What The Americans Gets Right About Spying and Intimacy
At the End of Its Third Season, the Best Show on TV Keeps Its Friends Close and Its Enemies Very Close
With the close of its third season, The Americans, Joe Weisberg’s twisty spy drama, remains the best show on television. It’s not excellent because it’s often thrilling—though it is—but because it understands that espionage is about the cultivation of intimacy rather than the mere collection of intelligence. At its core, it tells a story about human relationships, about the bonds we form, the way that we form them, and how we change in the process.
Along with his collaborators, Weisberg, who once served as a CIA officer, staged The Americans’ latest …
