FX’s Cold War spy thriller The Americans, which returns Wednesday for its third season, benefits from the sort of reverse novelty that made early Mad Men so enchanting: It lets us remember (or imagine) what it was like to live in the days of phone booths,...
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Near the end of the first season of FX’s Cold War spy thriller, The Americans, a Soviet sleeper-cell operative played by Keri Russell has an affair with a man wanted for the murder of an FBI agent. Troves of D.C. police are frantically canvassing the...
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Warning: season finale spoilers ahead. In a key scene from The Americans' Season 3 finale, Philip Jennings visits the apartment of an FBI employee who may know too much about the bugged pen planted in bureau headquarters. Naturally, Philip—the undercover...
Read moreBecause there are certain things you can’t get away with saying or doing in ad-supported TV, the medium has often used genre stories, like fantasy and science fiction, to say those things covertly. And another fertile ground for hidden meanings is the...
Read moreJoe Weisberg and Joel Fields had never met before they were teamed up to write and produce The Americans for FX five years ago. Now, they continue to marvel at the similarities in their working styles and sense of aesthetics. In a wide-ranging conversation...
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