There are many dramas on television that are deliberately slowly paced, and they’re mostly trying to accomplish the same thing: Build tension, increase your anxiety, and draw out the suspense. There’s a very fine line, however, and the slow pace too often draws you into a stupor. NBC’s Hannibal straddles that line successfully most of the time, although there are moments when they spend entire sequences on the preparation and display of food that can lull the audience to sleep if they’re not into the sumptuous exhibition of dinners made from human meat.
On the other side, there’s a show like The Fall on Netflix, which seems to be slowly paced to obscure the fact that it often has nothing to say. It wants to give us the illusion that it’s an intelligent drama, but when they spend literally 45 seconds filming Gillian Anderson walking down a hall and towards a door, you recognize that they’re not really saying anything at all. They’re just killing time.
The Americans absolutely nails the delicate balance. It burns slowly, but it’s always advancing, and it’s always saying something. To me, it’s still missing the dark humor that elevates a show like Justified or Better Call Saul, but it’s easily the most thematically rich and complicated drama on television.
It’s a hard show for us to cover, however, because nobody watches it, and we want to encourage you all to watch it without giving away major plot points. So, we often focus on the big, shocking scenes like the salacious 69 scene, the brutal suitcase scene, the tooth-pulling scene that was a metaphor for the Jennings’ married intimacy, or the cold-blooded murders. They’re fascinating, shocking scenes, and they’re fun to talk about the next day, but they’re not really the point of the show, although they’re sometimes fun:
What’s more interesting — and what cannot be conveyed in a GIF — are the mind games and the power plays. Frank and Claire Underwood have nothing on Philip and Elizabeth Jennings. For instance, and without giving too much away, this season sees two Russian spies posing as a married American couple using their daughter’s religion to further their own gains. Elizabeth wants to recruit their daughter, Paige, into the KGB and is attempting to subtly demonstrate to her that Paige’s belief can be more effective if it were used for a different cause, like, spreading communism. Philip, meanwhile, is attempting to push her further into a religion he doesn’t even believe in to simply insulate her from the KGB. This married couple — who loves each other in their own kind of f*cked-up way — is using religion to manipulate their daughter against each other. It’s a complicated dynamic where Philip and Elizabeth are being pulled between their love of country and their love of family, and they both know that letting their 15-year-old daughter into the KGB means putting her life in danger. It means turning her into an assassin for their cause. Elizabeth is willing to sacrifice family for country. Philip prioritizes family.
There are other factors at play, as well. Philip, for instance, is being pressured by his Soviet handler to sleep with with a 15-year-old girl. His handler is very subtly telling Phillip to f*ck the underage girl, or he will kill Philip’s bastard son. Philip, however, is smartly using religion — instead of sex — to keep the 15-year-old girl close without sleeping with her, but psychologically, it may be just as damaging (and creepy) as having sex with her.
It’s icky, but we find ourselves inexplicably rooting for murderous Soviet spies whose agenda is opposite our own. They’re essentially terrorists playing a very long con against our own interests in the Cold War, and it is fascinating.
It’s an amazing, engrossing show, and the pace is crucial to that success. It’s not a show like Empire or Scandal or ALL of Ryan Murphy’s shows that eats through the plot. It lays the foundation. It builds the story. It layers in the themes and builds out obstacles, and it ratchets up the tension so effectively that when the credits on an episode finally roll, there’s a huge sense of relief. You barely realize that you’ve been practically holding your breath for the last 42 minutes. Then, you’re ready to quickly immerse yourselves back into the lives of the most complicated characters on television.
The Americans is not an easy sell, and I can understand why so many people are reluctant to watch. There’s no quick payoffs. There’s no humor to relieve the tension. It’s stressful, and heavy, and dark, and there are no heroes, but there are rich, complicated characters, and that’s what makes it interesting and different from everything else on television.
