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This article was published 12/5/2018 (865 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

Even in the middle of its gruelling final go-round, The Americans (Wednesdays on FX Canada and streaming on iTunes) remains a remarkably reserved show.

Over six seasons, the spy drama has regularly topped "The Best Shows You’re Not Watching" lists, garnering critical plaudits but never really pulling in a mass audience. As New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum puts it, the series "is at once a must-watch and a hard-sell."

Season 6 starts in 1987, as Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell), Russian-born KGB agents posing as married-with-children Americans in suburban Washington, D.C., head toward a Cold War showdown. The series has always been part espionage thriller (oh, the tradecraft) and part domestic drama (oh, the laundry folding). Those strains now converge completely, as geopolitical conflict spreads to the Jennings marriage, Elizabeth and Philip working against each other in a deadly serious spy-vs.-spy scenario.

While other shows tend to chuck everything they have at audiences in a desperate bid for attention, The Americans has always preferred to withhold. This aloof attitude probably alienates a lot of potential viewers — it can feel a bit like rejection — but for people who love the show, it’s strangely seductive.

Here are a few ways The Americans exerts its chilly charm:

DARKNESS AT NOON: Ever since The Sopranos, prestige TV — and wannabe prestige TV — has claimed to be "dark." The Americans is plenty dark, but not with the raging, ranting, spectacular darkness of Breaking Bad or True Detective. Here the darkness comes out as sadness — muted, weary, low-grade sadness — which has a different effect.

Basically, The Americans is about long-term trauma and unrelenting stress subsumed into the routines of middle-class family life. (How American is that?) For the Jenningses, this comes down to PTSD rooted in their murderous and duplicitous profession, but the show also explores the more universal and quotidian griefs of work losing its meaning, children growing away and marriages hardening and cracking.

ENIGMA VARIATIONS: The show is enigmatic but not in that trendy, Westworld-y, puzzle-box way. The Americans’ perplexities come from the unresolvable questions and moral murkiness of real life and actual history. Tracking events we already know — from Reagan’s "evil empire" speech to Gorbachev’s glasnost — the series realizes it can’t pull off great big plot twists. It does, however, manage to do a lot with constant uncertainty and thrumming dread.

ADULT VIEWING: Lots of TV shows are packed with Game of Thrones-style sex and violence, making them unsuitable for children. That’s not necessarily the same as being grown-up, though. "Mature Content" in The Americans is actually mature, in the sense that it is complicated, nuanced, not easy.

Yes, there’s violence on The Americans. The Jenningses have killed dozens of people, but these deaths are never reduced to throwaway spectacle. Violence on this show has consequences, and it is stark, ugly and deeply felt. (See: Sadness, above.)

There’s also sex, but it’s never gratuitous. In fact, because it is part of the Jennings’ job description — setting honey traps and engaging in transactional faux-intimacy — the sex is often stunningly anti-erotic. I never want to see Philip’s sad post-orgasm face again.

LIKEABLE, SHMIKEABLE: Shows like Mad Men have played around with the lure of "difficult men." The Americans gives this now-tired trope a gender flip. Philip is the softer of the two spies. Leaning into his cover, he has become yearningly American, reading motivational books, exploring his feelings through EST seminars and — in a wonderfully goofy bit of period detail — taking up country-and-western line dancing.

Elizabeth, on the other hand, is flint-hard and emotionally cold, with an unwavering ideological devotion to Mother Russia. She’s a hell of an agent, but as a woman, wife and mother, she makes absolutely no concessions to our conventional expectations of female characters. It’s bracing, really, how little she cares.

FAN DANCE: As TV and fan culture become increasingly interactive, shows like Sherlock sometimes produce whole episodes that feel like winking responses to online superfans. The Americans is having none of that. The only fan service offered in Season 6 has been a cameo appearance by the FBI Mail Robot, a minor (mechanical) character beloved for its lumbering appearance and crack comic timing.

RUSSIAN ROULETTE: It’s become trendy to talk about "television in the age of Trump," but for The Americans, political relevance is entirely coincidental. When showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields started out in 2013, they had no idea that Russian sabotage of American institutions would become such a talking point.

YOU CAN’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT: OK, I can see I’m not really helping with the "You’ve got to watch The Americans" argument by describing the show as sad, confusing and unsexy, with characters who are possibly understandable but definitely not likeable and political relevance that’s completely accidental.

On the other hand, there’s tons of TV out there trying to figure out what you want and give you exactly that. And most of those shows turn out to be underwhelming. Maybe, as this contrarian, compelling and consistently excellent series suggests, what you want isn’t always what you need.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca