March 31, 2015

“The Americans” Is One Of The Best Shows On Television

Courtesy of FX.

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Do you watch The Americans? You should watch The Americans! Why don’t you watch The Americans? Do you not watch it because it’s about Soviet spies who love each other and also work together to bring down America by wearing wigs and having sexxxxxxx? Well, guess what? That’s only sort of what it’s about. It’s really about a marriage. Are you married? If you’re married, you’ll relate to this show a lot.

You’ll watch it and be like “God, my wife and I just had a very similar fight about how to raise our daughter.” Just replace spying for the Soviets with whatever you do for a living. They’re so cute together, The Americans! They love each other so much, but they’re torn in different directions by competing loyalties, and they don’t know what to do! Bonus: I recently found out that The Americans are dating in real life, which is so cute OMG.

I love The Americans. I’m not nuts about the dumb kids, and some of the storylines are dumb, but the show is really great. The one thing I don’t like about the show is that The Americans are not actually Americans, they’re Soviets and I don’t like rooting for people who are trying to bring down America. I keep hoping they’re going to defect.

But I think they probably won’t. They seem to like communism a lot. But at the same time they also like living in America and enjoying the fruits of capitalism. Their minds are all messed up! You can see what a complicated situation they’re in. A lot of D-R-A-M-A.

Anyway, it’s one of the second best show on television.

The problem is, not that many people watch it. :(((.

The ratings for season 3 are in the hole. A cloud of pessimism and fear has overshadowed the last few episodes; I figured it was unlikely to get renewed by FX for a fourth season. But, guess what? Good news! It’s coming back!

So start watching it please oh dear god I beg you please watch it, please! We can be best friends if you watch it.

Update, Wednesday, March 16, 2016: Tonight is the night! The Americans season 4 premiers on FX at 10pm ET. Get excited. Here’s the trailer:

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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