It’s becoming a norm for members of a show's creative team to dictate when they would prefer to end the original programs they have worked on for years. Cable channel FX has always been particularly good about working with various collaborators on shows, which is why dramas like Justified and Sons of Anarchy have ended on a high note. We recently heard from the executive producer of FX’s other series The Americans, Joel Fields, who also mentioned the 1980s spy drama has a timeline for when the team would like the show to end. Here’s what he had to say at the TCA winter press tour.
What we do know is that if you were to think of it as a three-act story structure, it feels like we’re coming toward the end of the second act. Whether it takes a fifth season or a sixth or fifth season to tell the rest of that story, we’ll discover as we start to dig into next season’s work.
If Fields’ timeline hold true, we are already about to begin the latter portion of the show’s run. Last spring, The Americans was renewed for a fourth season, which will consist of 13 episodes, similar to past seasons. While I will say that I was a little less excited about watching Season 3 than I had been about the previous two seasons, the show left off with a lot of questions regarding Paige, the potential to be caught and Phil’s ultimate loyalties at the end of Season 4, so there’s plenty more ground that the show could cover, should FX greenlight The Americans for Season 5 and 6 as Fields has indicated the network might.
Of course, The Americans has never been the ratings bringer that other FX shows have been. The most recent season of the drama hovered right around a million total viewers in Live+ Same Day numbers, although the show picked up a bit thanks to the DVR crowd. Ultimately, however, Fields seems fairly confident that The Americans will end when the creative team is ready to write its last script (via THR).
We’ll do what’s right for the storytelling and we always seem to surprise ourselves.
While The Americans has traditionally premiered in January or February, FX is holding off for a bit this season. The fourth season of the hit spy drama—which is just as much about familial issues as it is about wigs and other disguises—will hit the schedule on March 16, 2016. While we wait for the show to come back, you can find out when your other favorites will be returning with our winter TV premiere schedule.
