You could be forgiven for holding your breath during the nail-biting final 20 minutes of last week’s episode of “The Americans” as Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth (Keri Russell) finally told their daughter Paige (Holly Taylor) the truth — that they’re Russian spies.
The secret has been building for the past two-and-a-half seasons on the FX drama, with the teenage Paige’s suspicions about her parents’ double life reaching a fever pitch just as the KGB decided they’d like to recruit her to their ranks.
The pivotal moment finds Paige reeling from the shocking revelation and with plenty of questions in Wednesday’s episode (10 p.m. on FX).
The Post posed some of our own to series creator Joe Weisberg and executive producer Joel Fields (who wrote last week’s episode) about where “The Americans” goes from here.
How did you decide that this was the right moment for Paige to learn the truth?
Fields: We’ve known for so long that Philip and Elizabeth were going to tell Paige, but the moment that it was going to happen has moved around. At first it was going to be toward the end of Season 2, then at the end of Season 2, then right at the beginning of Season 3, then at the very end of Season 3, then right in the middle. We’ve really been guided by how the storytelling has naturally fallen. As we moved through this season, this episode became the place where it had to happen.
Talk about the decision to have Paige demand the truth, which ended the debate on when her parents — or which — would tell her.
Weisberg: We talked about the fact that with Philip and Elizabeth having their plans … that the wild card was going to be Paige. That she’s a full, independent person with her own ideas for herself. Once we came up with the idea of her asking, it made her fit right into that psychological understanding of the family dynamic.
Fields: It also allowed … after all this conflict between [Philip and Elizabeth], a chance for them to acknowledge … they held onto each other. They loved each other and neither of them betrayed that trust.
How are we to interpret Paige’s reaction to this news?
Weisberg: The information itself — although she’s known for a long time that something is wrong with her family — what it turns out to be is so surprising and so hard to compute that she doesn’t really know what to do with it. I think she’s in pain and in shock and is going to take some time — and we’ll see how much — to even digest it.
Now that Paige knows, what are going to be the big questions for the rest of this season?
Weisberg: How is she going to react? You’ve got three episodes to track this kid’s response to this cataclysmic event in her life. If Paige were 90 years old on her deathbed, she would talk about the day in the kitchen. What are the days and weeks after that moment going to be like in her life?
Have you talked about when their son Henry (Keidrich Sellati) might find out?
Weisberg: We do talk about that, but we really don’t have an answer. For the moment, we’re so deep in the middle of what is Henry’s reaction going to be, what is he going to pick up about the changed dynamics in the family?
What does this mean for [FBI agent/neighbor] Stan (Noah Emmerich) and his mission? Last week’s final scene felt very foreboding.
Fields: Though Paige is seeing everything differently … Stan has no reason to suspect his neighbors at this point. But it’s certainly changing the dynamic in that family and if you know anything about Stan, you know that he’s got pretty good radar.
FX just renewed the series for a fourth season. Are you plotting an endgame yet?
Weisberg: We’ve been thinking about the endgame since the beginning. We have a lot of ideas for it but … we haven’t landed on what it is. We’re open to even rethinking the ideas that we have.