Anonymous Commenter

I wish I could understand why this absolute trash is so popular. "The Americans" seems to follow shows like the Breaking Bad/BCS series in presenting morally complicated characters and forcing us to get close to them to convince us to sympathize with even the worst kinds of people there are. Except unlike those shows, it gives you absolutely no reason to feel any sort of sympathy. They willingly destroy their daughter's life and erase any sort of altruism she once felt, practically neglect their son, ingrain themselves into people's lives so they can destroy them, brutally murder scores of mostly innocent people, and, to balance it out and exact our sympathies... feel guilty about it for maybe a few minutes every couple of episodes (and even then, only in later seasons), and sometimes mention that they didn't have much food growing up. While failing at its main goal of making us understand and sympathize with morally "complex" (in quotes because I honestly failed to grasp any complexity here) characters, the show fails even worse at portraying spies. It takes some serious mental gymnastics to believe that a 40 year old woman can simultaneously beat up two well-trained FBI agents because she was trained decades beforehand, and apparently, Soviet training is akin to superpowers. Apparently, all it takes to outmaneuver a group of 20 well-resourced CIA agents is a radio jamming machine, all it takes to murder with impunity is a fake mustache and a wig, and it just so happens that just about everyone in any position of power is single, lonely, and desperate for sex (in the early seasons, this premise basically sums up every single episode). At one point in the show, a Soviet agent tries to steal a dangerous bioweapon, gets caught, injects himself with it and dies of it, and then, despite knowing the Russians had just tried to steal the weapon... the Americans just leave the infected body basically unattended? I think they rambled a bit about some guard schedule before they did it, but reasonably, it was lax enough that you could literally show up with a group of like 10 people and dig a body out and then escape. If you want to turn your brain completely off and watch some terrorists having aggressive sex, then I guess this is a good show for you. If you want a complex show that forces you to sympathize with the villain while creating realistic tension, then this show is just so, so far from that, and it's baffling to me that people have convinced themselves otherwise.