The Americans Review: Season 3, Dimebag, and How It All Ended

The Americans review: what the show is and why season 3 matters

The Americans ran on FX for six seasons, from January 30, 2013 to May 30, 2018, and it was created by Joe Weisberg, a former CIA officer who published a spy novel, An Ordinary Spy, in 2007 before he turned to television. Joel Fields served as co-showrunner. The premise is easy to state and hard to stop watching: Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, are KGB officers living in Falls Church, Virginia as a travel-agency couple with two American kids, and the series begins just after Ronald Reagan's inauguration in January 1981.

Most spy television treats the cover life as scenery. This show treats it as the subject. Every wig, dead drop and recruitment sits next to a school run, a birthday dinner or a marriage that was assigned before it was chosen. That tension is why the third season, which covers late 1982 through March 8, 1983 and the night of Reagan's Evil Empire speech, is such a useful place to judge the series. Thirteen episodes aired between January 28 and April 22, 2015, and the family at the center of them has stopped being able to keep its two lives apart.

The review of episode 4 opened with a blunt verdict: the show had brought its best work so far that season, and this installment lacked the shock value of episodes 2 and 3 but landed an emotional punch anyway. The piece was written week by week, as the season aired on Wednesday nights, and it reads like a reaction to one hour of television. This updated version keeps that judgment and adds what a reader in 2026 can now see from the far end of the series.

Dimebag: the plot in brief

Dimebag is the fourth episode of season 3, directed by Thomas Schlamme, written by Peter Ackerman, and first broadcast on February 18, 2015. Philip is ordered to work Kimmy, the teenage daughter of the head of the CIA's Afghan group, who has become a babysitter for an agent whose phone Philip bugged. The assignment is the most uncomfortable one the show had given him, because Kimmy is only a few years older than his own daughter.

At home, Paige turns her birthday dinner into an announcement. Instead of inviting school friends, she asks that her pastor and his wife come, and then says she wants to be baptized. Pastor Tim and his wife back her up at the table, and Elizabeth and Philip realize Paige set the whole thing up so that the request could not be refused in front of guests. Meanwhile Nina, now in prison, is pressed to get a confession out of her cellmate, and Stan speaks his mind at an EST meeting and is asked out by a woman named Tori.

Elizabeth, Philip and the argument over Paige

The review's strongest point is about the marriage. Philip and Elizabeth are no longer on the same side of the one question that matters at home. Philip wants Paige kept away from anything to do with the KGB. Elizabeth, who treats her service as an identity and not a job, wants her daughter brought into the only life she has ever known. The review singled out the moment in which Elizabeth looks at Philip and tells him she is going ahead with or without him, and said it made the writer say "oh, snap" out loud.

The review resisted the easy reading of Elizabeth as the villain of the house. Her conviction is complete, and the cost of raising children in a country she regards as shallow is something the show lets her feel. Philip, for his part, spends the hour doing to Kimmy the thing he is fighting to prevent at home, which is taking the innocence of a teenager apart for information. The review called that nauseating, and the episode plays it as exactly that, with Rhys letting Philip's discomfort show only where Philip himself would allow it.

Loss of innocence as the theme

The review named the theme directly: loss of innocence. Philip protects one teenager from the KGB while he recruits another into it, and Paige, on a separate track, wants to wash away her old self and be clean. Those threads rhyme without anyone underlining them. The review also noted that Holly Taylor was growing into the part of Paige, and said the performance made the recruitment storyline more compelling than the writer expected.

Faith matters here for a plot reason too. A girl who has found a church is a girl who has found a set of values that her parents do not share, and the review wondered how that would interact with her eventual recruitment. The show answered that question over the following seasons, but the question itself is the best argument for treating season 3 as the point where Paige became a character and not a worry.

Stan, Nina and the slower threads

Not every storyline earned the same praise. The review found Stan's arc, in which he tries to repair his marriage after losing Nina, the weakest part of the hour, and said it had little point beyond filling time. The reasoning was blunt: the character fell in love with an asset and now wants sympathy. The review did like seeing Stan work as the sharp FBI agent he is, and it was curious whether a new Russian contact was real or planted.

Nina got a warmer reception. Annet Mahendru's character, a clerical worker turned KGB agent and Stan's former informant, is in prison in these episodes, and she is handed more spy duties in exchange for a lighter sentence. The review enjoyed watching her operate as the capable spy it always believed she could be, and the cellmate storyline supplies the episode's quieter suspense.

The supporting cast and the season around it

Season 3 widened the ensemble while it tightened the family. Lev Gorn, Costa Ronin and Richard Thomas were promoted to series regulars that year, and Frank Langella and Margo Martindale appeared as recurring players alongside Julia Garner and Callie Thorne. Martindale's work as Claudia earned her a guest actress Emmy for the season, which says something about how much weight a recurring role carried in a show built on two leads.

That depth is part of why a single episode review can say so much with so little plot. Because the series had spent two seasons establishing what each person wanted, a short scene of Stan at a self-help meeting or Nina leaning on a cellmate arrives with history attached. The reader who comes to Dimebag cold gets a good hour of television. The reader who comes to it after seasons 1 and 2 gets the whole structure of favors, lies and loyalties underneath it.

There is also the matter of period. The season is set in the early 1980s, and the show uses the decade lightly, with an album bought for a daughter, a pastor at a birthday table, an EST meeting and a government fretting over counter-terrorism. None of it is winking. The details sit in the background so the performances can stay in the foreground.

The Americans at a glance: seasons, episodes and key facts

Figures as listed in the Wikipedia articles on the series and its third season.

What happened to The Americans after season 3

The show kept building. Season 4 premiered on March 16, 2016 with Glanders, season 5 on March 7, 2017 with Amber Waves, and the sixth and final season on March 28, 2018 with Dead Hand. The series finale, titled START, aired on May 30, 2018 as episode 10 of the last season, closing a run of 75 episodes. For a drama that had to hold a single premise across a decade of story time, ending on its own schedule is an achievement in its own right.

The awards arrived late and then arrived in force. Matthew Rhys won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for the final season in 2018, and Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg won the Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series for START. Margo Martindale won the guest actress Emmy twice, for her work in seasons 3 and 4. The series also won a Golden Globe for Best Television Series, Drama, cited to January 2019 coverage of the final season, and two Peabody Awards. The Peabody committee honored the finale in 2019, praising the series for ending one of television's best dramas with one of its best finales.

Critical standing shifted from respected to canonical. The third season holds a 100 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes across 53 reviews and a Metacritic score of 92 from 23 critics, per the season's Wikipedia entry. Vox wrote in 2015 that the show was on one of the best runs of episodes in television drama history, and the series later turned up on The Guardian's list of the 100 best TV shows of the 21st century and Rolling Stone's list of the 100 greatest TV shows of all time. That is a lot of weight for a series that, at the time of this review, was still an underwatched cable drama.

Verdict: is The Americans worth watching now?

The review's conclusion about episode 4 holds up. Dimebag is not the loudest hour of season 3, but it is the one where the show's central argument becomes visible: two people who were assigned to each other now disagree about what to do with the child they raised under cover. If you are deciding where to start, begin at the pilot. Season 3 rewards investment in the first two seasons, and the Paige thread, the Stan and Nina thread and the Martha thread all pay off for viewers who have watched them grow.

The honest criticism stands too. Stan's counseling storyline drags in this episode, and the show's patience with its own subplots can try a casual viewer. Anyone who wants a faster spy story will find the pacing deliberate. What the series offers in return is the rare thriller in which the family drama is the espionage, and the review's single strongest sentence is its simplest: the writers are building tension scene by scene so that the audience arrives at the finish at its breaking point. After six seasons, they did.

A word on tone for newcomers. The review's title promised something flippant, and the writing is chatty and quick to joke, but the show it describes is not a comedy and rarely lets anyone off the hook. Philip's disgust at his own assignment, Elizabeth's certainty and Paige's search for something clean are all played straight. The jokes belong to the reviewer; the discomfort belongs to the series.

If one scene explains why the show is still discussed, it is the marriage argument. Two people who have trusted each other with their lives are now negotiating over a teenager's future, and neither can fully tell the other why they are right without revealing how much they have each compromised. That argument runs through the remaining seasons, and Dimebag is where it stops being polite.

One last practical point for anyone planning a viewing. The series asks for attention, and subtitles come up often because a good deal of the dialogue between Soviet characters is in Russian. A viewer who treats it as background television will miss the small gestures that carry the plot, such as who sits down first, who stops talking, and who takes the last word. Episode 4 is full of those gestures, and the review caught the loudest one.

For readers who care about the order of things, the series is complete, it is not coming back, and the ending is considered one of the best that television has produced. Watch it from the start, and watch season 3 as a unit.

Sources

• The Americans (2013 TV series), Wikipedia — Series dates, episode counts, cast, awards
• The Americans season 3, Wikipedia — Season 3 episode list, air dates, credits and reception