The Americans doesn’t end the way most fans have probably been thinking it would end.
The FX drama about a couple of Russian spies in 1980s Washington, with Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys as the deeply embedded Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings, wraps up at 10 p.m. ET Wednesday.
No spoilers here, except to say many viewers may be surprised by who’s left standing at the end. And where.
One of the drawbacks of writing an engaging show is that each tense season raises the stakes for the finale. With action shows, as opposed to lower-impact character dramas, there’s an unspoken imperative that it somehow has to top everything that came before.
Despite the writers’ best efforts, it usually doesn’t.
The Americans doesn’t, either. But it makes a good run, and that’s not a dismissive assessment – particularly since creators Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg are from the school that thinks it’s better to not to make everything black and white, but to require that the audience fill in some greys.
Weisberg, speaking to TV writers the other day about one particular scene in the finale, put it this way:
“We want to walk a fine line there, because we're very reluctant to impose too much of our thought process on a moment like that, where we really want to let the scene speak for itself. And the audience, sort of, have their own moment with it.
“We think everybody's going to view it differently. The other day somebody told us something about what they were feeling in that scene that was profoundly different from anything we ever felt about it.
“It's not our place to quash that or get in between somebody and their experience of the scene.”
This isn’t The Sopranos, which cut to black at a moment that could have finished the whole game or could have been just another moment. The Americans doesn’t leave the Jennings family sitting in a Jersey diner.
It does, however, reflect years of creative runup.
“At the very beginning there was no idea of how the show was going to end,” said Weisberg. “But when we got somewhere around the end of the first season, beginning of the second season, we suddenly got a very clear sense of the ending.
“And we had no idea if that ending was going to stick. If you had asked us, we would have told you oh, probably it won't. As you develop stories and characters change, odds are any ending you thought you were going to tell is going to end up being changed by all the things that came in between. But then we got to the end of the show and sure enough that ending was still the one that we liked best.”
Which is not to say it wrote itself.
Fields, referring to a pivotal confrontation in the final episode, says, “In the whole series, that was the scene we spent the most time writing. Went through the most drafts on. Probably had the most anxiety. We were never going to crack. Put down and walked away from.”
“We wrote the story,” says Weisberg. “Outlined a piece for that scene. And then we finally sort of wrote around it. And then we just said we got to sit down and write it. And we did. And we wound up with a surprisingly workable draft. But it was quite a distance from the scene that we wound up shooting.”
Fans who have followed the last two seasons, in particular, won’t find it any big spoiler that The Americans leaves a few loose ends.
“One of the joys of being able to plan so far ahead in these past two seasons is we're able to tell the story the way we wanted to,” says Fields. “For better and maybe for worse.”
What makes it into the finale, he says, is “the story as we saw it. We were able to let go of those [other] stories and characters, as hard as it was, in the moments when it felt like it was time to be done with them.”
In the end, Fields and Weisberg think The Americans finishes where six seasons have led.
“We consider it a plus,” says Weisberg, “that it’s going to surprise people. We were also aware it may disappoint some people. But as long as it rings true to us, we're happy.”