This is my semi annual plug for all of you to watch the fantastic and somehow forgotten FX network TV show, The Americans, A spy drama set in Washington DC in the 1980s about KGB “illegals” posing as travel agents.
It’s way better than any basic cable TV show had any right to be. Plus, all seasons are streaming on Hulu, so you don’t have to worry about whether the story will be completed.
https://www.hulu.com/series/the-americans-6deba130-65fb-4816...
I want to give some advice: Don't judge it by its first few episodes. When I first checked it out, the basic setup seemed rather inane and I stopped watching.
Then, a couple years later, I needed something to watch during long exercise sessions and I checked it out again. It was getting much more interesting by the end of the first season.
And every season got better and richer. By the very end, I experienced it as actually deep, especially in the way the Keri Russell character unexpectedly evolves. It was a real pleasure and I'm very glad I had the chance to enjoy it. Recommended!
I had initially ignored the show because they had cast Keri Russell which I had assumed to be a total light weight. So I missed it the first few years and then I realized after its fourth renewal - gee maybe its good - and well - I was completely wrong. She was amazing. The show was terrific. But I'm a sucker for 80s cold war dramatics.
Keri Russell a lightweight? I’m curious what gave you that impression as I’ve always thought of her as an excellent actress. Probably missing out on The Diplomat too if you like political intrigue at all.
Well on that topic, the French series "The Bureau" [1] was fantastic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bureau_(TV_series)
I don't understand why people like these shows, there isn't a proper story just things that happen that are essentially discarded at the beginning of the next season. There is never any real 3rd-act/resolution.
Are you sure you aren't confusing The Bureau with something else?
No. Every season ends on a cliffhanger that seems critical to the story and then is quickly resolved as if it were some minor point in the first episode of the subsequent season. This is the nature of this type of episodic television that runs for an indeterminate time and therefore has no real overarching story (but pretends to) like soap operas do.
I only know of a few examples where writers escape this. The first is to have the episodes be essentially disconnected from one another (e.g. Star Trek). The other is what "The Wire" did by having each season have its own plot that is properly resolved at the end of each season.
Riverdale is that thing you hate but made the primary characteristic of the show. Especially past season 1.
They’ll set up what feels like a season finale in most episodes, then instead of resolving it in the next, quickly toss it aside or even just ignore it. It’s not good, and I would not recommend it at all, but it’s maybe the weirdest show I’ve seen.
I remain unsure whether the writers were aware they were writing one extremely-long joke about television writing, or if they thought it was actually good.
Lost would like to have a word. I rented the 6-season DVD set to watch while recovering from an injury and the ONLY good thing about that show was that the first time through you had to wait a week between episodes.
Watching without the cliffhanger/socializing "what's next" discussion, and seeing them discard 87.3% of all plot points with reckless abandon made me hate the show after watching 2-3 seasons.
Riverdale features a character whose (incest-having? Probably.) brother is murdered, who becomes a leader of a bow-wielding vigilante club of women (this is not the only vigilante club in the show, mind you), whose grandmother becomes inhabited by the undying spirit of an ancient witch (also this character is herself a witch), whose family estate was built on a mine full of ghosts and also the mine contains lots of palladium which her Russian spy parents try to use to build a bomb (oh also she kills her dad and burns the mansion down early in the show but it’s fine, they just rebuild it and also there are alternate universe shenanigans), who gains fire-based superpowers and destroys a comet, who keeps her dead taxidermied brother around in a shrine-room (when he’s not alive again for whatever reason)… and that’s like 20% of the insane shit that happens with that character who is not even a main character. There are characters with way weirder sets of events in their biography. Also she’s in high school and a cheerleader, because why not? I think maybe she saves one of her lovers from the afterlife, too.
It’s nuts. If that sounds awesome, I assure you, it’s not, nothing ever matters in that show. Fascination at its commitment to a particular way of being terrible, and a little bit of joy from trying to describe the show to people who haven’t seen it (often they think I’m making stuff up) is what got me through.
I get that Lost is a show with a lot of problems, but this is a show dedicated to having a lot of problems. It’s swinging for the fences of having-problems. It’s astonishing. It’s… an achievement? It’s terrible. It’s the inverse of a miracle that it exists.
...but, but... bow-wielding club of vigilante women, you say? ;-)
I think you're confused about what episodic TV is. Star Trek is (or was) (generally) episodic. The Wire is serialized, as is most TV these days.
Some people like episodic TV, some people prefer serialized.
I don't think they're confused about episodic vs. serialized shows; they're talking about the plot structure of serialized shows often having a change of direction at every season boundary instead of resolution of the existing plot threads. That sort of meandering never-concluding plot can be annoying. One way to avoid that pitfall is by staying episodic, (Old Trek,) another is to wrap up each season and start from a relatively blank slate on the next, as if the seasons are episodes. (The Wire.) I think a third is to have all the story structure written in advance, as with a book adaptation, so there is a real through-line.
Yes I shouldn't have used the word episodic. The problem with your third solution is that it seems to be difficult to do with the current way TV series are financed and produced: You can't commit to multiple seasons at the outset and you also want to have an arbitrary number of episodes depending on how well the show is doing (milk more episodes if the show is doing well). There is also incentive to create cliffhangers so that subsequent seasons can be produced.
There are lots of mini-series which do book adaptations but it's hard to come up with examples that span multiple seasons: "My Brilliant Friend" did it I think and maybe you could argue early "Game of Thrones" but the story was never finished in book form either so it couldn't be said to be telling a complete story.
I don;t think "The Wire" gets enough credit for creating a format that conformed to the constraints of TV production while still being able to tell stories that spanned many episodes. You could have ended the series at any season (had it been cancelled) and it wouldn't have felt incomplete and yet the final season did feel like it completed an even larger story arc.
I have to mention Babylon 5 here, I don't think anything is as complete in terms of a 5 year, 110 episode plot. Note; don't read up on the plot, it's actually self-destructive.
Don’t think he can be talking about The Bureau either. It’s in my top ten all time TV shows.
A.k.a. "Le bureau des légendes": criminally underrated. Was available to view in Australia on SBS On Demand, where I serendipitously encountered it. It is right up there with the best of John LeCarré's film and television adaptations: "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", "Smiley's People", "The Little Drummer Girl", etc.
As another semi-obscure “spy” series check out the british production _The Sandbaggers_. Very lecarre-esque story that reflected the inanity and stakes of the cold war, written by a RN officer.
Apparently it's the actual spies favorite.
I can understand the reflex. To me she was "that actress from that show Felicity that I never watched". The Diplomat turned me around real quick.
The Americans was awesome, especially that last "showdown" climax. Best TV ever, along with parts of Breaking Bad.
I watched a couple episodes of The Diplomat and couldn't get into it. I'll give it another try.
Episode 3 is the one that kicked it up into the stratosphere for us.
Incidentally, and I realize the appeal for the show is significantly less if you aren’t a teenage girl (as I was when I watched it), but Felicity is excellent and she’s excellent in it. Like, beyond excellent. Like, there was the acting all the other WB actresses were doing in the late 90s/early 2000s and then there was what she was doing.
If that show had aired on a real broadcast network (as JJ Abrams' next shows were) and not on The WB, she would have been nominated for Emmys out the wazoo. As it was, she won the Golden Globe for that first season, but she should have at least been nominated for the Emmy for her work on that show, because she was every bit as good or better than her peers on cable or network.
I have a running theory that The Americans and The Diplomat are in fact set in the same universe. Keri Russell is still playing the same character, a deep-cover Russian agent, and now she has infiltrated the upper echelons of the US government...
Reminds me of The Double (2011)
Th Diplomat is excellent and she plays the role perfectly.
Everything I see her in, her acting style to me resembles a lifeless cardboard cutout. I get that that’s “the point” of the Americans, but if that’s all she’s bringing, something’s not working here. And in the diplomat it seemed exactly the same. Lifeless acting, and it seemed a lot of her personality was expressed by other characters because she wasn’t doing it herself.
you might also be thrilled by her performance in "The Diplomat". She is absolutely no light weight.
Strong advice for any show.
Agreed. I learned this with Black Sails (first few episodes were huh?) and it evolved into something awesome. The Americans as well. I think that’s usually the case with shows that are trying something new and haven’t quite got the formula down. First season of Star Trek was a freak show of theater that somehow, worked. Thrived. And blossomed. Let’s just pray Bob Igor doesn’t get his hands on the franchise.
I now follow this advice with all shows. I’ll give it a full season to see if they develop something I’m interested in following.
> Bob Igor
Is he the hunchback brother of Bob Iger, Disney CEO?
I plead the 5th and assume no association… the wrath of the house of mouse is real.
Black Sails in particular evolved with the writers' historical knowledge of real pirates as they moved from made up nonsense they read to actual research.
Thanks for the Black Sails suggestion. I hadn't heard of it but will check it out. High praise on IMDB.
Except Community, and BoJaxk
Bojack ep1 is terrible but it immediately gets better, and it’s gold by the end of s1.
Yeah I just recommend people skip the first half of season 1
Community is easy - the ones with Dan Harmon involvement are the best. 100% causation.
Try this: look up the most highly rated episodes on IMDB and watch only those. Missing the crummy episodes usually does not interfere with understanding the story arc. Often, I set a minimum IMDB score that I will watch, like 8.5 or 9.0 to capture only the best. This works well with series that:
- take a year or two to find their footing or
- have a large cast (some mediocre) that get their own story lines of no consequence occasionally or
- introduce cast members that don't make it or
- implode towards the final season.
I have done this for many series that are somewhat uneven:
- The Americans
- How I Met Your Mother
- Fringe
- Orphan Black
- Halt and Catch Fire
- House of Cards (watching the ratings allows you to miss all of season 6)
- Arrested Development
- Bojack Horseman
- Veep
- 30 Rock
- Jane the Virgin
- Black Mirror
- The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
- Suits
- Six Feet Under
- La Femme Nikita
- The Blacklist
- Peaky Blinders
- The Romanoffs
- Ozark
- Westworld (sometimes dropping episodes does not matter)
- Succession
- Borgen
And all of these series have lots of strong episodes.
Series I would not do this with:
- The Bear
- Breaking Bad
- Money Heist
- The Serpent
- Fleabag
- Chernobyl
- The White Lotus
Wow, thanks for the watching list! I agree on season 6 of House of Cards, sadly Robin Wright can't carry the series the way Kevin Spacey did.
Albeit, we got bored of money heist after season 1.
If you did not make it past season one of Money Heist, then you missed out on:
- outstanding performances by Spanish actresses Ursula Corbrero, Itziar Ituno, Alba Flores, and Najwa Nimri and
- humming Bella Ciao to yourself for two months.
This is a very interesting way to watch a show. It feels almost illegal or wrong to me, lol. I'm one of those people who won't completely finish reading the end of a book series or game (witcher 3 easy example) because I'll like a show/game so much I don't want it to end.
I'll go through this list and start from episode 1, though, so I appreciate the list of good shows!
skipping succession episodes is insane, i'm sorry. it had a niche following but the entire series is a work of art in every aspect. i don't think i can point to a single episode that was "wasted".
I have a feeling this would work well with MadMen.
There were always a few "filler" episodes that didn't move the story forward much, if at all.
But sometimes those filler's are just good tropey fun! :-)
Thanks. I have a 3 episode rule. If I'm not into it by the end of the 3rd episode, I don't continue. I'll give this one another shot.
I guess, but there are some all-time great series with relatively weak first seasons, e.g. Halt and Catch Fire and The Leftovers.
Breaking Bad.
This doesn't filter out the series that start off strong with no contingency plan to get picked up, then they get signed to 2+ more seasons, go "ah shoot we blew all our story ideas in season 1" and slow play 3 episodes worth of content for an entire season. So. many. like. this.
I have blasted through four seasons of The Americans but have been really having a lot of trouble getting through the 5th season.
It does change season to season but the finale ... just talking about finale ... is at such a different level in tying up things that it elevates the entire season and the entire series. And of course the last few episodes leading to the finale tell a story so they eventually add value even though it may not be apparent when the season starts.
Exactly my experience. Many years ago I watched perhaps 3-4 episodes and stopped. I recently finished the entire series and by the end I was binging it in the most traditional sense, watching multiple episodes a day, telling myself I'd watch the last 20 minutes of this episode in bed and end up watching 2 more after that, etc.
It's a fantastic show and while there are certainly some smaller arcs that could have been written better as is the case with any long-running show, especially one made for cable, it doesn't spend the two seasons completely destroying its reputation like most do. It ended at just the right time.
Thanks for the advice. I shut it off after one episode. I'll give it another try at some point.
Thanks for the comment.
I did watch half the first season years ago and wasn't too captured, will give it another go.
The best thing about the show is how stories constantly take unexpected turns. It will sometimes seem like they’re setting some big thing up and then suddenly the characters are caught completely off guard and the show makes a hard left. It might sound contrived the way I’m explaining it, but it all makes perfect sense in the way the show unfolds.
Good advice: I also found the start not a good salesman but some peristence worth the wait.
I've found the show because of a post on reddit listing TV critics ratings for TV shows, and this stood out as one of the few which were good from start to end.
We're at season 5 atm and up until this point, I can confirm the ratings.
...I just wish I could find that reddit post again. Can't remember if there were others good shows on it.
The most realistic Russian sleeper scenario imo was in Slow Horses. Brits don't insult your intelligence too greatly in their spook shows; the American variety always involves some sort of super-human characters. It's good as entertainment, the Americans, but just over the top.
This is why I could never get into House of Cards, it's just so over the top compared to something like Borgen which for me to this day is still one of the best political dramas ever made, also sadly went somewhat under the radar especially across the pond.
It wasn't any over the top than the original. It mostly just followed The BBC production almost to the letter, except with US spin.
Until Season 4?. Whenever the re-election campaign started. Joel Kinnaman, while a great actor (loved him in Altered Carbon) was a massive miscast as a plausible candidate for the GOP. Mostly due to youth. And the last season was a Game of Thrones-level utter disaster.
This is the first time I see a fellow Altered Carbon fan in the wild.
In the wild? For people who read books, they probably weren't a fan. For people who don't care about source material, the show was amazing. I'm still pissed it was cancelled. It was apparently ridiculous expensive to produce and that's all the more reason they should have kept going with it: to show that we want more of those types of things.
Recasting of the main character didn't help, even if it's explainable in-universe.
I thought it was a great standalone show. What I found unforgivable were the underlying plot changes vs the books.
The Last Envoy? What? That did not even become a plot point (at least in season 1, I bailed pretty early in S2). Also, Envoys are terrorists and not the ultimate-special ops forces?
This is what really threw me. In the book, Kovacs was hired because he had been a highly-trained UN envoy. It made little sense for him to be hired as a known terrorist. I wasn't much of a fan of any of the terrorist cell background, or the other background elements like those with his sister, that they decided to add to the show.
let's make it three then. Read the books, enjoyed the series(s). Want a unicorn backpack to carry around, but don't think I can carry it off (pun intended) the way Joel did.
I thought the original was scoped and paced perfectly: no fluff, all action (of the suspensy kind), didn't wait for itself to peter out.
The remake just drags on and on and on. Tons of irrelevant detail and uninteresting sidestories.
That's how I felt about Succession for 3 seasons.
I felt it just dragged and dragged and I couldn't understand what was the fuss.
Then I started watching some YouTube commentary and starting to understand that the irrelevant and uninteresting was actually relevant and interesting.
ATN, the succession, that was all bogus for character development, a setup.
I feel like House of Cards may fall in a similar category there. It's not much about the action but character evolution and dynamics.
Oh I have no doubt that was the aim in the HoC remake. It just wasn't any good, unlike Succession. Not all character development and dynamics are interesting.
The scope and pacing in the original was just perfect. Just because you can layer on more, doesn't mean it's gonna make it better. Much was pure tedium and seemed to serve filling time first and foremost.
I stopped in the episode where, for me at least, out of absolutely nowhere, Spacey's character seduces a body guard and him and his wife have a 3some with him. I'm sure many people loved that. For me, I was like WTF? what was completely out of left field, added to punch up ratings or just it insert shock value. I stopped watching. What that in the UK version?
except it made more sense Francis Urquhart being Conservative than Frank Underwood being Democrat
Did you check out the original UK House of Cards? Worth catching if you can find it.
Yeah but "the dogs" in Slow Horses is laughably out of control ridiculous at points...reaches out of your immersion in the interesting story to grab you, shake you, and declare what you're watching is absurd hyperbole. Very disappointed by that aspect and I hope they're done with that excess.
That's a fair statement. My standard for this type of show remains BBC's Tinker Tailor Solider Spy (1979) and the follow up Smiley's People (1982).
Alec Guinness owns Smiley. Just perfect. Absolutely gripping yet low budget [+] it actually demands that you use your intellect to keep up. If you haven't seen those I say whip up ye old torrent client and get some.
Anyways, I did say "too greatly". Someone up there says "no spoilers" so ..
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080297/
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083480/
agreed: john le carre bbc is great. also loved Luther, slightly off topic.
Back in the late 80s they did a TV production of Deighton's Berlin Game, Mexico Set, London Match. Unfortunately, BBC/GranadaTV do not wish to release it on dvd or streaming even in original quality, assuming the tapes still exist. There is, however, a low quality youtube (probably a copy of home VHS):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezekuICeYlg&list=PLSpG6jj23V...
Watched with my father growing up, may even have some home copies myself.
Eh, maybe? There's got to be _something_ for sociopathic ex-squaddies to do who don't want to go back to civvie street. I found their existence believable, if not the high speed Range Rover driving stuff. It's very clearly not going for full-on realism, obviously a fantasy spy show. So the dogs work in that context - at least for me.
EDIT: someone else mentioned Tinker Tailor (either the '80s BBC miniseries or the Gary Oldman movie - once again he's killing it) which is far more grounded. That might be more up your street? I enjoyed both a lot. Bleak as hell though.
It's called Realism.
I mean this is just American politics in general.
It's a show specifically about MI5 in Britain.
That's a very way to express that idea. I'll be reusing that, if you don't mind.. :-) I've always expressed it more crudely as having the feeling of being forcefully lobotomized by the producers..
As in, British shows don't necessarily explain or show everything? I'm a bit lost here.
Well, looks like British television isn't for you.
As in: those shows don't insult your intelligence by presenting something impossible or untruthful as a fact, and by assuming that the viewer will be too intellectually challenged to question anything spoon fed to him.
You'll know when you see a show or a broadcast that gives you the impression your brain is leaking out of your ears.
That was a brilliant show. Not just because of Gary Oldman. Well-drawn characters throughout.
I've just started season 3 so no spoilers please :)
If you enjoy Slow Horses, I highly recommend the book series it’s based on. I’m not sure if Mick Herron wrote the books with Gary Oldman in mind, but it’s the perfect Oldman character nonetheless. The show is quite a faithful adaptation of the books, even down to some lines. Excellent review of Oldman in the 3rd season: https://defector.com/gary-oldman-is-gross-and-loving-it?gift...
Gary Oldman was a lot of it.
I had read and enjoyed the first two books. After the first couple of episodes I had to admit I was watching it for Gary Oldman more than anything else. I'd watch just a supercut of him expressing disdain for and disappointment with his subordinates.
Sandbaggers is still up there as one of the best, I rewatched it last week.
I am English, and old enough to have seen "Sandbaggers". I don't know how I never heard of this show until I found the complete series on Youtube a few months ago. Now I am enjoying viewing it for the first time.
The latest season got a bit silly at the end, but still entertaining.
I dunno. I watched the first few episodes over COVID and I thought it just the same as any US cable show: sex, crash-bangs and manufactured plot twists.
Maybe I'm wrong but IIRC there's a sex scene in the first five minutes of the pilot. Like, don't insult my intelligence.
Smart people don’t like sex scenes?
I guess smart people visit porn sites when they want to watch some.
For me it's just boring filler and I skip them.
While we’re expressing opinions: in a show about navigating a partnership that accepts seduction as a necessary part of intelligence work (not solely of a romantic nature, but often), where the main characters are also being seduced by the capitalist lifestyle — I suspect some smart people might also view those less-clothed scenes as contributing (and even critical to) the underlying themes.
I'm with them, I don't enjoy those scenes (in general - haven't seen the one in question). Not because I'm a prude, I just find them a little boring and they usually take too long - and often are immersion breaking themselves with how they clothe or position characters to appeal to TV decency standards. An implication and a fade away is enough for me, unless something pivotal happens within the scene itself.
I chuckled and thank you for the compliment!
Also: I agree. It's pretty much always a tedium. Now, American series almost always suffer from that: not just the sex scenes are used as filler, and could be replaced with a line or two suggesting the events if relevant. House of Cards is my go to example: just take the British original for how you can condense the story by a factor of 10 without any loss. Putting it that way: it'd be hilarious if a compression format would work this way.
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3045
US:ian media doesn't have sex scenes, it has symbolic innuendos standing in for sex scenes.
That was probably the only "cheap stunt" of the entire series. They still had to consider the average viewer, I suppose. But I know a few people I recommended it to were turned off by that exact early scene and never got past it. Really unfortunate.
Thanks for this. Maybe I'll give it another go.
The real Americans was you, all along
The Americans is a highly sensationalized and fictionalized retelling of the life stories of Elena Vavilova and Andrey Bezrukov. From a historical/accuracy perspective, there’s basically zero resemblance of the show and the source material beyond the premise.
As drama, it excels in the drama around the marriage rather than the actual fact of them being spies, and has been praised as “fundamentally a show about a marriage”. If you’re looking for a spy thriller, you might look elsewhere. It’s very “American TV” and doesn’t really stray from the formula
I watched the entire series, The Americans. It's thrilling and well-crafted television, but totally bogus as a representation of how illegals worked in the USA.
Illegals were/are special assets that would never be concurrently running so many different operations and engaging in risky wet (i.e. assassination) operations right and left. More likely they would spend many boring years cultivating their positions in society and a select few important contacts. That doesn't make for good television.
Typically the best television stories are taking an entire organizations stories and distilling it down to just a few people. Easier to develop characters that way and keep the audience from being confused by actors that don't contribute much.
A good 101 on an illegal story is by Jack Barsky, on his own account. He wrote a book on it, there's various interviews with him, a podcast series (The Agent) and he got interviewed by Lex Fridman (#301). I recomment The Agent podcast series [1] on his (life) story. Also available on Apple Podcast.
[1] https://open.spotify.com/show/5DToOunQsM18OmGD5eVRXR
The Americans : espionage :: The Sopranos : organized crime.
The Sopranos was not especially realistic. But realism wasn't the point; there was just enough verisimilitude to serve the narrative, which was a kind of morality play. It's the same with The Americans, which is at bottom more of a relationship story than one about espionage. (We agree, I think.)
A lot of research went into the show, but it shows up in the same ways research shows up in Mad Men.
Don't watch it expecting to learn a bunch of stuff! That's not the point.
(A top 5 series for me.)
We clearly didn't watch the same show. The nature in which they use disguises alone was some of the best use in a show I've ever seen. There's also some very clever code words and traps that scary in their realism.
Not to discredit South East Asia but Germany is where the Cold War took place. Especially the second part of it. RAF, for example, was pretty much sponsored by East Germany.
So many good series made involving the subject though. Both drama and documentary. I mean, you do want drama and not documentary? Cause the story The Americans is inspired by is documented.
For drama, check Deutschland '83 and the two successors. Has a great cast.
And of course there is Clifford Stoll's book about how he caught Hagbard Celine (see the movie '23' with a young August Diehl who later broke through in Hollywood).
German cinema, both West-German and modern, has gems regardless (I am not German btw, subs are easy to come by).
I do agree that the "Deutschland 83/86/89" TV series was great espionage drama, but I also think your Eurocentric bias is showing. I have often wondered why Asia has been continuously overlooked in the espionage TV drama stakes. Even John LeCarré's "The Honourable Schoolboy" never got adapted to the screen. My conclusion is that it is not due to a lack of good material but due to political and cultural reasons. Westerners are uncomfortable with portraying Asian geopolitical adversaries such as Communist China and North Korea because they don't want to be accused of racism. When was the last time you saw or read a tale about Chinese spies? Sadly, this has resulted in a vast, unexplored region of espionage drama being totally ignored. I wonder if they make Asia-focussed spy drama in Japan?
Right now I am watching The Sympathizer, a Vietnamese drama about the Cold War, focussed on the Vietnamese take on the matter. Its on HBO Max. Weekly release so not yet finished. They just added the third episode, and I've almost finished that. Seems very much promising.
South Korea also has a cinema scene. I once saw a Korean horror and it was unlike anything I saw before. Like, really weird. But it had nothing to do with spy drama.
A lot of spy drama or action from the Cold War era is very over the top and/or propagandist/fear mongering. Drama is dramatized, but can easily be regarded as overdramatized, bending the truth too much in the process. At such point, a good documentary on the subject is probably preferred. The faith I have in a country like China or North Korea being authentic on such matters in documentary is near zero, and thus I assume their drama on the matter will equal the low effort American cinema we saw previous century.
That a band like Laibach was allowed to play in North Korea is very much telling to me.
I watched the first episode the Sympathiser last week. It occurs to me that South Korea is the only Asian country that has produced significant modern-era (i.e. Cold War and later) espionage dramas that have been widely distributed in the West: these with the two Koreas as protagonists, of course. The only other Asia-focussed espionage dramas that spring to mind are a few with pre-WWII era plots involving Imperial Japan.
Have some fun, watch Atomic Blonde followed by Phantom Doctrine playthrough.
The Americans is pretty banal and follows the basic script you would expect. It's good background noise if you want 80s nostalgia though.
I'm with you. I don't really agree with all the praise it gets. I liked it at first but it really seemed to run into the "manufactured drama" trap that a lot of TV shows run into when they try and keep it going. It really ruined my suspense of disbelief.
Agreed. As someone who's read and watched a lot of Soviet-era spy fiction, along with lots of actual history, I found it pretty underwhelming. I forced myself through 3 seasons and gave up.
It really doesn't though. For example, I didn't expect to see so many totally innocent people get killed. I've also never seen a marriage portrayed with so much tension so realistically. I grew up in an abusive household and Americans is the first show to to give me ptsd flashbacks.
In a side note: how do you check for the level of nudity/sex in a show or movie? I use the rating but I don’t find it provides enough finer grain: some R rated ones are OK to watch with my 13 year old but some have graphic sex scenes which I feel uncomfortable to watch together.
Common Sense Media reviews, like this one. [1]
IIRC, there's a bit of sex in The Americans, and a fair bit of discussion of how the spies had to sleep with targets as part of their training, and in the field. The father character also has a pretty dicey relationship with a much younger woman/girl, in order to access her father's home office.
1: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/tv-reviews/the-americans
I don't know how accurate it is, but IMDb [1] will usually tell you exact episodes of inappropriate content. Individual episodes also have a parental guide, but it looks less used.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2149175/parentalguide
I'd worry more about a particular scene of sexual violence in Season 3, Episode 2 ("Baggage") than any graphic sex scenes. It's basic cable, so you'll see some butt cheeks here and there but never any nipples. Watch S3E2 yourself in advance and then fast forward through the relevant part for your 13 year old. You'll know it when you see it.
I loved the show, but in retrospect, the premise of 2 Soviet spies being the most prolific serial killers in the history of the DC area without being caught is a bit weak.
Masha Gessen did some work on making the spoken Russian be more authentic https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/translating-th... ( She must have given up on Keri Russell )
Peter Jacobson (FBI Agent Wolf) appears in comedy Russian TV show inspired by the Americans "Adaptation" https://www.poconorecord.com/story/entertainment/2018/05/26/... . I've seen episode 1 available on the internet, full series is hard to find.
It's estimated there are 25-50 serial killers active in the US at any given time. There are also around 6k new unsolved murders each year. The point is that a murder done by someone with no connection to the victim is very hard to solve.
I mean there are several stories of these deeply implanted KGB sleeper-type agents in real life. Sure, not serial killers (who knows), but everything else is quite authentic.
Here is a couple from Germany: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/15/married-pair-r...
They had an oblivious daughter and everything.
I second this. Of all the TV shows I've watched over the years, this is one is easily the one I've spent the most time thinking about, even long after I finished watching it.
While it has it's ebs and flows, it never got bad or dull for me.
And it contains a ton of details you might think is for dramatic effect or cinematography, but often it turned out to be based on actual practices, historic fact or just have a practical purpose for the characters.
The whole Est conference thing was real and pretty popular in the '80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhard_Seminars_Training
HIGHLY highly recommend The Bureau, which is the most real spy show I have ever watched. The Americans is excellent (i've watched all of it) but has some unreal TV-like drama that The Bureau is able to avoid and is imo the pinnacle of spy genre. George Clooney is apparently making an American remake of The Bureau (which is in French).
Couldn't agree more, The Bureau had me hooked from start to finish. After the first episode, I basically binge-watched the entire 5 seasons non-stop. Subtitles are not an issue for me as I always have them on anyway. It takes a couple of episodes to get into it as they don't do out of their way to explain things. It's like you've been dropped into a job with an intelligence service with no training.
"Tehran" (Israeli spy thriller) is another really good spy series. You really get a feel for the oppressive environment in Iran under the thumb of the IRGC.
Also "The Spy" with Sascha Baron Cohen is excellent too.
Heh it's all too real for us in Eastern Europe.
Back in Soviet Union if you ever get a blessing to visit another country, you have interviews with KGB, one before leaving and one on return. Upon return they asked if you bringing any contraband, currency and one of the question is "Why did you return?".
So, my parents lived with me in NZ for last few months. When they got back dad's boating mates decided to grill him - Why did you return?
It was fun all around.
To be allowed to leave you had to sign a paper promising to "tell" the secret service on your travel companions after the trip. So everybody on the trip was living in paranoia of one another.
It was mostly to later have some blackmail material on you if you became opposition - you signed the paper so you're an agent of the system.
And when (if) you returned - regular people assumed you have some connections to the regime and treated you like an enemy.
One of the best TV shows of all time, I second your recommendation. Rare show that gets better with each season.
i don't know about that, the last 1 or to some extent the last 2 seasons were a bit lazy
Easily one of the top 10 shows ever created IMHO
How is this show "forgotten"? It's one of the most critically acclaimed shows of all time
Don't do FX like that.
They had a juggernaut lineup of great shows at the time (which is why The Americans kind of got pushed to a backburner).
and if you want to read about the real world Russian illegals that were caught in the US and traded in the 2010 spy swap, read the FBI pages on Operation Ghost Stories: https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/operation-ghost-stories-ins...
Loosely based on an actual case.
Another recommendation is "Person of Interest". The series was ahead of its time with the implications of AI on society. It also has spies.
It spreads the interesting stuff out too much for me. Halfway through the third season I realized the episodes were starting to run together in my head and if I waited more than a day to start watching again I ended up rewatching half the episode before realizing I'd already seen it.
I'd recommend Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy instead.
love this show - big fan of Stan