but not fatally) by his opposite South African number (white but on the black side with Communist backing), chased down, and slowly strangled to death. Again...the whole process.

And in the saddest killing...not really violent...an old lady discovered working late in her late husband's shop by our two Russian spies "had to be killed." I knew it was going to be a powerful scene when I saw that Lois Smith(highly regarded actress) was cast as the old lady. She gets a dialogue with Keri Russell(as Elizabeth, the cold Russian killer) that is poignant and touching...but she still has to die(forced to overdose on her heart pills) and we get this "crucial to the entire series" exchange:

Old woman: You have children? (Taking the poison pills)
Elizabeth: Yes, two.
Old woman: And you do THIS? Why?
Elizabeth: Because I have to, to make the world a better place.
Old woman: Evil people always say that, when they are doing evil things.

And then the old woman dies, and its more painful to watch than the gory murders that preceded.

Politics(and religion) being "third rails" I'm always reticient to opine, but I think that "The Americans"(at least this far) is positing Elizabeth(and to a lesser extent, her "husband") as, indeed, evil. Yes, war is hell(as the Professor said in NXNW, which is relevant to this show), and this couple see themselves as soldiers who kill in battle, but really, their murders are often ambushes, tricks, unfair (not to mention the non-murderous emotional damage they wreak on those who trust them.) That these two people(damaged and or orphaned in childhood) do this for Mother Russia seems a capable indictment of that brand of Communism. Sides are being taken here. And the mix of high ideals and bedrock vengeance in the South Africa plotline are food for thought.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I see the scene with the old woman as "that moment" in The Americans when the statements are made that will trail the whole series. The rest of the series will flow from the nice old woman's direct accusation to Elizabeth of her evil -- its like the mid-series episode of The Sopranos where an aged psychiatrist confronted Carmela with the facts of her marriage to a Mafia murderer: "You can never say you weren't told".

And yet...the show has a long ways to go(for me.) We will see where it goes.

I'm a little disturbed about the "murder porn," though. These killings are all graphic and real and lingering and the number of them is getting oppressive. In the Hitchcock canon, they harken back to Gromek(in another Cold War tale) in Torn Curtain and Brenda in Frenzy.

But I'll still watch. I've long accepted my hypocrisy on violence("Its so awful...that's one of my favorite movies!") . Its just that there is fun violence(Arbogast, the Godfather murders) and not-so-fun violence.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

I see the scene with the old woman as "that moment" in The Americans when the statements are made that will trail the whole series. The rest of the series will flow from the nice old woman's direct accusation to Elizabeth of her evil -- its like the mid-series episode of The Sopranos where an aged psychiatrist confronted Carmela with the facts of her marriage to a Mafia murderer: "You can never say you weren't told".

This is all correct! As you can surely see happening right now, the arc of the rest of the show is Phillip not being able to go on with the life they've chosen, and what her true-believer-and-by-any-and-we-mean-any-means-necessary status is going to cost Elizabeth (even as she increasingly becomes history's fool as the cold war nears its end). There are going to be other key markers and phrases from here but like the point blank lie to Kay (that she instantly sees through) at the end of The Godfather or Carmela being forced to face the truth by the psychiatrist, the 'death of the old lady' is the point of no return.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Getting a little political: evil true believers are kind of everywhere. The right in US politics basically really respects someone who'll follow *any* order, go to *any* extreme (insert key Goldwater quote about 'extremism in defense of liberty is no vice' here): from lunatic generals like Curtis LeMay to Oliver North to Trump saying he'd torture much worse than water-boarding (and boasting he could kill and still get voted in), to torturer/renditioner Gina Haspel becoming CIA Head recently and cruising through her Senate confirmation, you'd have to say that the American political system persistently rewards flat out evil.

And think about the Kashoggi-killing Saudi dudes who obviously followed orders from high-up and are now being asked to die for that to shield the high-up order-givers from responsibility. Only Oliver North/Elizabeth Jennings-types need apply for such jobs I suppose.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Getting a little political: evil true believers are kind of everywhere.

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Oh, I certainly believe that. I think America is such a free for all right now(left/right, all races) that the true believers simply can't get the dominance they get in other countries. But they still do evil...

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The right in US politics basically really respects someone who'll follow *any* order, go to *any* extreme (insert key Goldwater quote about 'extremism in defense of liberty is no vice' here): from lunatic generals like Curtis LeMay to Oliver North

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You know, Oliver North was credited with one of the stories for an episode in Season Two on The Americans(the contra camp one, I think.) Makes you wonder about the producers of this show. But its a pretty even handed show.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Trump saying he'd torture much worse than water-boarding (and boasting he could kill and still get voted in),

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Well, audiences made Dirty Harry, Death Wish, and Rambo hits...and Taken...

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to torturer/renditioner Gina Haspel becoming CIA Head recently and cruising through her Senate confirmation, you'd have to say that the American political system persistently rewards flat out evil.

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Yes...I suppose so, sure. I'm not naïve.

Still, I think that The Americans is starting to suss out the Soviet brand as particularly bankrupt(in the 80's, who knows what it is today -- its gone from the Reps hating the Soviet Commies to the Dems hating the Russian Commies.)

I was also thinking that in The Americans, I am assuming there was still a draft in the Soviet Union in the 80s?? A handler tells the couple that their daughter is not their own -- she belongs to the state. And certainly in America(with breaks) up until 1973, the draft assured that American kids belonged to the state, too.

Thus, if America has broken loose of at least those bounds -- "peaceable" with regard to using a volunteer force rather than draftees, it is a least a bit more relaxed of a country to live in than one where the military owns your life at age 18.. The husband/father in The Americans seems to see this -- his daughter has a chance to live free(and she can certainly still protest American inequalities.)

it boils down to Totalitarianism for me. Stalin, Mao...that guy Hitler. Pol Pot? But totalitarianism works for some nations, its all the people know, they can live with it.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

The husband/father in The Americans seems to see this -- his daughter has a chance to live free

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Yep, Phillip sees the truth: the reverse of The Amercians - long term US moles inside Russia - could never happen both because (i) Russia is so regimented and closed that nobody can escape surveillance, needing connections, etc. The Jennings are only possible in the low-surveillance-state that they're trying to curb;

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Its quite the irony, and The Americans set up the dichotomy early on in the show -- with Elizabeth worried that Philip was becoming much too used to America's "consumerism" (part of freedom, after all.) Meanwhile, Elizabeth, as a true believer, is disgusted by it all. What IS that "better world" she seeks? Everybody in the same economic place, I'd suppose -- but we know that every society always has its pampered elite -- certainly the Communist ones.

I'm reminded, by the way, of the great original Manchurian Candidate, and the jovial Chinese mastermind who chides his Russian counterpart in New York on having made a profit with a fake sanitorium that covers a spy operation -- just before the Chinese man goes to Macy's to buy goodies for his wife. In short, its hard to be a sacrifice-minded Communist in a place of plenty.

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and (ii) ultimately virtually ever westerner values his or her own life too highly to be sent on 30+ year embeds,

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This is true. What we know of the childhoods of Elizabeth and Philip is that both were deprived...of affection, of family...they WANTED to sacrifice their minds and bodies(and souls) to their murderous mission. At least, at the start.

And now the issue arises of the daughter's willingness to follow them....

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

This is all correct!

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Thanks for the attaboy!

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As you can surely see happening right now, the arc of the rest of the show is Phillip not being able to go on with the life they've chosen, and what her true-believer-and-by-any-and-we-mean-any-means-necessary status is going to cost Elizabeth

--

--
(even as she increasingly becomes history's fool as the cold war nears its end).

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Its like Mad Men, isn't it? We know what's coming. And since it is the 80's, I REALLY remember it. Fun: they showed characters watching Tootsie in a movie theater with a poster for The Verdict outside the theater. Ah, Xmas 1982...some great movies for Mainstream Man.

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There are going to be other key markers and phrases from here

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I'll be watching for them.

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but like the point blank lie to Kay (that she instantly sees through) at the end of The Godfather

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Yes

--
or Carmela being forced to face the truth by the psychiatrist, the 'death of the old lady' is the point of no return.

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Felt that way to me. A long, measured scene in which a total innocent was given far too much time to contemplate the evil woman before her and her impending death. Yes, Elizabeth chose to tell all truths(her name, her family background) and to try to reach out to the old woman...but when the time came, the death came, and it was horrible to watch a woman who had been minding her own business have to die like that.

I'm telling you, I'm sticking The Americans out, and likely Ozark, too...but I need some shows where the good guys win. I've been streaming Justified and even old quick Peter Gunn episodes recently just to get that good feeling back.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Why, in America right now(for almost two decades since The Sopranos started in '99) have we such a taste for such grim characters and such downbeat tales, with so many innocents getting killed or ruined? Its a dark streak.

The Sopranos, Deadwood, Breaking Bad, The Americans, Ozark...the list goes on and on.

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I don't really have the answer, I'm just noticing it.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Why, in America right now... have we such a taste for such grim characters and such downbeat tales, with so many innocents getting killed or ruined?

I suspect that it's the sort of question whose answer will seem very clear in a couple of decades, e.g., if the US starts to break apart, or if climate disasters continue to get worse and worse with attendant massive refugee flows.

Compare with how people *now* look at the movie output of Germany 1920-1933, e.g., in the great 2014 doc. 'From Caligari to Hitler'. Once you know what's coming then Mabuse and M and Dr Faustus and crazy Mountain movies and lots more all start to make sense. Similarly for our most distinctive cultural outputs perhaps.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Since I can't conceive of an answer on my own...I will certainly take yours.

Within "Hollywood" itself(such an elastic term now, with 685 cable series, broadcast series, MCU films, indie films), I feel that once the barriers came down that "the bad guys don't have to lose," any number of artists accessed their inner cynicism and fatalism. The Sopranos begat Deadwood begat Breaking Bad begat The Americans begat Ozark...

Now, it can be said that "the bad guys" on all these series suffered...some died, many family lives were ruined, so the showrunners could say "but crime did NOT pay...the bad guys didn't lead happy lives."

Except Tony Soprano. Even after he killed or had killed his best friend, the young son of his late boss, his cousins, the fiancee of his cousin, we never saw him pay for anything....and we'll never know if he got shot.

Meanwhile, on The Americans -- suffering is endemic. The husband. The wife. The daughter. The FBI man. The Russian beauty trapped in Siberia. And on and on...

Dark stories for dark times.

Still: I sure like my memories of happy ending movies: Its a Wonderful Life, The Sting, The Music Man(sorry), Damn Yankees, Mary Poppins(though it is sad she leaves at the end), Animal House...

..and North by Northwest.

Funny: I was thinking A Mad Mad World , which was a funny epic, had a happy ending, but it doesn't really. Everybody is going to jail, Spencer Tracy is in the worst place...but they all laugh anyway.

Maybe THAT's the message of life.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

The NY Times has a great video series (45 mins total) on where 'Fake News' comes from. The series begins with Soviet cold war shenanigans:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5WjRjz5mTU
I found it eye-opening. The Americans' picture of Soviet spycraft definitely underplays the disinformation/BS-spreading side of Soviet operations. Perhaps if spy-thrillers had more accurately presented this side of things western democracies would't be such hopeless suckers for BS now. It's sobering/chilling.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I'll take a look.

I've always felt that a fair amount of the news is fake, exactly for what reasons...who knows? Its a complex world out there.

But there remains a crips/bloods split to how ANY political figure or action is analyzed "in the news." We are now rife with profit-driven "play to the base" cable channels which are "pure advocacy." If the President gives a speech, one side says its a great speech, the other side says its an awful speech and -- somebody would get fired if they reported "against their party." Oh, well.

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By the way, I realize that entertainment "news" by its very definition is subject to hype and hyperbole, but Psycho sure has its share of "fake news" associated with it. Here are two big examples, one that I've mentioned before:

ONE: The idea that Hitchcock wanted to surprise everyone by killing Janet Leigh early in the shower. The 1960 trailer that ends with the shower scene disproves that but...every year around Halloween , the same old story goes out.

TWO: The idea that the New York Times said that Psycho was "a blot on an honorable career." Truth be told, in 1960, NYT critic Bosley Crowther's first review was a positive review -- he said the movie was sure to be a big hit, and that the film depended on "slow build ups to sudden shocks," which didn't impress Crowther much, but which ended up with a positive review. A couple of weeks later, Crowther took note of the blockbuster status of Psycho and its shower scene("the most talked-about event of the summer other than the political conventions") and leaped to the defense of Psycho against all nay-sayers. Then Crowther put the movie on his year-end "Ten Best List of 1960."

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I found a few letters to the editor that were mildly against the violence in Psycho -- and one that defended it(by a military man, who noted "we seem to be more squeamish about two killings at close range than 1,000 killings in a battle scene."). But nowhere could I find any statement by the NYT of Psycho "being a blot on an honorable career."

And yet that "review" keeps getting mentioned in writings on Psycho even in recent years. I know , because I keep seeing it mentioned, usually with this "leap": "The New York Times at first said Psycho was a blot on an honorable career, but later put Psycho on the Ten Best of the Year list."

Fake movie news.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

SPOILERS for The Americans, Season 4

(I know this show is "old" and off the air, but I am experiencing it first hand, and I figure something that's a big spoiler on the series, maybe I should protect here. I know swanstep has seen the show.)

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I wrote:

Meanwhile, on The Americans -- suffering is endemic. The husband. The wife. The daughter. The FBI man. The Russian beauty trapped in Siberia. And on and on...

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Well, the suffering ended for one of them. The Russian beauty trapped in Siberia.

I have to say that, for the most part, I have lost the emotional connection I had to movies and (some) TV series in my earlier decades. I don't know why. Age and some maturity comes, its harder to feel connected to fiction, the hormones subside. I find myself, modernly and at this age, watching things and not getting much out of them. About a movie or two a year, luckily. (And almost always a QT movie, so sue me.)

And in the "sudden sequence" that ended with the Russian beauty's death(Nina's her name) I felt some of that emotional connection for the first time in a long time. First of all, her "on the spot" execution was doled out with no warning -- it was a surprise not too far removed from "that scene" in LA Confidential in which a major character is suddenly killed. (Or, hey -- that, uh, shower scene?)

But it just felt unfair. Nina's story was one of being cornered by a series of MEN -- an FBI man, her Russian male colleagues -- and forced to spy for one country or the other, one country against the other -- wrenched backwards and forwards and almost always using her body to get the job done(well, just her friendship with a female cellmate). She was such a pretty and sexy woman in the first two seasons of The Americans, but by Seasons Three and Four, so much of our time with her was spent in a grim prison cell in the gulag that I, for one, was getting tired of seeing here there. Couldn't SOMEBODY spring her?

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

SPOILERS for The Americans, Season Four

Well, attempts were made. But Nina committed one selfless act too many and -- bang. Dead .

I gotta hand it to The Americans. For one time, I followed the subtitles closely and watched as they doled out only a few words at a time -- to great suspenseful effect:

A nameless official saying:

"Your appeal has been reviewed and..."

Wait for it

"It is the decision of the court that...

Wait for it

"Your appeal is..."

Wait for it

"Denied."

Wait for it

"The sentence of death will be carried out shortly."

Yeah. VERY shortly. Gun to the back of the head.

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I'll miss Nina. She was personally my favorite character on the show. Here's hoping that a new one will be introduced, post haste.

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Side-bar on The Americans: Much of the cast is unknown to me, but they've been good thus far in "landing a quality known character actor" as the series has moved along. Good: each name actor who joins the show gets to stay and act with the next name actor who joins the show.

First we got Margo Martindale as the motherly-but-merciless Soviet Handler Martha. Then Frank Langella came in as a handler brought out of retirement to help our spy couple. He's a nicer person than Martha, and the show finds them to be a parallel to Philip and Elizabeth: the kind-hearted male killer spy and his more ruthless female counterpart.

In Season Four, they have added Dylan Baker, he of the long dissipated face and wry cynical delivery, as a Russian plant involved in biochemical warfare -- the chemicals have literally destroyed his body AND his soul.
But he's still a funny guy.

With Martindale, Langella, and Baker, "The Americans" has an injection of star power(of a type.) Its good to see all of them on the show (and I remember Langella in 1970, young and black-haired and sexy in Mel Brooks' unsung The Twelve Chairs. Decades later, he's just a cool old guy with a great voice -- who played Nixon once, to Oscar-nommed effect.)

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Side-bar on The Americans: Much of the cast is unknown to me, but they've been good thus far in "landing a quality known character actor" as the series has moved along. Good: each name actor who joins the show gets to stay and act with the next name actor who joins the show.

It's definitely one of the keys to making a top-tier show - can you write memorable supporting roles and cast them well with top talent? If you don't do this well the leads will cloy after a while.

Anyhow, congrats on getting through the show so quickly. Season 4 is a fave of most viewers I think. Season 5, probably necessarily, is a bit frustrating: we want our spy-fun but there has to be a cooling off after all Season 4's wreckage (more to come than just Nina and poor poor Martha I assure you). Season 6's finale comes roaring back, but subjectively Season 4 is the last time The Americans felt completely whole to me. The Americans we miss ends there much as Mad Men did at the end of Season 5 with Don walknig away to the strands of You Only Live Twice and 'Are You alone?'

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

It's definitely one of the keys to making a top-tier show - can you write memorable supporting roles and cast them well with top talent? If you don't do this well the leads will cloy after a while.

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Yes...I think that's true of most series, and a great point: the leads WILL cloy after awhile. Familiarity breeds contempt without some fresh blood. And if the faces are more recognizable(to me at least), suddenly the show becomes that much more accessible.

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Anyhow, congrats on getting through the show so quickly.

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Well, I tend to move "slow...then fast." You dropped hints as to how good The Americans was some time ago. i tried to get it started, did about three episodes, but couldn't get the rhythm started. So I waited until my "viewing schedule cleared," committed again, and now I'm on a roll.

The key to all this is that in the past six months , I have committed to a streaming service so now I can "binge." The days when I could commit to a show and wait a week for an episode...over six years...may well be behind me (though if another Sopranos or Mad Men comes along, maybe I can do it that way again.)

I find "binge viewing" to be very akin to reading a novel. Slow at first, then steady...then with a big "run to the end." The final 100 pages. The final six episodes.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Season 4 is a fave of most viewers I think. Season 5, probably necessarily, is a bit frustrating: we want our spy-fun but there has to be a cooling off after all Season 4's wreckage (more to come than just Nina and poor poor Martha I assure you). Season 6's finale comes roaring back, but subjectively Season 4 is the last time The Americans felt completely whole to me. The Americans we miss ends there much as Mad Men did at the end of Season 5 with Don walknig away to the strands of You Only Live Twice and 'Are You alone?'

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It does seem that both The Sopranos and Mad Men didn't know to "quit when they were ahead." TV series that go and on for financial reasons are OK in broadcast TV (Law and Order, ER, Grays Anatomy come to mind) -- they have their audience and nobody much seems to care about "the telling of one great story." But The Sopranos and Mad Men started so strongly and secured such great themes and episodes early on that it was frustrating to watch the series start to come apart at the end. These episodes weren't "bad" -- the writing and acting was still good -- but it felt like the stories were being padded out or extended past their run time.

My favorite season of The Sopranos was Season 5 -- The Buscemi story, the sudden-death wrapping up of the Adrianna arc, and the feeling that the story had come to somewhat of an end(with Tony clearly alive.) But we got a "Season 6A and 6B" and indulgent dream sequences and...the worst ending imaginable (doubly so to me because I know that some folks feel it had the best ending imaginable...and I hate conflict.)

With Mad Men, I feel the story of the first three seasons -- which ended with Don discovered by Betty, JFK blown away, the marriage over and Sterling Cooper dissolved -- ended a great series about "the fifties into the sixties." The second half of Mad Men, in new digs in the countercultural late sixties was about as frustrating and unfocussed as that was in real life. (Though I liked the men growing long hair and moustaches; and the firm desperately reinventing itself in a series of sales until no final moves could be made and it was over.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I'll just have to see with The Americans. The loss of Nina strikes me as very damaging, she was sympathetic and sexy and the Russian "rezidenza" (sp?) scenes were just more interesting with her there. She made lumpy ol' Stan seem empathetic and reasonably sexy. She humanized that hot shot young Russian guy.

Given where I am in the series, I suppose that there yet may repercussions for Nina's death. She has at least three men(Stan, the stateside Russian, and the kidnapped scientist in Siberia) who just might wreak some vengeful havoc on Nina's behalf. We'll see. (Won't we?)

And yes...poor poor Martha. Such a cruel story. With an ironic twist: she's sacrificing just about everything to love "Clark," a man who exists to exploit her, and its sorta because she's not very attractive(in face, and by TV standards alone). And yet, two FBI male colleagues have both pursued her romantically -- she's not "desperate." There is also the extent to which Martha "mirrors" Nina as a woman who is pushed(and yet in certain ways consents) to betraying her country.

"Weak-ish," to me: the storyline with the daughter being told (for now) "half of the secret"(she knows her parents are Russian spies -- she does not know they are mass murderers) and spilling to Pastor Tim(whose very name rather bugs me.) The stakes and horror of the main spy story seem to be weirdly trivialized by the teen daughter embarrassing her parents and sort of pushing them around. It just seems oddly inconsequential to me. But that story has a ways to go -- particularly if/when Paige finds out (or witnesses) her parents' abilities to kill without mercy.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Speaking of killings, I have noted that while the spies like the "clean kills" of shooting people, when push comes to shove, when you gotta improvise, and there is no time left -- strangling is the killing method(at least for the men so far, Philip and for Hans.) Strangling was Hitchcock's preferred method of killing in his films, idea being that to kill that way -- you don't need a weapon, you can do it with your bare hands. Which makes it animalistic and intimate. (Though neckties and scarves added style to the method.)

Poor Philip had to do this to a nameless security guard on a bus(with unseeing witnesse nearby), but I think was that not only was the guard going to discover the plot, but he might have opened the bottle with the "bio-death" and killed thousands. He just HAD to go. But Philip committed this killing of an innocent within days of having had to kill ANOTHER innocent(the FBI computer guy.)

Note in passing: we have allowed ourselves a certain amount of OT discourse on the Psycho board because...talking Psycho alone for 20 years isn't a great idea (even as we DO talk Psycho for the good of the board.)

But I think that The Americans has some pretty deep roots in Hitchcock that make it reasonably "on topic." The direct connection is to all of his spy films, but particularly that aspect of them that detailed how personal lives(and, in Topaz, family life) and loves(Notorious, NXNW, Torn Curtain, Topaz) can be sacrificed horribly "in the name of country." The Cold War stuff(complete with false and true defectors) is very much a "better" version of what Hitchcock tried to do with Torn Curtain and Topaz.

And the killings? Well, they all seem to track with Gromek in Torn Curtain to me -- the person who has to be killed, in a lingering struggle that reduces statecraft to animalistic murder.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Though our "heroes" are assassins, too. I've watched Elizabeth kill one guy in a swimming pool and another under his car(while repairing it)...all to "open space" for someone else to get their jobs. Strictly business, and Elizabeth follows her orders and does it, just like that. (Like The Manchurian Candidate assassin, except not under hypnosis.)

Which is where, I suppose, "Psycho" comes in.

And maybe Shadow of a Doubt more intensely. Let's go there. Paige has been suspecting her mother and father of nefarious activity much as Young Charlie did with Uncle Charlie in "Shadow of a Doubt." The horror of your Uncle being a killer is compounded by that of your PARENTS being killers. Both of them!

And was it Philip who said (to Langella): "You have to be insane to do this job."

Yes, maybe you do a little. Philip and Elizabeth are psychopaths in the name of country. I'm not sure "regular" people could do the job.

However: is not the nature of war and soldering ALWAYS to take "regular people" and to train them how to kill people, and then to SEND them to kill people?

I grew up as a child in the sixties with suburban fathers on the block who, it was rumored, had killed people in WWII and Korea. It was an accepted fact of life that just wasn't supposed to be brought up now that they were back home with families.

The Americans perhaps has this reality as one of its themes, too.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

I grew up as a child in the sixties with suburban fathers on the block who, it was rumored, had killed people in WWII and Korea. It was an accepted fact of life that just wasn't supposed to be brought up now that they were back home with families.

The post-draft, professionalized military situation changes things I believe. When most soldiers were conscripts, and, in a sense, *any* guy could have a military background then perhaps it really does make sense to tactfully draw a veil over what people did or didn't do. Now less than 1% of the pop. has any contact at all with the military (and it's the same families, mostly southern, poor, or rural, generation after generation who do) so no norm of tact exists and the whole vibe of professionalized killer, everyone's a Special Forces/Unstoppable Badass wannabe is embraced.

Even more troublingly, and I noticed this especially when I taught ROTC and other guys from Fort Riley in Kansas, the professionalized military often look down on civilians and think civilian life is undisciplined and weak. Hearing this made me realize that the way the military has evolved in the US, i.e., into Sparta, *has* raised the risk of loss of civilian control over the military, and that one of the key messages of trashy Hollywood thrillers from Rambo to Homeland to Taken - keep an eye on/look after your Special Forces guys when they become civilians - was surprisingly correct.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

The post-draft, professionalized military situation changes things I believe. When most soldiers were conscripts, and, in a sense, *any* guy could have a military background then perhaps it really does make sense to tactfully draw a veil over what people did or didn't do.

--

And the sad thing is that "regular guys" were called upon to be killers. "Saving Private Ryan" took this up by casting Tom Hanks, instead of Mel Gibson or Harrison Ford, as the lead. And yet, with WWII, the case has been well made that this kind of killing was necessary to stop what Hitler wanted to do. You certainly DO have to fight sometimes.

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Now less than 1% of the pop.

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Yes, almost like a variation on our hiring of a police force to "do the dirty work" that we cannot do.

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has any contact at all with the military (and it's the same families, mostly southern, poor, or rural, generation after generation who do) so no norm of tact exists and the whole vibe of professionalized killer, everyone's a Special Forces/Unstoppable Badass wannabe is embraced.

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Yes. I was at a party near a military installation once -- this was within the past 10 years -- and some of those guys came roaring up on motorcycles and circulated through the party with a sort of "shared secret" about whatever it was they were doing "over there". They weren't sheepish - they were very macho and back slapping each other.

And one, maybe two, of these guys did live in the neighborhood, that's why they were at the party. They were invited.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Even more troublingly, and I noticed this especially when I taught ROTC and other guys from Fort Riley in Kansas, the professionalized military often look down on civilians and think civilian life is undisciplined and weak.

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I guess they might feel that way. "With fiction as my guide," I offer the scenes in The Hurt Locker where the "war lover" comes home to a suburban America and just finds it too comfortable and soft. So he goes back to war.

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Hearing this made me realize that the way the military has evolved in the US, i.e., into Sparta,

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Hmm..yikes. Sparta. Great analogy.

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*has* raised the risk of loss of civilian control over the military, and that one of the key messages of trashy Hollywood thrillers from Rambo to Homeland to Taken - keep an eye on/look after your Special Forces guys when they become civilians - was surprisingly correct.
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Well, though he joins a cast of many entirely different shooters, a recent psycho shooter (of a California bar) had a Marine background and tours in Iraq, and maybe PTSD and...but...none of the other recent shooters did.

Perhaps aside from the mental illness that creates an active shooter is a certain "macho" that might indeed lead to trouble ahead in terms of the military "reporting to anybody." I'm betting for the time being now that the military -- like any of our political or judicial or business institutions -- has enough good guys to counteract the abuses of the bad guys. But who knows?

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

My favorite season of The Sopranos was Season 5 -- The Buscemi story, the sudden-death wrapping up of the Adrianna arc, and the feeling that the story had come to somewhat of an end(with Tony clearly alive.)

Mine too.

Note that The Sopranos began screening in Jan 1998, so the 20th Anniv. of what in hindsight is the start of the modern, TV-preeminent age is almost upon us. (I predict think-pieces galore ahead!) It doesn't feel that old to me, however, since I didn't start watching eps. until around the time the show ended in 2006-7, by which point it was dominating cultural conversation, especially online. Anyhow, The Sopranos' template for long-form TV, and the standard of excellence it set for the whole industry still apply today.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

My favorite season of The Sopranos was Season 5 -- The Buscemi story, the sudden-death wrapping up of the Adrianna arc, and the feeling that the story had come to somewhat of an end(with Tony clearly alive.)

Mine too.

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Great minds think alike. Ha.

Keep in mind that I think David Chase had gotten some bad fan mail over how, in Seasons Three and Four, it seemed like the series was spending too much time on the Tony/Carmela marriage and not enough on gang stuff.

So Season Five gave us "The Class of 2004" and the release of four gangsters, each of whom would figure, in different ways, in the gang war that would play out in the final seasons of the show. Buscemi was in that group(as Tony B), but so were Phil Leotardo and Feech and "That Rockford Guy" as Buscemi' prison mentor. It was a BIG mob-based season on the show, even as the Tony-Carmela plot line was about bringing a broken marriage back together(by force.)

But then came the big zig while everybody else zagged. We were so focused on the Class of 2004, the gang war, and the Tony-Carmela reconciliation that the sudden veer to "the Adrianna plot" came outta nowhere and hit hard. Very hard. Very touching. (It ended all thoughts of Tony being an "understanding guy," too.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Note that The Sopranos began screening in Jan 1998, so the 20th Anniv. of what in hindsight is the start of the modern, TV-preeminent age is almost upon us. (I predict think-pieces galore ahead!)

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Yep. There is a pretty good book called "Difficult Men" that takes up that era. it came out a few years ago and was able to include The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Deadwood as examples of the "bad guys win" formula (interesting that of the four shows, only Mad Men is NOT about crime and murder; Mad Men got its "bad behavior" out of rampant infidelity and business infighting and takeovers.) The book also made the case that the new breed of showrunners -- from David Chase to Matt Weiner to the creators of Breaking Bad and Deadwood -- were themselves "difficult men" who imposed their dark views of life upon their shows, their writing staffs, their actors. (Though I do believe we now have some "difficult women" female showrunners, yes?)

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It doesn't feel that old to me, however, since I didn't start watching eps. until around the time the show ended in 2006-7, by which point it was dominating cultural conversation, especially online.

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And this: as I recall, The Sopranos broadcast its final (and frustrating) episode in June of 2007. Less than one month later, in July 2007, "Mad Men" began. I read the promotional articles on Mad Men, saw that Matt Weiner had Sopranos writing credentials, realized that the series would start in that fifties/sixties cusp period I so love(proven with a 1960 episode in which Psycho and The Apartment were mentioned) and....boom...I had my new Sopranos within weeks of ending the original one.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Anyhow, The Sopranos' template for long-form TV, and the standard of excellence it set for the whole industry still apply today.

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I sure didn't see it coming. People forget that before The Sopranos, most of HBOs "TV series" were fairly subpar in production quality and writing , compared to broadcast. They felt like amateur "wannabee series"(there was one in the 80s about football, with OJ Simpson and another called "Dream On" whose claim to fame was HBO nudity.)

That said, HBO DID have an intelligent, nuanced hit with "The Larry Sanders Show," and evidently the network was looking hard for something to replace it as a "water cooler show." They got that -- and a lot more -- with The Sopranos.

SNL had a pretty funny "fake commercial" for The Sopranos with fake critics quotes that reflected how quickly that show took over the zeitgeist:

"The Sopranos...has replaced oxygen as the source of my life."

"I fear that if I turn my head away from one moment of The Sopranos and miss a great scene, my head will explode and dissolve into nothing."

Yep, the show was beloved real quick like in TV critic land, and by S 1, Episode 5("College") the show had its bedrock thematic statement in place: suburban dad Tony took time out from touring his daughter Meadow around Maine colleges to track down and strangle(that again) a mob rat he discovered in the area. Doting dad...sadistic killer...honorable mob man. The template was set for The Sopranos...and for other series to follow it.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I still find The Sopranos to beat all comers in not quite being able to match it in certain qualities. Others have suggested these qualities, but I'll offer them with my own take:

ONE: The authentic New Jersey locales. Chase fought off all attempts to film the show in LA, and refused to shoot New Jersey-set scenes in New York(he would set New York-set scenes there.) The result for those of us who live far away from New Jersey was to get a SENSE of a setting a lot of us are not familiar with. The opening credit sequence underlined this...as we travelled with Tony through "the rougher ends of town" and ever so slowly through various neighborhoods of various ages and classes until...we arrived at Tony's McMansion up on the hill. Subsequent episodes would explore every nook and cranny, it seemed, of New Jersey. And tour bus lines were set up to take fans to many of those spots.

TWO: The casting. Chase made much of the fact that traditional TV networks never would have allowed the casting of James Gandolfini(too overweight) and Edie Falco(too "plain") in the lead roles. Nor were the actors playing Chris Moltosanti(sexy but large in the schnozz) and Paulie Walnuts(those hair wings!) typical TV types. (They did find a number of sexy women for Tony to play with, but...that's Hollywood.)

THREE: The psychiatrist scenes. Key to everything, and yet rather frustrating over the years. Dr. Melfi never really seemed to "get" her sociopathic client til the very end. Many sessions ended with Tony yelling and quitting the session. A sexual tension was there that Melfi fought hard to defuse. But there was sweet irony, too: Tony was very, very self-aware(and witty, see below) right up until the point when Melfi would try to confront him about his Mafia work , or his infidelity, or his selfishness. Then..the explosion. But Tony was too self-aware, I figured, not to know that much of what he told Melfi was rationalizations and lies.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

FOUR: The humor. Having re-watched many an episode of The Sopranos over the years, I think that it is in its comedy writing that it has really overmatched series like The Americans(where the Soviet spy community is an analogy to the Mafia) Mad Men, and Breaking Bad(what I've seen of that one.)

Tony and his gang say very funny things, sometimes by accident(in the malapropisms of Tony and of "Little Carmine" the bonehead mob son), sometimes on purpose, like when Tony told his sister of her return to Jersey that ended with her killing her fiancé: "Overall, I'd say it was a good trip." The famous Pine Barrens episode had the famous line in which, having misheard Tony's phone warning that a Russian they were seeking, had been "with the Ministry of the Interior," this:

Paulie: Tony said he was an interior decorator.
Chris: Really? His apartment looked like s--t.

Also, in that same episode,how Bobby showed up in full hunter attire that somehow looked all wrong on an overweight Jersey mob lackey.

Some of the biggest laughs were in the episode where the mob gang tried to stage an intervention with drug using Christopher. Watching these killers try to struggle with "empathy" (hard) and "tough love"(easy) was very funny.

Yes, The Sopranos managed to effortlessly mix comedy in with the murders and the drama. I've not found a real match for that yet in its successors. (Well, Roger on Mad Men, but that's different. The show isn't a murder show.)

PS. Of course, Hitchcock was a master at mixing just the right tone of comedy into his thrillers. Psycho has some jokes and some deadpan camera angles on the action, and Norman vs Arbogast is almost a comedy scene. NXNW and To Catch A Thief are filled with one liners. Frenzy has "the Oxford dinners." Bruno Anthony elicits laughs sometimes, even though he's a killer. Etc.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

FOUR: The humor.

I think that you may be right that this is The Sopranos' ace. It's certainly the feature that makes the experience of watching it feel like the experiece of watching some of the best Hollywood films: people kind of forget that Pulp Fiction is howlingly funny, Casablanca is howlingly funny, Singin' in the Rain is howlingly funny, even Gone With The Wind is *very* funny for a lot of its running-time. As well as being great dramas or romances or musicals or... these films were all great comedies.... pleasure machines really. The Sopranos kind of filled you up in the same way whereas, e.g., it's near-peer time-wise and in critical stature, The Wire didn't and was a slog by comparison (I didn't finish it).

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I think that you may be right that this is The Sopranos' ace.

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Yes. Really sophisticated comedy dialogue writing is hard; The Sopranos writers could nail it AND (like Hitchcock) make sure that the murders were horrible and Tony was an SOB. The humor rather surrounds him, but doesn't rule him.

I'm afraid that a show like The Americans(which DOES try fairly hard to sneak in some jokes along the way) too often veers into what I call "soap opera drama" in which characters just tell each other the facts("Stan says he's noticing that Paige is acting strange" "Oh, really-- why does he say that?")

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It's certainly the feature that makes the experience of watching it feel like the experiece of watching some of the best Hollywood films: people kind of forget that Pulp Fiction is howlingly funny,

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Jackson: What am I doing on brain patrol?

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Casablanca is howlingly funny,

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Rains: Why did you come to Casablanca?
Bogart: I came for the waters.
Rains: But we're in a desert.
Bogart: I was misinformed.

And "Shocked to find gambling in this establishment" and "Round up the usual suspects" are gags that are so famous now as similies we forget that they were gags.

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Singin' in the Rain is howlingly funny,

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Donald O'Connor: JR, I once gave you a cigar. I want it back.

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even Gone With The Wind is *very* funny for a lot of its running-time.

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Laughing "With" or "at"?

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Yes, I suppose you could say that humor is a key element to a lot of the greatest films, because it allows us to relax and access characters who otherwise would be difficult to get close to.

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A favorite gag in The Godfather is when Moe Greene laments about Fredo: "He was bangin' cocktail waitresses two at a time; people couldn't get a drink!" We laugh because "poor sad Fredo" proves to be quite the ladies man; its a shocking idea. Of course, this also means he was weak. Michael refuses all paid women offered to him.

Also, I have read that James Caan used Don Rickles as part of his inspiration for the volatile Sonny -- the insults FLY.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

As well as being great dramas or romances or musicals or... these films were all great comedies.... pleasure machines really.

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These grim TV shows that I've been harping on here do often have some comic relief, or an "edge" that feels hip and funny.

But the best MOVIES(Casablanca, Psycho) put their humor in the service of more complex, human drama. Comedy AND drama, at the same time.

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The Sopranos kind of filled you up in the same way whereas, e.g., it's near-peer time-wise and in critical stature, The Wire didn't and was a slog by comparison (I didn't finish it).

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I tried The Wire, too, and could not make it. I cannot always be swayed by what the critics say is "the best." The story and characters -- and setting, maybe -- have to peak my interest. I find the New Jersey locales of The Sopranos fascinating. Urban Baltimore, less so.

As for Game of Thrones, its just not my genre. This is my fault.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

and by S 1, Episode 5("College") the show had its bedrock thematic statement in place

Yep, I guess that was the ep. (like Mad Men S01E06, Babylon) where The Sopranos became *The Sopranos*. An ep. that does't quit: Tony kills the rat in very Gromek-y fashion and then looks up to see the damn ducks flying over. It's funny and beautiful, unexpected yet clever and somehow inevitable since Ep. 1 as soon as you see it. 'I am so watching this' I remember chortling to myself at the time. (Remember I was a late-comer to the show; I was 6+ seasons behind and sorta looking for reasons to *not* keep watching, and then 'College' happened.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

and by S 1, Episode 5("College") the show had its bedrock thematic statement in place
Yep, I guess that was the ep.

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Early enough in The Sopranos run to hook some viewers(like you) early, who had been rather "meandering" as they learned all the characters.

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(like Mad Men S01E06, Babylon)

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Intriguing that these key episode are a bit near the middle of the season. Episode 5(Sopranos) and Episode 6(Mad Men.)

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where The Sopranos became *The Sopranos*.

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Well, the home family and the mob family finally set on collison course. I might add that much as I like the Jersey locales , I liked this look at Maine. Except it wasn't really Maine. I think it might have been Jersey!

I can pull in The Americans here, because recent episodes have shown the ice cold Elizabeth being willing to spare some people from death. She MIGHT not be the psychopath I think she is.

Or, it might be like on The Sopranos: Tony will not or cannot hurt certain people: innocent bystanders, the lawyer who wants to sell Tony his house, the doctor an his wife next door.

But if you are an aggravating mobster at "flunky level" -- Tony will kill you in a millisecond. The young guy who shot Christopher("Did you enjoy that drink? Good, cuz its' the last drink you're ever going to have.) All rats.

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An ep. that does't quit: Tony kills the rat in very Gromek-y fashion and then looks up to see the damn ducks flying over. It's funny and beautiful, unexpected yet clever and somehow inevitable since Ep. 1 as soon as you see it. 'I am so watching this' I remember chortling to myself at the time. (Remember I was a late-comer to the show; I was 6+ seasons behind and sorta looking for reasons to *not* keep watching, and then 'College' happened.)

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Ha, well, this is roughly how I came to The Americans. Which I am enjoying in spite of its too-strong suspense and bleakness.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

SPOILERS for The Americans

I return to check in on my binge watching of this series. "The end is in sight."

Last time I checked in from "mid-Season Four." I have completed Season Four and Season Five. I'm two episodes into the final season(Six) and with some of that excitement one feels when the last 100 pages of a novel come into view.

I can't go to the Americans page and read spoilers, so I can't comment "episode by episode" but in a sweeping way, I can offer a few comments:

Yes, Season Four was better than Season Five. Season Five seemed "trapped" into having to focus mainly on teenage daughter Paige, and that's always a problem for a show. We entered "The Americans" through stories about sex and murder among the adults of two (or more nations.) To get stuck in suburbia with a young actress who -- unfortunately for her - seems to have one main facial expression and was asked to play "angst" like, all the time -- well, it was tough.

And yet Paige IS the centerpiece for where The Americans will end. Her parents were told that the Russians want her to become a spy. And in some clever step by step script work-ups, damned if she hasn't become one. But a limited one.

Still, I liked this breakdown:

Mother Elizabeth wants to recruit her. Dad Philip does not.

One day, Paige DEMANDS to know what her parents really do. That's the opening Elizabeth has been waiting for. We work for the Soviet Union. For world peace. Philip can't help but join in the recruitment now. Paige is lured in, one issue at a time. (The parents get the "gift" of what looks to be American skullduggery to poison the Russian food supply -- they use THAT to get social activist Paige on board -- and later find out they were wrong!) The show makes the salient point that legitimate political activism WITHIN America(Paige's opposition to Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork in 1987) can be used as "leverage" for the Soviets to recruit activists(despite a decided totalitarianism within their own country, which scenes with Oleg and Martha "over there" drive home.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

SPOLIERS FOR THE AMERICANS

Via that old contrivance -- "the convenient mugger" -- Paige sees her mother expertly and gorily kill the man with a knife to the neck. Now Paige knows that Mother is an "action spy" -- but she killed a "bad man." What will happen, we wonder, if Paige should ever have to watch Mom kill an innocent?(Like the old lady at the mail robot office? Or the nice lab worker?) I'm precisely at a point where Paige has witnessed an "aggressive spy murder" by mom -- but not necessarily of an innocent(he's a repentant military traitor), and maybe Paige will be told the guy killed himself. Or (rightly) that Liz had to defend herself. I dunno. Next episode. (That Paige was confronted with her mother's face covered in red blood and brain matter has to impact this, no matter how Liz "sells it")

Getting to here from Season Four has been some good drama. Indeed, how poor Martha was handled was moving and dramatic - and her sudden reappearance in Russia in the corner of one wide angle shot made me gasp (then she got a close-up and a certain satisfaction rolled in.)

I like how Philip moved on to a "new Martha" in Topeka Kansas...but the woman dumped HIM. A total reversal of how Martha was so devastatingly hooked and ruined.

The show seems a little wobbly in its grip of just how psycho Elizabeth and Philip are. They seemed to shift back and forth from compassion(even on Elizabeth's part) to monstrousness. It would seem that the deal is: they kill when they feel they have to kill. They ruin lives as a matter of their daily work assignments(it has become oppressive to watch them move on from victim to victim, destroying souls when not killing them.)

Great work from Frank Langella as Gabriel, the kindly and compassionate Russian handler, who isn't THAT kindly and compassionate. Ditto from Margo Martindale, Langella's tougher replacement.

The Russian actor who plays Oleg is handsome and plays perhaps the most decent and heroic character on the show. I'm hoping for Oleg's survival.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

SPOILERS FOR THE AMERICANS

And I've developed a kind of fascination for the never seen Master Control Brains in Russia who are only called "The Centre." (I'm guessing that spelling.) It is a lesson in totalitarian government authority and the people who follow it.

Elizabeth and Philip are always being told "Wait for what the Centre decides" or "The Centre wants you to kill this person" or "The Centre wants you to recruit Paige" and -- in Elizabeth's case -- she ALWAYS follows the orders of the unseen Centre. Even Gabriel believes in them: "We must trust the judgment of the organization." I trust he meant...we must trust the judgment of the Centre.

Which made it funny to me when Dylan Baker's acerbic biochem expert told Philip: "You realize, the people who are in charge of us have no idea what they are doing." But we all want to believe in The Centre, don't we?

The analogy to the Sopranos seems stronger all the time. Will the children join the family business or not? (Well, one has -- but will it "take"?) And on both The Sopranos and The Americans, the children are one older daughter, one younger son(and we've watched the child actors grow up , just as on The Sopranos.)

I'm on the run to the end of this series. I definitely like it -- even though it has been a very painful watch. Amazing to me: fictional stories and characters can still grab me at this age, I still agonized to watch the fates of Nina and Martha(different though they were) and I'm still wanting to find out "what happens at the end."

I trust there won't be "Sopranos"-like disappointment at the end. I don't think so. Ever since David Chase's betrayal with the ending of The Sopranos, showrunners have promised not to do THAT again -- you see, that "non-ending ending" WAS considered a mistake in professional circles, no matter how some critics and fans liked it.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

PS. And how can I forget:

Mail Robot!

From the edges of such a grim and bleak story emerged a character than fans could cling to for comic relief. Mail Robot has a fan club and a Twitter feed and I suppose a time came when the showrunners knew of Mail Robot's fans and started writing Mail Robot into the episodes. At FBI HQ, He/she/it comes rolling by in Hitchcockian cameos and its funny every time.

Truly, I think Mail Robot has emerged as something funny to cling to in the horrific world of The Americans.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

[deleted]

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Last time I checked in from "mid-Season Four." I have completed Season Four and Season Five. I'm two episodes into the final season(Six) and with some of that excitement one feels when the last 100 pages of a novel come into view.

Nice going.... it's amazing to read, as it were, all one's dutiful years of viewing telescoped into a few months at most! Anyhow, it's all gold for the rest of Season 6 without any of Season 5's wobbles (e.g., Philip's Russian son; writing malfunction?).

After some of our discussion here, I've been rewatching Sopranos season 1. I now see all sorts of templates that Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Americans flat out stole because.... they work. It doesn't mean that Sopranos did everything best, but I guess it does seem right to say that it did almost everything first and very well. After The Sopranos, everyone else knows where they're going when they set out to make a multi-generational family+business TV-novel (w lots of psych depth/dream sequences etc.) worked out over 70 or so hours. As long as people find new ways to put gas in the tank of that format, The Sopranos is going to continue to be a benchmark.

Also, Livia and Paulie are funnier than I remembered, and what I'd remembered as peaks like "College" were't quite as high as I remembered, and, e.g., eps 1-4 were all knock-outs, better than I recalled.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

After completing a rewatch of Sopranos Season 1, I think we can say that a big part of the show's success is all there at the beginning. I'm really not sure that the Sopranos was ever as completely satisfying again as it was in S1. S1 has multiple full arcs with only the Pussy story-line left self-consciously open. The final two eps pay off almost everything we could want at this point, all the while taking a bunch of stylistic chances that point the way to the show's future digressiveness.

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I can't remember if David Chase said it about The Sopranos or Matt Weiner said it about Mad Men, but it FITS both: "I went into it not knowing if there would BE a second season, so I put everything plot-wise I could into the first."

Such a strategy does give you a bang-up launch -- but also puts you on the defensive to keep on delivering after you threw in everything you had.

It remains an issue to me that "long term series" are often subject to the whims of the studios that produce them. Showrunners are pushed and prodded to "keep on delivering the show" -- even if the three-act classic structure is massively "stretched" to do that.

With The Sopranos, I've read that a late-breaking storyline about a gay Mafia man(and how his macho conservative mob colleagues despised him simply because of that -- he was otherwise loyal and a great earner) was practically spitballed " on the spot" -- with no real preparation in the seasons before it appeared. (This also moved up an actor who had been fairly low down the cast list to "major character," and I guess that was alright, but we hadn't been prepared for him to become such.)

Its been countered that Dickens' novels were often serialized before publication, but it seems to me that he knew his story start to finish BEFORE it was serialized. That Sopranos trajectory was a bit shoehorned in to the main plot.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Funnier(and I think I've referenced this before): on an old nighttime soap, "Falcon Crest," some old Nazis and their young followers were introduced as a new plot one season. Fan mail hated them(as the internet would today), so in one episode...all the Nazis went into a cave and got blown up. End of storyline.

Anyway, the idea that long run series are kind of "grown year by year" depending on the whims of the studio bosses seems wrong to me. At least everybody seems to agree that six seasons is it -- though The Sopranos split that season into two.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

The (Sopranos) Pilot was similarly great; simultaneously self-contained but also very expansive. You want to make a show with 6 or 7 seasons staying power then you have to give it everything right from the beginning to build the good will for that long haul. The Pilot, the opening 5 ep stretch, ad then the season are as a whole are all complete hooks for a audience. This is a distribution of early energy that Mad Men and The Americans have followed almost exactly and to similar great success.

---

Pilots are fascinating things when you look at them after the series has taken shape. You can see the premise, you see the characters in "embryo form," its a bit too broad in the storytelling...but if the hooks are there, they are there.

Tony Soprano ...a different kind of mobster. Overweight (but only slightly in the pilot), a suburban family man. Goes to a psychiatrist. A pretty female psychiatrist. Has trouble with his aged mother. And some mob warfare dynamics up front(suggested in Season One by sly as a fox old guy, Uncle Junior.)

Funny how Season One really served up Mother as the main issue -- shades(just a lil' bit) of Psycho, though Livia was more realistic, reminiscent of the banal evil of mean young women grown old.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

SPOILERS FOR THE AMERICANS -- FINAL EPISODES

(In case anyone's interested in seeing the show -- it is very good, indeed.)

Well, I made it. I will say that part of the journey involved avoiding any and all internet articles about the 2018 Emmys(I feared reading "Matthew Rhys wins Emmy for great death scene" or something), or about Keri Russell and Rhys as a real item in real life(but not married, as I've now learned.)

And what I did to watch the finale was to watch the final season up to having three episodes to spare -- a bit under three hours -- and then watching those final three in one final "gulp."

Which was surprising to me. With three episodes left, it felt like the show was ready to "end things fast." And yet -- three hours is a LONG movie(like Godfather I long)...so those three hours required plenty of watching. Funny though, how weird these continuing series are today -- one commits to an "80 hour movie" without protest, but the final three felt...a bit long.

But in a good way. I'm reminded that for all his talents as a cinematic stylist, Hitchcock was, indeed, The Master of Suspense, and as a creator of narrative with his writers, he really knew how to tighten the screws. So do the writers of The Americans.

The final three hours were almost what I call "too suspenseful" -- not fun, painful. The suspense got downright excruciating at times -- particularly watching hapless but determined FBI man Stan Beeman keep edging closer and closer to finding out the truth about his neighbors, but never quite close enough. (Arrrrgh)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

SPOILERS FOR THE AMERICANS

There were also, I think some nifty "false alarms" about imminent death. Uh oh, Elizabeth's going to HAVE to kill Philip now. Uh oh, Stan knows too much, he's got all the key information...he CAN'T get killed now. Indeed, when Stan told his fellow FBI agent of his suspicions about the Jennings, I figured "OK, now he can die -- he has shared his information ala Arbogast in the phone booth, and can be avenged." I assume now that that scene was a trick, played on all of us(gullible me in particular.) As Hitchcock said to Truffaut, "you know how the audience likes to feel it has guessed ahead -- and then you trick them."

And there was a lot of suspense generated once we know that "valuable information had to be sent to Soviet leaders" and all the people who were supposed to get it to them...got captured before they could.

Hitchcock's great and simple recipe for suspense was this: "Give the audience information the characters don't have."

The BIG one in that regard on The Americans came in the pilot: FBI agent Stan Beeman doesn't know his neighbors are Soviet spies. In some ways, the entire series was built around our desire to see what would happen when he found out. (Like wondering what would happen in Vertigo when Scottie found out that Judy was Madeleine. So there.) Would Stan get killed? Would he have to kill Philip or Elizabeth(or...Paige?) The whole series built up to that and...boy did we get it. (But not the way we expected...Hitchcock's remark to Truffaut held tight.)

Interesting(to me): The ten-episode Season 6(versus the 13-episode seasons before it)....seemed to focus on Elizabeth going totally out of control as a killing machine. Critics(i read weekly re-caps) noted that in the first three episodes, Elizabeth brutally killed three people, two of them "innocents." By episode four, she killed several more people. All while sucking away on cigarettes and looking ever darker around the eyes. All while in possession of a cyanide pill kept in a necklace.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

The murders have always been brutal on The Americans, but the mass accumulation of them in Season Six...all, I think, committed by Elizabeth, edged The Americans into "horror movie" territory for me. Elizabeth stabbed victims in the throat, slashed one across the throat and -- in the Americans tradition -- had to improvise the strangling of one innocent when her ruse was exposed.
(I watched these episodes with a companion who simply started to turn her head at this stuff, while I'd mumble, "well, here we go again.")

I linger on Elizabeth's mass murder spree in Season Six to suggest the one element that I found both surprising and , yes, disappointing when the series came to an end:

Elizabeth didn't die. Either at the hands of the law, or Phillip, or Page...or Stan...or the FBI or...herself(that handy cyanide pill.)

I expect that was the most "artful" of decisions of the showrunners. Indeed, EVERYBODY of consequence was still alive at the end of the series. But Elizabeth getting to live was pretty damn heartbreaking.

Crime does not pay? On THIS series, it does(as it did on many other "anti-hero" series in the wake of The Sopranos.)

But wait -- I will be told that Elizabeth(and Philip) suffered the ultimate loss -- a fate worse than death: the loss forever of access to their two children, left behind or staying behind in America.

Well, I can figure that any parent would find that aspect of The Americans' ending to be a tragic one -- except that, Elizabeth was willing to give Paige over to "the state," and Henry was so neglected over the course of the show that it made eminent sense to turn him over to Stan at the end.

In short, these parents(well, the lovely Elizabeth) didn't seem to have true parental love for these two children. The children were, in some ways, "props."
So how hard was losing them?

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I buy this ending as being "painful for the Jennings," but they killed far too many people and ruined far too many lives to feel too good about them surviving. The kids will be better off without them. Especially without Elizabeth, who indeed "turned better" at the end, but had a lot of blood on her hands.

Best bits in the final three hours (to me):

ONE: Paige, realizing that her mother slept with a "boy" intern her age to get information, flat out calls her mother a whore. And says her mother has always been a whore. Mother eventually flat out says the sex was nothing, sex is nothing, "nobody cared, not even your father."

(That we saw Elizabeth spare that boy intern the death she doled out to others was perhaps a nice turn but...too little, too late. And this: many of Elizabeth's murders in Season 6 were because she planned poorly ahead, and she kept NOT getting the sensors she wanted to steal, even with all these deaths. I guess not having Philip along to help...mattered.)

TWO: The Big Scene: Stan confronts the entire family(less Henry) in the parking garage. I've read up on this -- its an 11-minute scene, written and re-written by the showrunners until they got what they wanted. Which was: about 80% good, but ultimately just too long, so long to get one asking too many questions (Stan went in there without back-up? He can't shoot ALL of them before they get to him. ) One kept wondering if Stan's possibly Red wife would arrive to shoot him, or if the FBI would arrive to shoot the Jennings, but no -- the biggest series gamble of them all. Stan lets them go -- because Philip WAS his friend. The bringing in of EST as "part of the solution" seemed equal parts joke and sincere to me, btw.

The FBI finally went after the Jennings but -- not because Stan told them. A dark final note to the story.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

SPOILERS FOR THE AMERICANS

THREE: To the lyrics and strains of "With or Without You" -- the biggest emotional jolt of them all: the sight of Paige off the train as it pulls away with her parents. Yes, it got to me -- as did the family's final call to Henry(who, like any young college or boarding school guy, really just wanted to get off the phone.)

I suppose that was the ultimate surprise of The Americans. A tale that was running on the fuel of suspense and outright horror ended largely in tears and emotion. Psycho became ET. Yes, it got me(dabbing away)...until it was all over and I thought: "Hey, yeah that was sad but...Elizabeth was a cold blooded psycho killer."

The show ends with the Americans back in Russia, and speaking Russian, and we can wonder about their future: indeed, the Soviet Union is going to change -- but they are now on the side of the "changers." (Yet perhaps the Centre's remnants will hunt them down.) Can Philip adjust to the country he no longer craves? Can Elizabeth adjust to the new country? And how about Martha...I can't believe that Philip won't look her up now. Or visit his brother and meet his son(no reason not to learn of him, now.)

Oleg was a sad "loose end," but hope springs eternal that Gorbachev and Stan(who, in not dying, is there for Henry AND Oleg).. can intervene and he can get sprung to his family. (He was, after all, working for peace.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

SPOILERS FOR THE AMERICANS

I recall reading "fan comments" hoping for a Sopranos ending where Chris saved Adrianna from Tony and they escaped to freedom. Nope. I kept reading fan comments for "The Americans" which postulated Philip versus Elizabeth in a fight to the death; or Stan's new wife trying to kill Stan; or Paige killing her mother, or the FBI descending on the Jennings home in a rain of bullets but...no.

More "fan service" was delivered than in that awful Sopranos finale but...in the end, The Americans was more art than commerce(that dying female artist and her art should have been a clue about that.)

NOBODY major died at the end. The confrontations were all verbal(including Elizabeth vs Claudia.) The final hour knotted one's stomach without ever "exploding." The Americans returned to Russia. (A rather sad and nostalgic Russia at night, btw -- with a sense of wintry homecoming, and nobody around.)

And perhaps the Jennings can re-unite with their children some day. (But honestly...and even including her childhood of death and deprivation, who would WANT to reunite with the murderous liar Elizabeth?)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

SPOILER FOR THE AMERICANS:

To the very, very good with The Americans: it gives me much to ponder -- as an American, I know there are some from many countries here -- about its story and its themes -- the whole US vs Russia thing is kinda fascinating, isn't it? They were our sworn enemy, then kind of our pal, then shoved aside as enemies for the Muslim terrorists; but now back as enemies(but rather as enemies for domestic politics)...what of them? Who IS Russia today?

And what of the life's work of Philip and Elizabeth?

Good show. Great getting there(tragic Nina will remain the soul of the show for me, and easy on the eyes, what the heck), and satisfying ENOUGH at the end(though this viewer wishes Elizabeth had died. As violently as she lived.)

I began this thread as an "Ozarks"/"The Americans" thread, because I was watching both at the time, and they seem very similar in premise(emotional husband, tough wife, both partners in crime.) "Ozark" won't be back for another season for a long time. I guess I'll have to pick something else to watch. Preferably via binge. House of Cards, maybe?

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

PS. Some casting trivia on The Americans.

It has one cast member from Ozark:

The frizzy-haired gal Philip worked for info on her CIA daddy is the frizzy-haired young Ozark girl helping the criminal enterprise on Ozark. Julia something.

It has one cast member from The Sopranos:

Tony's one-legged Russian amour resurfaced as a lower-down in a criminal "food mafia"operation.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

[deleted]

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

That we saw Elizabeth spare that boy intern the death she doled out to others was perhaps a nice turn but...too little, too late.

The savage point, however, is that that one moment when Eliz. is too tired, strung out to kill again appears to cost her her daughter Paige.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

The savage point, however, is that that one moment when Eliz. is too tired, strung out to kill again

--

...but also, it seemed to me, edging towards somewhat more of a conscience. She's judging the extent to which she can let this "kid" go whom she's already seduced and who can't (she thinks) report her to anybody as some of her other victims could have.

The number of truly savage murders Elizabeth commits back to back in Season 6 seem to eventually take their toll.(And I couldn't help but flash back to Arbogast's unseen "beneath the frame" stabbing death and consider how far we've come: knives into jugular veins, lingering stranglings, The Americans goes there time and again.)

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appears to cost her her daughter Paige

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Yes. Elizabeth didn't count on THIS saved victim exposing her THAT way.

The two things that Paige was spared knowing by her ever-lying mother was whether the mother had sex to obtain information ...and whether the mother ever killed innocents. At series' end, she knows the first is true, and Stan says enough in the garage to communicate the second.

PS. And what this outcome of not killing a victim shows is: yes, Elizabeth really DOES have to kill all these people, given her risk of exposure. A savage reality.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Jumping remarks back to a thicker column!

The frizzy-haired gal

Julia Garner. I first encountered her as a bit-player in a memorable bathroom scene on HBO's Girls & in a small role in the excellent cult-drama Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011). I thought she was great as Kimmy on The Americans, and that they gave her a great, horrifying/sobering end-game with an appalled Phillip.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

And perhaps the Jennings can re-unite with their children some day. (But honestly...and even including her childhood of death and deprivation, who would WANT to reunite with the murderous liar Elizabeth?)

Elizabeth is a monster no doubt... and the monster didn't come from nothing. There's something relentless about her that would have made her a big success in any life... and her final line 'We'll figure it out' (in Russian) sort of tells us that she's going to rise quickly in post-Soviet Russia too, probably make a ton of money, probably living the high life in London by 2000, etc..

Of course, whether Phillip and the kids will continue to shape her life is hard to say. The finale brought us right back to Season 1 and her lover Gregory (whom she tried to persuade to escape to Moscow rather than choose death by cop - imagine if she'd succeeded at that; he'd now be there for her in 1987!). On the plane she dreams of Gregory and a version of the conversation Gregory told Phil about all that time ago, that she didn't want her baby (Paige), that living the lie of the kid was too much for her... but of course she *had* to go back to the lie, keep building her American family cover, etc.. Liz in the dream then sees young Gregory gone, a big self-portrait painting from the dying artist looming over the now unshared bed, and a photo of Henry and Paige at the side of the bed. Then she wakes up. Nothing's resolved, but it's not clear that Liz's American family is at her core, and that shark-like she won't now just move on.

Elizabeth Jennings *is* the disturbing/fascinating/revolting/seductive Tony Soprano/Don Draper/Walter White anti-hero of the show. Many a think-piece had previously argued that this sort of glorious monster role was essentially male or was only open to men, but The Americans has conclusively shown that that's not so. That's an achievement.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Elizabeth is a monster no doubt... and the monster didn't come from nothing.

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Indeed. One of the reasons that the recruitment of Paige looked like it was never really going to "take" is that Elizabeth (and Claudia) were trying to launch the girl into spying from a rather pampered American life, with none of the formative events of Elizabeth's poverty and exposure to death from an early age.

We saw that Paige was willing to do some spy work, but she wasn't confronted with the ugliness of her mother's job, or asked to do it. Key: Paige was being trained to really become...another Martha. Embedded in the State Department and simply spying..not killing.

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There's something relentless about her that would have made her a big success in any life... and her final line 'We'll figure it out' (in Russian) sort of tells us that she's going to rise quickly in post-Soviet Russia too, probably make a ton of money, probably living the high life in London by 2000, etc..

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Yep. The "fan fiction writer" in me suggests that Philip might be better suited to re-up in Russia with Martha, even if Elizabeth has better looks. Philip could marry Martha and raise both her orphan daughter and the son he never saw(another loose end planted.)

Thus leaving Elizabeth to follow her savage plans wherever they take her. The "new" Russia, London -- though, it seemed at the heart of Elizabeth's True Believer-ship was a real hatred of capitalism in the face of worldwide poverty. She might remain a "savage do-gooder."

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Of course, whether Phillip and the kids will continue to shape her life is hard to say. The finale brought us right back to Season 1 and her lover Gregory (whom she tried to persuade to escape to Moscow rather than choose death by cop - imagine if she'd succeeded at that; he'd now be there for her in 1987!).

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Interestingly, a NUMBER of people are "there in Russia" for re-connection, even if Gregory didn't make it: Martha, Philip's other son...Gabriel. And if he is released...Oleg will be there too. The Jennings can make new friends and reconnect with old ones.

Sadly, Nina WAS there...but didn't survive.

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On the plane she dreams of Gregory and a version of the conversation Gregory told Phil about all that time ago, that she didn't want her baby (Paige), that living the lie of the kid was too much for her... but of course she *had* to go back to the lie, keep building her American family cover, etc.. Liz in the dream then sees young Gregory gone, a big self-portrait painting from the dying artist looming over the now unshared bed, and a photo of Henry and Paige at the side of the bed. Then she wakes up. Nothing's resolved, but it's not clear that Liz's American family is at her core, and that shark-like she won't now just move on.

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That dream scene was pretty good. The juxtaposition of Gregory and the painting felt profound and...in taking up the issue of whether or not Elizabeth ever really wanted Paige(or Henry) or just took them on as part of the assignment...well, its why the finale plays a bit false to me. I never really felt that Elizabeth was going to connect to her children...UNLESS they joined the cause(and only Paige was being asked to.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

A sensitive matter taken up by The Americans, via the character of Gregory and some of the Soviet spies in America: the role of African-Americans as part of the Communist cause. I am thinking, back in the fifties, of singer-actor Paul Robeson, who was prominent as an artist and, eventually, as a Communist. I think the Party saw the oppressed American "negro" as an ally in the war against capitalist oppression on all levels.

The FBI went after civil rights organizations looking for Communists, and it seemed a witchhunt that got in the way of real progress. But that doesn't mean Communists weren't THERE. Same with Hollywood. Just not in the numbers to make much of a difference, or to constitute much of a threat.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

SPOILERS FOR BREAKING BAD

Elizabeth Jennings *is* the disturbing/fascinating/revolting/seductive Tony Soprano/Don Draper/Walter White anti-hero of the show. Many a think-piece had previously argued that this sort of glorious monster role was essentially male or was only open to men, but The Americans has conclusively shown that that's not so. That's an achievement.

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That is an achievement. And I think this "female angle" will development on "Ozark" as well. (I do not intend this as a spoiler, the Linney character is a toughie from the start.)

That said....I can say that one of the reasons the ending of The Sopranos bothered me is that I waited the whole series for Tony to finally "lose"(whether in prison or death) and...it didn't happen. And it didn't happen to Elizabeth either. Whether the monster is male or (now) female...its tough not to see justice done.

In certain ways, I guess I'm just too "moral"(not self-righteous moral) to really enjoy these shows where "the monster gets away with it."

Now with one of those shows -- ironically one that I didn't watch much, though I did watch the final episode! -- Breaking Bad, the monster DID die at the end. But as somewhat of a hero. I found that satisfying but I can't say I jumped up and down with joy. It just felt RIGHT.

Tony is in limbo (literally) and Elizabeth is in limbo(figuratively) but....I really not only wanted to see Elizabeth captured or killed at the end of The Americans, I felt she was almost requiring it herself. All those final savage murders of innocents, all because of a general clumsiness at her job near the end. And all that chain smoking. Its like she was INVITING death, wanted it(hence the symbolism of the cyanide pill.) They say that a lot of serial killers screw up at the end, inviting capture because they simply "lose control."

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Kudos to Keri Russell, of course. I suppose you could say that she has followed the contours of the Anthony Perkins career. All those sweet-faced teenage characters(Felicity?), the Mickey Mouse Club, and romantic roles and ...she found the darkness and toughness of Elizabeth and gave us the essence of a human being who has learned to shut a lot of feelings off.

The main sense one gets from Russell's Elizabeth is that her entire family is failing her...neither Philip, nor Paige really have "the right stuff" to be the merciless killer that Elizabeth is, nor, the lack of emotion about sex as a weapon(Philip developed feelings for Martha; Paige can't conceive of doing that...yet.) And her "deal" with Philip near the end seems to be that Henry is off limits from the family business...and is Philip's responsibility (in the final phone call to Henry, Elizabeth is sad, but pretty much all business.

I cruise the net now and find Keri Russell doing funny interviews on all the talk shows(sometimes with Rhys, sometimes without, and usually with a sexy emphasis on her strong dancer's legs via very short skirts --- RUSSELL uses her sexuality , too) and, while Elizabeth is pretty much gone from this woman "off-screen," there is just enough "residual toughness" to Russell to suggest that Elizabeth is part of her now. May have ALWAYS been part of her, somewhere deep inside. Like Tony Perkins and Norman.

Its a classic performance by Russell. And so far, only Rhys has won something(an Emmy.) I guess because he lost his accent? And gets the big speeches at the end?

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

All those sweet-faced teenage characters(Felicity?), the Mickey Mouse Club, and romantic roles and ...she found the darkness and toughness of Elizabeth

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

One of the curious real-world corollaries to The Americans undercover agents is the corp of precociously battle-hardened, young show-biz super-pros that Disney partially lucked into and partially created in the early '90s with the New Mousketeers: Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, JC Chasez, Ryan Gosling, Keri Russell. Of those only Spears (who broke biggest) had a real meltdown and even she has been able to pick herself up and make out like a bandit via Vegas. Collectively they're a picture of relentless, Elizabeth-Jennings-like success.

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Yes, that's like a Murderer's Row of child stars made good as adults. They have drive; their parents have drive.

I'm getting that feeling right now from Holly Taylor, the young girl who played the daughter on The Americans. She's on the track -- I guess she's over 20 and hence starting to "sex up her looks" as J-Law(another TV teen sitcom actress Gone Big) did for her career.

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It's not much of a stretch to imagine a what-if thriller/sci-fi premise where all the mouseketeer recruits are in fact aliens or deep cover agents working to inspire dissidence or subvert moral fibre of youth or create political apathy or pick your conspiratorial end.

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LOL! Actually, I see that as a great premise. These real-life kid stars SEEM alien. Leo started that way, too. Brad?

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Its a classic performance by Russell. And so far, only Rhys has won something(an Emmy.) I guess because he lost his accent? And gets the big speeches at the end?

Deep down I suspect that Russell hasn't quite got the acclaim that even Rhys has because the lingering sexism in almost all of us finds a monstrous (or even just totally committed to a cause) woman character just that more disturbing and unnerving than her male counterparts.

I've alluded to a truly crucial scene in the show from the end of S4 before but couldn't discuss it without spoiling: William's (Dylan Baker's) end
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3yXP6uB7Xo
En route to 'She's pretty. He's Lucky.' (The tag line for the John Hughes version of the show) William ruefully and incredulously recounts what his handlers wanted him to do which he couldn't do.... be married and have kids while betraying them with his leading a double life. That's the central monstrous thing Liz *has* been able to do that we can't ever quite forgive her for, and somehow this inner wince we all have about Elizabeth's core mission transfers just a little to how we feel about Russell's performance. We can't ever, even guiltily, revel in her performance the way we can with Gandolfini's and Hamm's that's for sure.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

TWO: The Big Scene: Stan confronts the entire family(less Henry) in the parking garage....Which was: about 80% good, but ultimately just too long, so long to get one asking too many questions (Stan went in there without back-up? He can't shoot ALL of them before they get to him. ) One kept wondering if Stan's possibly Red wife would arrive to shoot him, or if the FBI would arrive to shoot the Jennings, but no -- the biggest series gamble of them all. Stan lets them go -- because Philip WAS his friend.

It's complicated. Stan ultimately has also to believe that not letting them go would empower anti-Gorbachev forces in Russia which would halt progress towards the end of the Cold War and so be against US interests. But, it's true, a basically by-the-book type like Stan would just *not* allow Phillip to keep talking.... you'd never be able to trust yourself to tell lies from truth (or part truth from whole - Phillip conveniently never mentions/confesses that he killed Stan's partner Amador back in S1!) and to make complex calculations in such a situation, so you'd 'cuff 'em first and only listen to stories and make a decisions about release later. I still thought it was a great scene and I liked the codas with Stan's fiancee and Stan's driving up to break the news to Henry (in a 'Jennings'-emblazoned hockey shirt) a lot too.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

It's complicated.

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Oh, yes it is!

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Stan ultimately has also to believe that not letting them go would empower anti-Gorbachev forces in Russia which would halt progress towards the end of the Cold War and so be against US interests.

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That's in there -- maybe the main point - -but I felt that Stan now has the information(from Elizabeth, with details about the falsified report, which reminds me of the "lie" about the US poisoning wheat) and Oleg had the information (in broad contours) and...Gorbachev can be warned anyway.

But I suppose if Elizabeth and Philip go all the way back -- "Back in the USSR" as some critic noted about the finale -- they can take active action against the Centre and other factions. (Note that Elizabeth turns against Claudia and the Centre when she realizes they are "renegade to the Party" -- no matter WHO leads the party.)

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But, it's true, a basically by-the-book type like Stan would just *not* allow Phillip to keep talking.... you'd never be able to trust yourself to tell lies from truth (or part truth from whole - Phillip conveniently never mentions/confesses that he killed Stan's partner Amador back in S1!)

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And Stan killed the "innocent" young KGB staffer Vlad in revenge -- THAT's how angry Stan should be right now.

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and to make complex calculations in such a situation, so you'd 'cuff 'em first and only listen to stories and make a decisions about release later.

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I've probably seen too many thrillers, but I've often felt that heroes in movies oftimes give villains too much of a chance to talk, to hang around, without cuffs or "laying on the ground"(which the Jennings refuse to do; Stan maybe could have shot Philip in the leg or something at that point.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

There is also the slight silliness (though Stan made similar mistakes earlier in the series), of Stan following the Jennings into the garage without calling his FBI colleagues(I mean, a whole ROOM of them are combing DC) to alert them, and to request back-up. I suppose the skepticism of his FBI friend that the Jennings could possibly be the spies gave Stan pause. That skepticism, btw, was classic Hitchcock -- "They Won't Believe Me!" -- and cut to the chase about the coincidental center of the show: that Stan just happened to live next door to these spies. That said, Stan's storylines were often very separate from the Jennings' storylines -- they weren't involved with Nina, for instance.

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I still thought it was a great scene

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It "delivered the goods." The whole series moved towards it -- required it -- and we got it. It also certainly made sense that Philip could/should communicate his disgust with his life and his job to Stan, a man who had endured his own suffering on HIS side(loss of wife, son, and ....Nina.) The idea that Stan was Philip's only friend calls back to Elizabeth -- whose "friend" Claudia is no friend at all , and who DID bond with that Korean Mary Kay woman as a friend...but had to get rid of her. Philip was saying that the friendship and bonding wasn't fake, and mattered.

But WE saw all the killings that betrayed that friendship every day.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

and I liked the codas with Stan's fiancée

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The series toyed with it: "Is she KGB?" and Philip finally suggested as much to Stan...creating ambiguity that was underlined by the finacee's final, knowing look at the Jennings house under FBI rummaging.

That woman always reminded me of Janet Leigh in The Manchurian Candidate.

If you are familiar with that film, you will recall that Leigh pretty much propositions Sinatra on a train, and within a few days has broken her engagement to another man and become Sinatra's lover(and soon to be fiancée.)

Some thought that Leigh was just playing "the girl friend," but some thought -- given how Leigh came on to Sinatra on the train - that she was HIS "Communist handler" and might yet be after the fade out.

I wonder if she influenced this Americans character.

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(and Stan's driving up to break the news to Henry (in a 'Jennings'-emblazoned hockey shirt) a lot too

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I, for one, felt that Stan was being planted as Harry's potential "next father" early on. Stan didn't have the connection with his own son, who was rather damaged goods and compared to whom, Henry was the All-American jock brain. The issues to me , were: Stan becoming Henry's father can happen if Philip and/or Elizabeth die or get caught; can't happen if Stan gets killed.

And it worked out..satisfying but, of course, sad for Henry. Except...maybe not. He had already gravitated to Stan...and away from his family, up in New Hampshire.

And his sister will likely be there for him if she can work a deal with the Feds. She only told Stan "I know" about her parents' dealings...not about her spy work.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Jumping remarks back to a thicker column!

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Thank you! I'm all thumbs tech-wise.

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The frizzy-haired gal
Julia Garner. I first encountered her as a bit-player in a memorable bathroom scene on HBO's Girls & in a small role in the excellent cult-drama Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011).

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You are up to speed as I am not on careers.

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I thought she was great as Kimmy on The Americans, and that they gave her a great, horrifying/sobering end-game with an appalled Phillip.

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Yes. She's a very key character on Ozark(probably third lead after Bateman and Linney)..young, deeply conflicted about her growing life of crime, trying to raise her brother up after the death or disappearance of her parents...and with a thick Southern accent so believable that I was stunned to hear her without it on The Americans.

Speaking of accents, in my newfound freedom to surf the net for all things Americans, I viewed Rhys' Emmy speech -- in full Welsh accent. Always amazing to me. I expect the need to control that accent accounts for the weirdly high-pitched and whiney tone that Rhys had to affect as Philip...which helped the character: The Wimp Who Kills.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I return to opine a bit more on The Americans, having now read some of the glowing finale reviews and -- more importantly perhaps -- a fair number of fan comments very much in favor of the ending, too. (Though whether some of them are FX plants, or some are trolls out to trigger angry responses, I'll never know.)

For in my case, I return to The Americans beat with some rancor....and a certain amount of distaste(grown now) for the finale and how it was handled.

Moreover, with this as an OT thread, I still see The Americans in context of some Hitchcock pictures: Torn Curtain and Topaz(both of which were referenced in some fan's praise for The Americans as being "as great at Torn Curtain and Topaz;" hey, now, Hitchcock revisionism!)
Frenzy, and, yes, Psycho. (Plus The Sopranos and Breaking Bad outside of it.)

So here goes:

ONE: I was upset that Psycho II and Psycho III posited a released Norman Bates as "a sweet, nice guy" who should just be "left alone." Yes, some characters went after him in the sequels(principally Lila), but others(principally, the new Sheriff) really wanted to protect him as an OK fellow. This, after what we SAW him do to Marion and Arbogast, and after we LEARNED what he did to his mother...let alone some other victims.
I still resolutely believe that Norman, in real life, having done those things, would NOT have been released. But still: "Sweet Norman" had his fans.

TWO: I was upset that, having shown in great lingering detail psychopath Bob Rusk menace, rape, and strangle victim Brenda Blaney (and then being shown in brief flashback doing the same to Babs Milligan)....Rusk was quietly and rather comically arrested at the end("Mr. Rusk, you're not wearing your tie.") I've noted that my PRIVATE ending for Frenzy, after THE END appears, is that Blaney managed to smash Rusk in the face and privates with that tire iron but...the movie doesn't really end that way.

I might add that, on "sedate" TV murder shows like Perry Mason, Columbo, and Murder She Wrote, the killings were so barely shown and barely seen(and often of unlikeable victims who had it coming) that one could watch the killers get quietly arrested and it was...no big deal.

But to see Norman so savagely stab Marion Crane(for doing nothing other than BEING Marion Crane) and then to savagely attack and finish off Arbogast(albeit for wrong-place-wrong time snooping that led to a few Americans kills) well...and Rusk...WELL. Just arrested? RELEASED? "Loved"?

Meanwhile...

THREE: The "non-ending ending" of the Sopranos will be eternally debated(though I say: great movies have ENDINGS)...anyway you cut it, we never saw Tony Soprano pay for all his murders(of best friends, favorite cousins, nice young women...). We didn't see him die or go to prison. Some of us invested a LOT of time waiting to see Tony get his and at the end of the series...he didn't. Conclusively.

...and all of these edges into the finale of The Americans, I think. Along with the peculiar pride of the Sopranos showrunner that he never told us what happened to the rapist of Dr. Melfi or the Russian who disappeared.

Having read some interviews with the showrunners of The Americans now, I can see that the felt guided by "the invisible hand of David Chase"(the Sopranos showrunner), in leaving a lot of things open-ended. Is Stan's wife really KGB?(Easily found out, I suppose, but still...) And what will the four Jennings family members do(I'm ok with that being open ended as reality...but its not the ending I desired.)

I think my anger centers very closely on the fact that in the final season of The Americans, we saw the cold-blooded "patriot" Elizabeth Jennings, episode after episode, "up close and personal" and as lingering as the killings in Torn Curtain and Frenzy(but WORSE) sequentially:

Stab a young Navy cop in the throat.
Strangle an innocent young man who worked at the "sensor making" factory.
Stab ANOTHER young man(Russian) in the throat(and up through the roof of his mouth and into his brain) and then stab and slash the throat of the man's wife...near their child(who Elizabeth CONSIDERED killing)
...and kill various guards at the sensor factory. And get entangled in a fight with a renegade general who may have killed himself but...left Elizabeth bloody
...and "mercy killed" a cancer patient but as brutally as possible.

...and yet...at series end: not captured. not killed. And believed(by Stan) lying through her teeth to him AND to her daughter("We never killed anyone.")

Reading the reviews and the comments we are told that Elizabeth(let's leave Philip out of it for a moment) suffered the ultimate loss: of her children. And yet she(and Philip) paid so little attention to Henry that Stan became his "surrogate father," and she was interested in her daughter mainly and only to train her to become a Soviet spy, too(had Paige ultimately rejected this role...would Elizabeth have been that understanding?)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

We can believe that Philip felt the pain of loss a bit more than Elizabeth with the kids, but even HE had transferred Henry to Stan for father-ship (following Elizabeth out of town on THANKSGIVING) and he was becoming estranged from Paige as she started going full Soviet on him.

But all this said, I return to the Sparing of Elizabeth. She was shown doling out so much painful(and unnecessary) death to so many innocents in Season 6 (not to mention her cruel ruination of the South Korean family without killing anybody, the season before) that I felt she was being set up to "come apart at the seams" in a kill or be killed finale that HAD to end with her death.

And the showrunners said..."We figured you'd want that...but we thought it would be more fun to trick you and let her get away." The Sopranos special. The Russian from The Sopranos becomes The Russians on The Americans.

Reading the showrunners rather self-congratulatory "exit interviews" (which are required for today's long forms -- as if we weren't expected to figure out the ending for ourselves), they seemed so in thrall to the "Sopranos" playbook(don't give the people what they want) that they suddenly sounded like hacks to me. ("We were wondering, should anybody get killed? Should both kids go back to Russian with them? Or only one? How about NONE!")

But equally depressing was the mélange of likely paid shills and likely real fans rhapsodizing about the "beloved" Philip and Elizabeth (and beloved Stan, who, in retrospect, just seemed like a weak-willed dolt to let those people go -- it was as if the whole thing was just so he could have Henry as a surrogate son.)

I don't feel that Philip and Elizabeth were "beloved." At least one of them, Elizabeth, was a psychopath who -- I agree with swanstep here -- would likely thrive in the new Moscow(or London) without much need for her kids at all.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

The mere fact that I can summon up this kind of anger about a work of total fiction reminds me: the movies(in whatever form)...can STILL summon up powerful emotions; well written, well acted drama grabs the viewer.

40-some odd years later, I still hold a residual rage for the scene Hitchcock gave us in Frenzy where Rusk killed Brenda: how much he did it on whim, to a woman who had done nothing to him(though in being the ex-wife of Blaney, she was a fun target for a double dose of sadism -- rape-kill her, and get her ex blamed for the crime) , how cruel he was. And yet it was fiction, all fiction. Staged by actors.

Well, I felt a lot of those same emotions with Elizabeth's kills (and a few of Philips -- like the FBI IT worker, also YOUNG) all these years later. Cant say I'm happy about the fact that Liz and Philip didn't REALLY pay. Nor Stan, whose general dummy-hood over the course of the show(he helped get Nina killed, and also the husband-and-wife Russian "forced defectors") paid off to the ultimate in that famous garage. (Stan reminds me of some of these FBI folk we read about in the newspapers nowdays; its not their anti-Trump politics that bothers me -- hardly -- its the stupidity of sharing anti-Trump messages with your mistress on public-access texting , that bothers me. THESE are our top cops? Stan fits right in.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Meanwhile: my demand for vengeance, to see "the bad guys get it real good" has certainly been sated in decades of movies, starting, I think with Dirty Harry(such an EVIL villain) and extending on through all the Harrys, all the Lethal Weapons, all the Die Hards...and on to Taken et al.

In fact, it goes back earlier than that: I recall in movie called "Dark of the Sun" from 1968, mercenary Rod Taylor lengthily beating the crap out of a modern-day Nazi who killed his best friend -- and finishing off the guy by breaking his arms on a rock just to inflict maximum pain before death. THAT's the ticket for vengeance(I saw this at the theater, with my parents, during the same period I was forbidden to see Psycho on TV! Go figure.)BTW, QT is a big fan of Dark of the Sun.

Or consider the end of Con Air, in which sadistic villain John Malkovich tells hero Nick Cage "the last thing your little daughter will smell is my hot, stinking breath when I kill her" -- and Cage promptly inveigles Malkovich into being, tossed through the air, electrocuted and conveniently dropped into a pile-driving machine that smashes his head into goo.

THAT's vengeance, too. So I suppose I should just keep watching those movies, and let the "beloved" Americans settle into their bleak post Cold War existence, without their (prop) kids...and totally unpunished for their heinous murders and ruinations of people who trusted them.

But I gotta admit: it would have been fun to see Elizabeth electrocuted and tossed into a pile-driving machine that turned HER head to goo. And yes, Keri Russell's character was as dynamic in her evil as Tony Soprano or anyone else of that ilk(including non-killer but general rat Don Draper) -- I hated her as much as I hated Tony.

I'm sorry to come out swinging on a finale that I think swanstep liked. But swanstep's been pretty hard on some of my favorites -- fair is fair around here, its good for the soul. As long as its polite, too.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Not that it should matter too much(ratings and box office are often big for mediocre works), but I was somewhat satisfied to read that The Americans never had very good ratings, and was kept afloat by management because of respect for its quality.

Those "never very good ratings" reflected, I suspect, American audiences having little heart to watch Philip and especially Elizabeth stab, strangle, shoot, poison and dismember ....Americans(often innocents)...in the name of a country that few Americans favor as a model of political life.

I thought it was clinched when Elizabeth made the kind old lady take all her pills and die while saying "I'm trying to make a better world" while the lady responded "Evil people always say that to justifiy what they do."

The Americans ended in support of evil people. Unforgiveable....

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

PS. I'm reminded that one of the two endings that Hitchcock filmed for Topaz -- and later had removed -- had the film's French Communist turncoat spy simply fly to Russia at the end, with a smile on his face and a nod from the jet's boarding steps to the French hero. Hitchcock told somebody "That's how it usually ends; they just go back" but it was determined that audiences would HATE that ending.

Well, The Americans pulled it off.

PPS. I'm also reminded that the audiences who found Philip and Elizabeth to be "beloved" are likely following a model created largely by Hitchcock: Norman Bates seemed SO nice all the way to the reveal at the end of Psycho(we didn't want HIM killed at the end); Bob Rusk was cheerful friendship personified when he wasn't raping and killing(his "false front" is largely what Philip and Elizabeth show to their marks). Hitchcock perhaps sowed the seeds for Elizabeth and Philip, long ago, with Norman and Uncle Bob.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Reading the showrunners rather self-congratulatory "exit interviews"

I read or watched a couple of these and one note struck me as completely delusional: that the biggest or most important message of the series is that the Russians/Other Side are people too, etc..

The fact is that we're up close and personal for much of the series with what amounts to a fantasy of one of the most horrible fronts of the Cold War (the Russians had plenty of killer spies during the Cold War and a cadre of long term undercover people but these groups didn't overlap as far as we know - in practice the long term-cover is necessarily a full-time job not something you can constantly dive out of to go on operations). Needless to say, there were also no US teams rampaging through the civilian pop. of Russia. Anyhow, granted the fantasy of long-term undercover super-killers, it's a fantasy of Soviet mercilessness and brutality towards its own people as well as to its US civilian victims. *That's* what we were focussed on - some of the worst stuff that the Soviet system could ever produce.

It's a lot like basing a series around the US general Curtis LeMay or around the terrible actions of Tiger Company and other free-fire units in Vietnam (who were basically ordered to head out and create chaos in villages/rural areas) or around all the support for Nazi ideas & causes in the US in the '30s and early '40s. These would be some of America's most terrible and brutal moments and if *they* were focusses then the main point would be to rub our noses in just how awesomely bad *we* can be. Similarly, in Elizabeth Jennings we get a vivid picture of the extreme badness (by any means necessary, etc.) to which both the Stalinist and post-WW2 Soviet states powered by bottomless grievance and paranoia and also inflated self-worth *were* prone. The showrunners seemed to me to evade this point.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I read or watched a couple of these and one note struck me as completely delusional: that the biggest or most important message of the series is that the Russians/Other Side are people too, etc..

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That is a problem. Russians ARE people, too, but I think the show made a case for the "people, too" including some pretty psychotic, damaged people with blind commitment to the cause (and the murder of innocents, not soldiers in combat, as means of advancing the cause (to "make the world a better place.")

Actually, in certain ways, the show went where a number of 80s and 90s thrillers(the Bonds of that era; Air Force One; The Peacekeeper) went -- the concept of the "far right wing Russian" who refused to give up the Cold War and went renegade on the Gorbachev-inspired "new Russia." It was an interesting mind twister -- far left-wing Communist renegade generals were "right wing" within their own society; the labels were meaningless.

Old Woman Claudia's mindset was locked into her WWII experiences, and Elizabeth's mindset was locked into her memories as a child just after -- deprivation, fighting to the death, living with multiple families under one roof, sex as a weapon. In that rather grim and moldy apartment where "the girls bonded"(Claudia, Elizabeth...Paige) one sensed at once a "national pride" being expressed(and a very different one than American pride) and...a kind of "locked in, cloistered and reactionary" desire to keep Communism alive.

All of which was interesting and well-presented, but only turned Claudia and Elizabeth into greater villains, one's you wanted to see "get it." Not to mention: Claudia acquiesced to the beatings and torture of Philip and Elizabeth early on "to prove their loyalty" -- a perversion of mentoring that resulted in Elizabeth satisfyingly beating the hell out of Claudia.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

The fact is that we're up close and personal for much of the series with what amounts to a fantasy of one of the most horrible fronts of the Cold War (the Russians had plenty of killer spies during the Cold War and a cadre of long term undercover people but these groups didn't overlap as far as we know - in practice the long term-cover is necessarily a full-time job not something you can constantly dive out of to go on operations).

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I thought the show made an interesting point(and indeed, one of fantasy): Philip and Elizabeth were NOT "just spies" gathering intel. They were assassins, very often being given the assignment(by Claudia a lot, by the nicer Gabriel -- I can't remember) to KILL PEOPLE. Claudia practically spat the orders out to Elizabeth to kill the male hockey player "forced defector"("He'll be saying how BAD we are," she sarcastically notes.) And Elizabeth was sent to kill the sympathetic Russian Summit negotiator, too(she balked.)

Then there was Elizabeth killing people so as to "clear the way" for others to take their jobs. The diplomat in the swimming pool. The assembly line worker under his car. This was reminiscent of The Manchurian Candidate, when the Commies sent "brainwashed assassin" Laurence Harvey to kill his newspaper publisher boss -- so as to take the man's job and power.

As Elizabeth(and to a lesser extent, Phillip), brought Paige along to join them in the spy trade, they left out the assassin part. As I've noted before, perhaps the idea was to keep Paige at an "innocent" Martha-level of intel gathering, but she never really was confronted with the true ugliness of what her parents were capable of.

The show DID ease into Paige's willingness to have sex to get information -- which turned out to be something her mother DID confess to, because after all, sex is used to get all sorts of things even outside the spy game.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Needless to say, there were also no US teams rampaging through the civilian pop. of Russia.

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Well, the show seemed to make the point that the freedoms and complacency of Americans made it easy for the sleeper agents to live among them. Elizabeth had real contempt for the country she was living in as a spy. Philip -- less so (HIS having to return to Russia was probably a real downer for him at the end of the show -- but he still evaded punishment.)

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Anyhow, granted the fantasy of long-term undercover super-killers, it's a fantasy of Soviet mercilessness and brutality towards its own people as well as to its US civilian victims. *That's* what we were focussed on - some of the worst stuff that the Soviet system could ever produce.

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Well, when Oleg went home to his parents and lived with them, and some agents just came over to the apartment one night and ransacked his room -- or when Nina was summarily executed after balking to ruin some other innocent's life --- it felt like more than a fantasy to me. Still, I'm sure day to day life in today's Russia isn't all that bad for folks willing(or forced by birthplace) to live under its governmental structures.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

It's a lot like basing a series around the US general Curtis LeMay or around the terrible actions of Tiger Company and other free-fire units in Vietnam (who were basically ordered to head out and create chaos in villages/rural areas) or around all the support for Nazi ideas & causes in the US in the '30s and early '40s. These would be some of America's most terrible and brutal moments and if *they* were focusses then the main point would be to rub our noses in just how awesomely bad *we* can be.

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Again, I take the point that American history has plenty of example of this kind of evil. I do think a few movies were made that took that up: Platoon(with its recreation of My Lai), Casualties of War(DePalma's look at American GIS in Nam raping and killing an innocent woman); Redacted(DePalma's recent attempt to tell the Casulaties story in the Middle East.)

Actually, given the sensitivites about "offending international markets" most modern American spy films have posited as bad guys -- American intelligence agencies. Or renegade forces within them. The Bourne films are the biggest example of this, but films like Red(the Bruce Willis films), and some of the Mission Impossibles have gone this way, too. This goes all the way back to Three Days of the Condor and Marathon Man. Avoid geopolitics...make Americans the bad guys in American films. (Even Hitchcock hinted at this with the cold orders given by the OSS/CIA bosses in Notorious and NXNW, to sacrifice women sexually, and women AND men with their lives, "to the cause.")

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Similarly, in Elizabeth Jennings we get a vivid picture of the extreme badness (by any means necessary, etc.) to which both the Stalinist and post-WW2 Soviet states powered by bottomless grievance and paranoia and also inflated self-worth *were* prone. The showrunners seemed to me to evade this point.

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"Grievance and paranoia" is a great summary of how Elizabeth operated. A real hatred of the American creature comforts around her given her deprived childhood(grievance) ; a real sense that she was committing all her horrible murders and ruining innocent lives(the South Korean couple seemed to be the saddest to me) because of her paranoia about how evil America was.

All of which are good discussion points -- but I'm still mad that the show ended without death or penal punishment for Elizabeth and Philip. And I'm afraid that the "showrunner exit interviews" revealed a lack of responsibility to confront the horrors the show spent seasons conjuring up, with justice. The showrunners got glib at the end.

PS. One nice touch near the end is how when Philip became a true capitalist -- expanding his travel agency -- he failed, and was going under. Its a brutal system, too -- but Stan reminded him "I've got a government job, the government matches my pension payments" -- a bit more security in America in those jobs.