For 2013’s best of TV list, The A.V. Club’s TV writers got together to discuss the shows that got us talking the most over the past 12 months. Between now and December 20, we’ll be unveiling those shows, one per publication day, culminating in our picks for the top three shows of the year. Don’t forget to vote for your favorites of the year in our readers’ poll.
- Enlightened
- Breaking Bad
- Bob’s Burgers
- Orange Is The New Black
- Game Of Thrones
- Acquisition theater
- Mad Men
- New Girl & Girls
- The Good Wife
- Justified
- Hannibal
- Sundance Channel arrives
- Scandal
- The Americans
- Comedy Central’s new wave
- 25 honorable mentions
- The rest of the best TV
- Best TV of 2013 explanation
In 2013, no TV show used pop
music better than The
Americans. FX’s period spy thriller didn’t just dial up an
’80s station on Pandora, either—music supervisor Janice Ginsberg dug through
crates of Top 40 hits, new-wave and post-punk favorites, and power-pop
obscurities in order to enrich and inform the paranoid tale of two Soviet spies
posing as a married couple in suburban Washington, D.C. In that spirit, The
A.V. Club compiled this “mixtape” of the show’s best musical moments—so pop
this into your Walkman, Matthew Beeman.
1. Phil Collins, “In The Air
Tonight” (Pilot)
It’s an old trick: A TV show
announces itself with a piece of pop music, letting the strains of a familiar
song set the mood, the scene, and the time period. The Americans does so
with the red-light district saxophone of Quarterflash’s “Harden My Heart,” but that’s
just the watery shot of era-appropriate cheese-rock accompanying the barroom
operations of undercover KGB operative Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell). The
stiffer stuff comes much later in the extended pilot, when The Americans
dares to step on the toes of the grandaddy of pop-music/TV-thriller marriages:
the stylish, unofficial Phil Collins video slipped into the Miami Vice
pilot by its director, Thomas Carter. It’s bold, it’s brash, and—considering
the urban legend that
persists about the song’s inspiration— it’s kind of genius that it soundtracks
footage of Elizabeth and her sham husband and fellow spy, Philip (Matthew Rhys)
submerging the body of a defector. But that’s just the type of show The
Americans announced itself as.
2. Fleetwood Mac, “Tusk” (Pilot)
Of course, the “In The Air
Tonight” of The Americans
premiere is actually the title track from Fleetwood Mac’s double-LP
follow-up to Rumors. Interpolated with the Eastern European flourishes
of Nathan Barr’s instrumental score, the song lends the proper sense of
spy-movie dread to the Jennings’ first major narrative mindfuck. (And that’s
well before Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie, and Stevie Nicks get into the
pertinent lyrics about infidelity and duplicity.) “My initial inclination when
I decided I wanted to set the pilot in the Cold War was to go ’70s, strictly because
I loved the hair and the music,” creator Joe
Weisberg told The A.V. Club at the end of The
Americans’ first season. Certain factors—like the United States’
development of the Strategic Defense Initiative (a.k.a. the “Star Wars”
program)—persuaded him to update to the 1980s instead. This leaves Jennings
caught uncomfortably between the Carter administration’s peacekeeping efforts
and the Reagan administration’s saber-rattling—a pressure not unlike that felt
by Fleetwood Mac as it prepared Tusk, an AOR band outmoded (yet pushed
forward) by new wavers and punk rockers dreaming up their own destructive
equivalents of Star Wars.
3. Roxy Music, “Sunset” (“Gregory”)
The Americans isn’t
unique in portraying the human cost of international conflict; as long as Homeland is
still airing, it also won’t be alone in providing an evenhanded look at the
costs on both sides of rhetorical lines, either. But the coda of the series’
third episode demonstrates the laser-like emotional precision that sets The
Americans apart. Guided by a retiring Bryan Ferry warble, Thomas Schlamme’s camera glides over tableaus of difficult new beginnings: The Jennings
making a serious go at marriage; the parents of their fallen comrade meeting their
infant grandson; friendly neighborhood counterintelligence agent Stan Beeman
coming across the body of the kid’s mother, rendered as collateral damage by
the Soviets. As Ferry sings in “Sunset,” one last sigh of farewell, goodbye—and
a pivotal vow from Beeman to protect the KGB mole recently placed in his care.
4. Echo & The Bunnymen, “The
Pictures On My Wall” (“In
Control”)
Dramatic irony is a deadly
temptation for historical fiction. Sure, the viewer knows the truth behind the
attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life, but wouldn’t it be neat to see how the
characters react to the situation? “In Control” avoids becoming the Americans
equivalent to Mad
Men’s JFK assassination episode, because its characters are legitimately
close to the crime. Until the authorities finger John Hinckley Jr., it’s
entirely plausible that the crime is phase one of a KGB-led coup. The show’s
natural state of paranoia is amplified by a flood of misinformation, press
conferences with Secretary Of State Al “I’m in control here” Haig, and a cut
from Echo & The Bunnymen’s post-punk classic Crocodiles. Turns out
nothing’s burning and nothing’s changing (aside from Jodie Foster’s security
detail), but that personal stockade Elizabeth unloads suggests that this story
could’ve had a more explosive conclusion.
5. Fad Gadget, “The Box” (“Duty And
Honor”)
Outwardly frigid and
mechanical, Frank Tovey’s early Fad Gadget recordings should be to
Reagan/Gorbachev-era espionage what a tremolo pedal is to the sexier heroics of
the Kennedy/Khrushchev years. It also makes fittingly steely theme music for
Elizabeth’s model of femme fatale, the hard-ass with a closet full of wigs and
fists that can unnerve even a legendary TV intimidator like Margo Martindale. (“SHOW
THEM YOUR FACE!”) A weaselly SDI worker with a gambling problem should be no
match for her Joan Jett alter ego—he’s basically the self-imposed prisoner of
Tovey’s song already. But Ginsberg’s choice of “The Box” is cannier than that.
With her unyielding principles and impossible standards, Elizabeth’s in her own
sort of trap. (Also: That SDI rat isn’t as stupid as he appears.)
6. The Cure, “Siamese Twins”
(“Mutually
Assured Destruction”)
For a series as fatalistic
and emotionally vulnerable as The Americans, The Cure had to sneak onto
the turntable at some point. It just so happens that the show got Pornography a year early, turning to the downward gothic spiral that ends the record’s
first side when a bombing leaves parties on either side of the Iron Curtain
feeling particularly defenseless and impotent. Never mind how beautifully the
track’s titular image dovetails with the dual nature of the show’s
principals—the devastating blow of deaths the KGB and the FBI did everything to
prevent demands of such miserablist depths. Bonus points for the way Soviet
double agent Nina describes espionage gamesmanship—“We want to everyone to stay
right where they are and bleed everything they know out of them—forever”—in
terms The Cure frontman Robert Smith would approve. They chose an eternity of
this, indeed.
7. Roberta Flack, “To Love
Somebody” (“Only
You”)
The refreshing breeze of
entertainment across The Americans’ Cold War tensions blows from the
sense that its characters are the figures typically squeezed into the margins
of the history books. The show manages to sell its domestic drama, because it’s
so interested in pinpointing the stories of these forgotten foot
soldiers—people like Gregory Thomas, an associate recruited as part of the KGB’s
efforts to attract black militants in the 1960s. As such, he’s a man out of
time, the most concentrated example of an Americans character finding
difficulty with backing the ever-changing “cause” as it pushes toward nuclear
brinksmanship and conveniently ignores what Gregory and his colleagues once
fought for. That displacement can be heard in the Fleetwood Mac and Pete
Townshend tracks that made their way into The Americans, but it’s most
pronounced in Gregory’s swan song, Roberta Flack’s cover of “To Love Somebody.”
Breaking from the synthesizers, drum machines, and British detachment, Flack’s
bluesy reading of the Bee Gees’ tune also sums up Gregory’s romantic feelings
for Elizabeth, another passion for which he’s willing to go down in a hail of
gunfire.
8. Peter Gabriel, “Games
Without Frontiers” (“The
Colonel”)
The first season is slippery to the end: After
the Jennings barely escape a sabotage, a final montage of the season’s events
details the secrets and disclosures the main characters carry with them to the
next round of The Americans. A pair of dossiers and a hidden wedding
ring remake the rules of the not-so-silly games these people play, but as in
the outlandish international game show Peter Gabriel sends up in “Games Without
Frontiers,” there can only be one winner. This time it’s Elizabeth and Philip,
who don’t just agree to reconcile (breaking an oath and doing so in their
native tongue even)—they also keep their greatest secret hidden from their
children. The use of “Games Without Frontiers” marks a full circle from the
pilot (a skeletal, percussion-driven sound shared with “Tusk”;
gated drums played by Phil Collins, just like “In The Air Tonight), but it’s
also a taunt. If young Paige can get so close to unintentionally exposing her
parents, imagine what someone actually looking for spies (like the FBI agent
across the street) might find next year.