The Americans: Season 6

Say this for The Americans - it went out on its own terms. The sultry and sometimes agonizingly slow spy thriller didn't turn into Breaking Bad for its final run, pitting FBI agent Stan against his neighbors and best friends for a thrilling blood-soaked run of betrayal and emotions. Nor did it ultimately pit man against wife, mother against daughter, or daughter against brother, as seemed to be the case early on this year. Instead, sure enough, the Jennings marriage endured, and when their big secret came crashing down on them, it did so quickly and coldly and without much fanfare. There was a hell of a parking garage showdown, sure, but that was really all; Stan was never going to pull that trigger, and everyone in that parking garage knew it. Even Stan. Especially Stan, maybe.

That's not to say it wasn't an emotional finale. The phone call! The train scene! Ugh, God, poor Oleg! But when The Americans was given, tow years ago, another twenty-odd episodes to close out its run, I didn't think it'd be tying up so many of those ends in the final episode, instead of before it, the way a lesser show like Sons of Anarchy did, a body count just piling way the hell up and up and up, the show no longer fun to watch at all.

I'm not sure what I'm saying naymore, or if there's a point I'm trying to make. In the end, I loved The Americans, but never quite head-over-heels loved it, if that makes sense. It took six years to get to a place it likely could have made it in four, and I'm just not certain all that extra time was spent as efficiently as it could have been.

Is it just me, or does the end of this show feel like the end of a certain era of television? Seems like the six-year-spanning prestige drama is more or less dead now, no? Everything good now, all of the head-turning new stuff, is an anthology series or a half-hour or some different format entirely. Or at the very least, maybe the acclaimed antihero prestige drama is what's dead. Because what do we have left on that front? A bunch of shit on Showtime and like, Ozark?

I digress. The Americans was awesome and its finale did not disappoint. Even if its final season dragged and sagged in the middle, just a little, I mean, hey. That's what this show always was, baby!