After a long, long time of watching this, as our normal habit is to intersperse seasons of different television shows so we’re not just bingeing through one, we’re finally done with all six seasons of The Americans and I can now write about it. I noted the existence of the series since its debut and the rave reviews it quickly garnered but I decided a while back to only start watching it after it had finished aired. It turned out to be the right decision as this is a great series from the beginning to the end.

The premise of the show set in the 1980s at the height of the Cold War is that all-American couple Philip and Elizabeth Jennings are really KGB agents sent to the US on a long-term assignment. Their cover is so deep and convincing that they have children born in the US who are unaware of their parents’ real identities and early on in the show, an FBI agent, Stan Beeman, moves in next door as their neighbor and soon becomes a family friend. Across six seasons, the Jennings perform a variety of missions for the USSR that includes assassinations, theft of secrets, seducing all manner of people and blackmailing them, the works. However as time goes by, their daughter Paige eventually realizes that her family is not normal and demands answers. Philip himself is also worn down by the killings and deceit and starts questioning why he is doing all this while Elizabeth remains the more idealistic of the two and driven by loyalty to the USSR.

To be fair, the exploits that the couple manage to get away with over the course of the show are not remotely realistic. Each of their missions, taken individually, are reasonably plausible but the idea of the same two people being capable of all these things and remain uncaught for so long is preposterous. But that’s the nature of a television show and we wouldn’t be so emotionally invested if it were about an endless succession of KGB agents. Still working within these limits and given that all of this is still secret and the full truth may never be known, it’s clear that the show has done its research very well and provides us with a decently accurate picture of what the spies were really doing during the Cold War. Whether it’s stealing blueprints for submarine propellers, secret prisoner exchanges with Israeli intelligence, putting pressure on Pakistan to influence the Soviet-Afghan War, exposing US involvement in the Nicaraguan Contras, this series has it all. Since I actually read some news during the Cold War, it’s very satisfying to feed my imagination with this account of what might really have been happening in the background of all these important events.

But as the showrunners are well aware, to keep audiences coming back week after week, you need emotional engagement. That’s why they like to characterize this as being mainly a family drama. It’s a little on the nose that the show starts with the couple only beginning to develop feelings for each other even though they already have two school-age children. But it does work to draw you in and the character development throughout the series is very satisfying. Not only is there the evolving relationship between the two leads, there’s their friendship with Stan, Philip’s growing disillusionment with his job even as Elizabeth remains committed but accepts his disengagement, the son Henry being all-American while the daughter Paige takes after her mother and so on. The show is also exceptionally good at ratcheting up the tension as there is a constant danger of being caught while the variety and competence of the spycraft on display here is immensely satisfying.

Finally, the very premise of the show itself represents a moral quandary for the audience. The audiences are naturally primed to root for the protagonists of the show of course and people do like to see competence in action, yet the characters are depicted here as doing unambiguously terribly deeds in the course of accomplishing their missions. Even if you’re sympathetic towards the USSR and skeptical of America’s claim to nobility, it’s inarguable that the couple murder dozens of innocent people and ruin the lives of those they don’t kill to get the job done. They constantly lie, prey on the good nature of their victims, and even underaged children aren’t spared. I’m constantly reminded of Breaking Bad, which is known as the anti-hero show, but what happens in The Americans is far worse. At the same time they don’t do it for the hell of it or even for themselves, but because most of the time, they honestly do believe that it is for the greater good of their country which they consider as being at war with the United States. The feeling that they ought to be caught yet you dread actually seeing them being caught is what drives the whole show.

Needless to say, I consider this to be a great television show. It’s intelligent in its plotting, sophisticated in how it handles the emotional development of its characters and manages to work real life events in an effective manner. I very much think that this is on par with Breaking Bad yet while The Americans is highly acclaimed by critics, it is much less popular with the general public. Finally even though this is set in the 1980s, it is highly relevant today as we can expect that this kind of shadow war is still going on in the background.