The Americans series finale was one of TV's best, with its shift from theater to silent cinema

Vulture

"The subdued finale, says Matt Zoller Seitz, "is one of the best that I’ve seen, a terrific example of an ending that summarizes what the series was about while putting a new frame around it. 'START' pulverizes any idea of a script for these role-players to 'play' and forces them to work off-script. The privilege (or excuse) of needing to stick to the script, rain or shine, has allowed Philip and Elizabeth to break every last one of the Ten Commandments in the name of a higher ideal: the destruction of America and capitalism. It has also allowed Stan, the beer-drinking, flag-saluting Yankee, to feel patriotic even after hacksawing huge ethical corners, including falling in love with a double agent (later triple-agent) and straight-up murdering a Soviet operative in retaliation for the KGB killing his partner. (Philip did that deed, but thankfully Stan never found out.) Everybody’s gone off-script now, and the series goes off-script with them. And so The Americans, a series that has never shied away from its TV-ness, goes in a startling new direction in its final chapter, envisioning its two most important sequences as, respectively, a stage play produced without costumes or sets in a parking garage, and a Russian silent movie that carries much of its meaning through images, confining dialogue to a few sentences so tight-lipped that they could fit on old-fashioned title cards."

ALSO:

• The finale was frustrating more than satisfying: It felt limp, unwilling to push its characters too far
• It was surprising in that it made a climax out of a series of anti-climaxes: "The episode was a litany of things that did not happen"
• The Americans leaving on a morally ambiguous note felt like the surest way out of the series
• The Americans needed to stick the landing, and it did with an ending that felt true to the main characters
• Though it was unexpected, the finale did live up to the spirit of the past six seasons
• There was a "quiet elegance" in the way The Americans chose to end the series
• The finale managed to tick off the necessary boxes without turning into fan service
• The Americans landed on a conclusion that reflects the series as a whole: Tense, understated, affecting, and one of the greats
• The Americans never told open-and-shut stories, so it makes sense that ambiguity crept into the ending
• Keri Russell cried reading the finale script at a restaurant, Matthew Rhys cried reading it on a train
• Rhys says the garage scene took nine hours to film, but the train scene was the toughest because they used an actual moving train
• Rhys didn't think Renee was a spy, but Russell isn't as sure
• Noah Emmerich said he thought the garage scene was "very beautiful and humane and poetic, and very Americans"
• Emmerich says Stan made a "humanistic choice": "It was too conflicted for Stan"
• Holly Taylor: "I was so shocked when I read that. I was not expecting that at all"
• Taylor predicts where Paige will be in five to 10 years after the series finale
• Showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields are keeping mum on what they think happens after the series finale
• Creator Weisberg said he and Fields found that this was the only ending that worked: "We did our due diligence and we ran every single possible other ending of the show through our brains to see if there was a better one, but this was still the one that we loved the best and seemed to be the most natural and true ending of this story."
• The garage scene wasn't an idea that was planned years in advance
• Fields and Weisberg aren't interested in doing any spinoffs, not even with Renee, Martha or Claudia
• Fields and Weisberg pick their eight favorite musical moments from the entire series
• Read an oral history of "START," The Americans' series finale
• Check out The Americans cast outside of their roles at a Wednesday night series finale event