Drama, comedy, reality: This is one of those nights where TV is firing on all cylinders.
Let's start with the heavy lifting. One of TV's most encouraging survival stories returns with the fifth-season premiere of TNT's uncommonly gritty police drama Southland (10/9c), a network reject (from NBC's darkest period) that thrives on cable, with a sharper focus and a determined avoidance of procedural cliché.
Each episode is like a graphic tour of duty on the streets of Los Angeles, and in the opener, it's not always immediately clear if the patrol cops and detectives in the line of fire are witnessing a real crime or make believe or some other sort of scam. (One vignette involving a brawl between naked men in a sauna looks like an outtake from Spartacus.) "Treat it like a circus," seasoned training office John Cooper (Michael Cudlitz) advises his latest ride-along, an Afghan War vet with too much attitude. The media circus threatens to consume Cooper's former partner Ben Sherman (Ben McKenzie), newly decorated and enjoying the attention a bit too much. Grounding these characters in the mundane distractions of unblemished real life, Detective Lydia Adams (Regina King) is adjusting to single motherhood with...
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We were all a little stunned when Felicity Porter, the University of New York's most famous student (aka Keri Russell), showed up as a gun-toting operative alongside Tom Cruise in 2005's Mission: Impossible III. But the gamble worked. Nobody was talking about her haircut, that's for sure. In a weird way, then, Russell's role on FX's The Americans is a logical progression. She and Brothers & Sisters' Matthew Rhys play Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings, married spies who live in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in the early 1980s, but there's a twist: They work for the other guys, specifically Cold War-era Soviets.
TVGuide.com sat down with Russell to find out why she signed on, what's in store for the Jenningses and how Felicity creator J.J. Abrams had a certain prescience about her new job...
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Felicity as Mata Hari? The mind reels. And yet there's Keri Russell, once America's sweetheart on The WB, bewigged and brazenly seducing classified secrets out of a Department of Justice stooge in the opening minutes of FX's engrossing spies-among-us drama The Americans (Wednesday, 10/9c).
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On FX's new drama The Americans, two Russian spies move to the United States, start a family and spy on — you guessed it — America. Welcome to the height of the Cold War, an era when Americans lived in constant fear that the Russians could get the upper hand. The cleverness of The Americans is that the show actually gets you rooting for the bad guys. That's because, deep down, the series is a family drama — this just isn't your conventional family...
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In FX's new Cold War-era spy drama The Americans, viewers may actually find themselves rooting for... the Russians. At least that's what producers hope for.
FX reveals premiere date for The Americans
The Americans stars Felicity's Keri Russell and Brothers & Sisters' Matthew Rhys as married KGB sleeper agents stationed in Washington, D.C., whose entire lives in America have been carefully crafted — even down to the two children they have together — in order to protect their true identities. Despite their shady dealings and ultimate goals to topple the American government, viewers may find themselves sympathizing with the couple since, at its core, the show is a family drama.
"We want you to...
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