
Peter Gabriel's "Games Without Frontiers" is the perfect closer for The Americans debut season.
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The series may have to kill them off, but it won't do it easily. The scene unfolds slowly with Gregory in a shootout with the cops, and the song highlights The Americans' respect for its characters. In " Only You," Gregory - the African-American man Elizabeth recruited to help the Soviet Union - decides to essentially commit suicide in order to secure Elizabeth's future (love makes you do crazy things).

It may not seem like the most obvious song choice, but Roberta Flack's "To Love Somebody" is a soulful tune that blends perfectly with one of the first season's most difficult moments. This doesn't bode well for him, as we'll see soon enough. "Siamese Twins" operates as the perfect song to close an episode that foreshadows the last devastating third of season one. Fortunately, in the eighth episode of its first season - aptly titled "Mutually Assured Destruction" - the song functions to simultaneously show the anger and resentment that has started to form between Elizabeth and Philip, but on a different note to show FBI agent Chris Amador's early suspicions of Martha. If you're going to use a track as moody as the Cure's " Siamese Twins," you'd better know what you're doing. Fake married or not, if you're with someone long enough, if you have kids with them, you're bound to feel something. Phil Collins' sensual " In the Air Tonight" is used to mark the conclusion of a horrific mission and the beginning of a tender and ultimately erotic car sex scene that proves the drama is up to more than it initially lets on. The Americans' pilot is not only bookended by the great "Tusk," but it also features another memorable track, one that allows us to rid ourselves of the notion that the drama is entirely about Philip and Elizabeth: The Spies.
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By sandwiching the episode with the droning Fleetwood Mac tune we get the sense that the anxiety is never not palpable for the Jennings' "In the Air Tonight," Phil Collins


It's an inherently dangerous job, one that offers Philip and Elizabeth Jennings - played by Emmy-nominated actors Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell, respectively - few moments of levity. We're let in by contagious but ominous drums, which serve to complement the pressure that marks this series about two Russian KGB agents posing as a suburban American family. In the series pilot, we're placed front and center of the conflict, perhaps most evident by the immediate use of Fleetwood Mac's " Tusk," which appears at both the beginning and end of the episode.
