You need to be watching The Americans.
I don't just mean you need to be watching in the usual colloquial way—although I do mean that, because it is the best drama on television, even though it, like The Wire, seems to have escaped the notice of Emmy voters.
I mean, you need to be watching. Watching closely.
The Americans is an exceptional case in today's TV landscape: It is a show that demands your undivided attention. There's no checking your Twitter or Instagram feeds; the show shuts down all second screens. (Even though Henry Jennings, a boy so amped about video games he'll break into his neighbor's house to play, finally gets a computer this season.) The Americans is about picking up clues, about the telling eyebrow raise, the ordinary-seeming coffee cup left by the bench, the car that turned left after signaling right. You have to watch so hard that you feel like you're spying on these Russian spies—which, in a way, you are.
The first few seasons of The Americans found Phillip and Elizabeth (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell) figuring out what was real in their marriage; no easy feat considering that, for almost 20 years, they didn't even know each others' real names. But as these undercover agents have found their way toward a relationship they know is real, feeling toward love and honesty like fumbling for a light switch in the dark, another relationship in their lives threatened to implode.
Their teenage daughter, Paige (A+ teen Holly Taylor), had that spidey-sense that her parents were up to… something. She probably did not expect that something to be, We're Russian spies pretending to be Americans, and you can literally never tell anyone we told you this, or we will go to prison and you'll never see us again. But you know what they say—you can't choose your parents!—so Paige ended season three by spilling her parents' state secrets over the phone to her beloved Pastor Tim.
If season three ended with supporting characters finally understanding (at least part of) the central truths in the series—Martha (Alison Wright), the FBI secretary who married Phillip-as-Clark, finally saw her husband without his disguise; Paige came face-to-face with her Soviet DNA when she met her ailing Russian grandmother—season four is about, well, what now? What do you do with the truth once you have it? Does a new, startling truth do more damage to your psyche than a familiar lie ever did? Are truths like lies: Once you start telling them, you don't know when to stop?
It's something everyone is reckoning with: Nina (Annet Mahendru) knows that the scientist she's supposed to be working with has a son who thinks he's dead; she's spitting distance from freedom, and acting on that intel could destroy her chances of ever getting out. Can Pastor Tim live with himself if he helps Paige help her parents commit treason? Can he live with himself if he betrays her trust instead? Martha knows exactly what "Clark" has done, and would do again, to protect her; where does she go from there? Or does she have nowhere left to go?
It's Martha, it turns out, who most quickly adapts to her new reality. In Wright's capable hands, she has transformed from a frumpy, lonely-hearted woman so desperate to be loved she bought Clark's dicey story (not to mention that alarming toupee) into someone taking ownership over a life she never would have chosen for herself, rising to face her unimaginable circumstances with a fierce dignity.
Season Four is, in the four episodes made available to critics, quieter than the three that came before it. Think less honey-trapping and breaking-a-corpse-into-a-suitcase, more ephemeral threats: biological warfare, familial implosion. Some of the most violent, unsparing scenes happen in dream sequences and flashbacks, as if to suggest that reality is nowhere near as brutal a place as any one of these characters' subconscious.
When Phillip and Elizabeth talk to each other, everything is code for something else. They are still, after all they've been through, on opposite sides of an existential crisis: Elizabeth will do whatever it takes to keep their cover and stay loyal to Mother Russia, while Phillip keeps growing more distant from the country of his birth and more disillusioned with what his spy work requires of him.
The season premiere gives us a glimpse into Phillip's childhood, and it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a cold and brutal one. He might be even closer to a breaking point than Paige is. He can't bear to add to his body count. He can't, that is, until he does.