Truth is trouble
The new season of The Americans starts with a dilemma: what do you do with a daughter, a wife and a pastor who all know too much?
The Americans Season 4 Tuesdays (from 7 June) M-Net Edge (*102) 20:00
KGB deep- cover agents Nadezhda and Mischa (Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys) are living a lie as suburban-USA couple Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, parents to Henry (Keidrich Sellati) and Paige (Holly Taylor). Mischa’s also juggling his identity as Clark Westerfeld, husband of his clueless mole Martha (Alison Wright), the secretary for the FBI Counter-intelligence Department. Secrets are their way of life; it’s the truth that kills and Philip and Elizabeth’s greatest risk of exposure comes from the two people closest to them. She realised that Clark wasn’t working for the FBI (episode 8 of season 3, 2015). And in the season 4 premiere, she demands to know who he is. But the more she knows, the closer she gets to having her corpse stuffed into a suitcase, unless she blabs to her FBI work buddy Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich) – aka the Jennings’ next door neighbour – first.
Philip and Elizabeth have been ordered to recruit their daughter to the KGB, a mission complicated by the fact that she’s now an evangelical Christian. In episode 10 of season 3, they told her that they’re Russian spies after she spied on them herself and Paige tattled to her church mentor Pastor Tim (Kelly AuCoin) in the season 3 finale (October 2015). In episode 2 of season 4 (14 June), Philip and Elizabeth weigh up what to do about Tim. Season 4 would be so much simpler if they could just become decadent capitalists!