TV/MOVIE EXECS, PRODUCERS, SHOW RUNNERS, DIRECTORS, AND WRITERS TAKE NOTE: The Americans should be your guide for how entertainment does NOT need constant, long fights, car chases, or emotional outbursts. It does NOT need clearly defined, black & white, un-nuanced good guys versus bad guys. It does NOT need music shoved in the audience's ears. A show can have audiences other than just teens with Attention Deficit Disorder.
It can, like The Americans, be built on: a great premise plus a fascinating story that takes its time developing; suspence and drama; writers who don't over-write scenes and let superb actors wordlessly convey thoughts and emotions with facial expressions and body posture, to the point of having a wordless 2 minuute long dinner scene that conveys more relationship tension than any screaming match could; subtle background music (without singers) that seamlessly blend into the background (until season 6).
So many things that I've griped about in IMDB reviews of other shows or movies over and over, The Americans did right, especially in seasons 1 through 4. One of my favorite things about the show is that it made me feel for people on both sides of the cold war... no one seemed completely good or completely bad. The characters were deep and complex. The situations written for them were complex, with choices that had pros and cons no matter what path they chose, and decisons made sometimes seemed like the best choice based on info at hand, until more info was revealed indicating how assumptions, conjecture, and mistrust can mislead those decisions.
After I quickly got over my initial kneejerk reaction of "this is trying to copy Homeland, except set in 1980s cold war", I loved the show. My complaints for this show: 1) season 6 the music suddenly became obnoxious, intrusive, and inappropriate, especially the first half of S6. 2) Season 5 a new young character was introduced, and they kept randomly bouncing back and forth between an older main character and the new young character, with too little explanation of what was happening, and for much of the season I mistakenly thought they were flashbacks to a younger version of the main character. Then later the new character just disappeared from the show and all the time they spent on that character in S5 seemed pointless. The new character didn't impact the story at all and seemed like a waste of time. They could have resolved this in the series ending, but didn't. 3) although most reviewers loved the ending, I found it a bit baffling... parts of it were good, but several characters made decisions that seemed like very sudden, drastic, unrealistic shifts in personality.
