The Americans Renewed for Seasons 5 and 6 as FX Sets End Date

Going to be sad to see it go, but I'm glad they are not dragging it out like the walking dead. Great TV show.

Thanks to Putin, there's room for a 21st century reboot.

quote:

---

they always wanted 6 seasons. glad they're getting it. probably going to hit the climax by the end of this season and see the falling action over the next two

---

The Americans is following the structure of a Shakespearean five-act tragedy

To understand why I think this way, you have to know a little bit about story structure.

Most of the time when we talk about cinematic story structure, we're talking about the three-act structure with a beginning, middle, and end, which looks something like this:



Many screenwriting students are taught three-act structure in this fashion — have a character climb a tree, throw rocks at them, then get them down from the tree. (This advice, popularized by screenwriting guru Syd Field, is commonly attributed to Mark Twain, though no one knows who actually said it first.)

That works well in movies, because movies have finite running times. On a TV show, structuring three acts becomes much tougher, because the second act tends to stretch on forever and the writers run out of rocks to throw at the characters.

That's why many of the best TV shows (including Breaking Bad and The Sopranos) use a five-act structure — or that thing you learned about in high school when you were reading Romeo and Juliet for the first time.

The main difference here is time. You'll notice the shape is roughly the same, but the five-act structure gives both the buildup to and fall from the climax whole acts to breathe. Instead of getting stuck in a never-ending second act, much of the story is pushed to the fourth act, or the fallout from the big moment. And on TV, time is everything:



The Americans has reached its climax right on schedule

Consider this: At the January 2015 Television Critics Association winter press tour, FX president told reporters he thought The Americans would run at least five years. And when I later interviewed showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields, Fields said:

"We're telling a long character story, and we're setting up pieces of things that we hope will pay off far down the line. We have this big story in our mind that we want to tell."

There's some sort of plan, then. Maybe even a five-year one?

And the show is winking at it. One of the very first things viewers hear in the series are the thumping drums of Fleetwood Mac's primal hit "Tusk," which plays over the opening sequence of the pilot.

"There's some sort of plan, then. Maybe even a five-year one?"

The show hasn't gone back to the band's catalog since then — or at least it hadn't until the third season's seventh episode, which concluded with "The Chain" by the same artists over a sequence of significant importance. And if The Americans runs five years, that episode will be its exact midpoint — the high point of the five-act structure. The use of Fleetwood Mac underlines the moment's importance.

Or consider the way "Stingers" features two massive revelations, of the sort viewers might expect the show to spin out for many more episodes.

There is way to much good info n this article to post. A damn good read

LINK