Bill Haverchuck is My Favorite

This is just a quick and rather lazy post to pose the question: Is Bill Haverchuck the best TV character of all time?  Of all TV shows?  I'm sure it's been asked a bazillion other times on the interwebs, to the point where adding here too is probably pointless.  But it's just a question that pops up in my brain pretty often, so I'm typing it here.  Please forgive me.

Nina Sergeevna: Hero or Villain?

Well o.k., the title of this blog post is misleading, because a show like The Americans is designed in a such a way that no one is a clear cut good guy or bad guy.  Everyone is just fighting for their own cause, and no cause is meant to be the "right" one for the audience.  It's like Game of Thrones in that sense.  But still, you gotta want to root for someone right??  Otherwise the show is not interesting.

That was actually a huge issue for me in season 1 of this show ... since Elizabeth and Philip are the two main characters, then presumably, we're supposed to be rooting for them, at least to some extent.  But I found both of these two to be so closed off and cold and spy-like in season 1 that I didn't feel motivated enough to really be on their side.  As a matter of fact, but the time season 1 ended, the only person I really WAS rooting for was Nina Sergeevna.

I certainly wasn't rooting for FBI agent Stan, that's for sure.  Vlad-murdering, extramarital affair-having schmuck Stan.  KGB or not, by the end of season 1, when Nina turned the tables on Stan and started playing him for a change, I was cheering at my TV screen.  Nina was a sympathetic character to me, because she was forced into the situation with Stan and the FBI against her will.  She was put into an impossible position, and she did what she had to do to survive.  And Stan had turned into such a douche by the end of the season that her betraying him was totally justified from my point of view.