Way back in 2001, the hottest spy show on television was Alias, starring Jennifer Garner as a grad student with a secret life of espionage. J.J. Abrams originally pitched the idea as “Felicity becomes a spy,” a reference to the popular college drama starring Keri Russell as a wide-eyed freshman looking for love. Nearly 15 years later, that pitch became something of a prophecy when Russell stepped into the best role of her career: a deep-cover Soviet agent living in the United States as a suburban mom named Elizabeth Jennings, along with her secret agent husband Philip, and their two wholesome American kids who have no idea that their parents are in the KGB.

Although the FX show is often thrilling, The Americans spends a lot of time dealing with the ugly and tragic collateral damage of espionage: not only the innocents (and not-so-innocents) who have to die in order for Elizabeth and Philip (Matthew Rhys) to serve the motherland, but the toll that living a double life takes on them—and on their family.

Created by Joe Weisberg, a former CIA case officer, the show is partly based on an actual Russian sleeper agent program called the Illegals. Although the real-life program took place in the 1990s and early 2000, Weisberg reimagines it in within the Evil Empire paranoia of the early 1980s. Like Elizabeth and Philip, these agents were deep cover Russian spies who spent years pretending to be everyday American couples, sometimes even having kids to seem more authentic.

Indeed, some of the most intimate moments in the show take place not only between Elizabeth and Philip, but between them and the people they spend weeks, months, and even years developing relationships with through their many alternate personas. For two people whose lives revolve around concealing who they really are, the moments where they’re able to be the most emotionally truthful are often the moments when they’re pretending to be someone else.

Elizabeth and Philip aren’t their real names, of course, though after they’ve spent the majority of their adult lives making a life and a family with those personas, it can be hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t. Part of how they sell deception to their marks is by selling it to themselves, and learning to believe the lies even as they’re telling them.

Here’s how to go undercover with The Americans.

The Americans

Number of Seasons: 3 (39 episodes)

Time Requirements: If you’re willing to put in a couple hours a day—and a little more on the weekends—you can knock this out in less than a month. The new season doesn’t start till next year, though, so you have plenty of time.

Where to Get Your Fix: Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes

Best Character to Follow: While Philip Jennings is often more conflicted about his life in America—and the life that he wants for his children—Elizabeth Jennings (aka Nadezhda) is not. If he’s the doubting Thomas, she’s the steely true believer in the cause of communism, willing to sacrifice anything for her ideals.

It’s especially tragic as we learn more about Elizabeth’s backstory and how much she has given up and lost already; and of course, the ultimate sacrifice might be her family itself, and how her deep cover demands that she watch quietly as her children are slowly co-opted by a Western culture that represents everything she hates. While the most interesting character on many shows is the one that changes the most, Elizabeth is most compelling in the ways that she doesn’t change, and finds a way to keep the faith when almost anyone else would have wavered.

Seasons/Episodes You Can Skip:

While there are few (if any) truly bad episodes of The Americans—and most are important to watch, if only for the often intricate mission details threaded through each episode—not every one is a winner.

Season 1: Episode 3, “Gregory” One of the slower early episodes deals with a black civil rights activist recruited by Elizabeth, and the secret widow of another KGB agent. Read the Wikipedia summary if you’re in a hurry.

Season 1: Episode 3, “COMINT” In yet another slow burn entry in the first season, Elizabeth and Philip slowly collect information and move more chess pieces around the board.

Season 2: Episode 11, “Stealth” The Soviets continue their work to develop stealth technology, while Elizabeth gets closer to the surviving son of the murdered family from the Illegals project. Not a bad episode, but not essential.

Seasons/Episodes You Can’t Skip:

Season 1: Episode 1, “Pilot” We begin at the very beginning, meeting Elizabeth, Philip, their kids—and their next door neighbor Stan (Noah Emmerich), who just happens to be an FBI counter-intelligence agent.

Season 1: Episode 6, “Trust Me” This episode was the first moment when a lot of viewers and critics sat up and started paying attention to the FX spook series, and realized that it wasn’t fooling around. Elizabeth and Philip are kidnapped by hooded men who torture them and threaten their children. This ends well for no one.

Season 1: Episode 13, “Come Home” After a season of squabbling, the arranged marriage of Elizabeth and Philip gets tested in new ways when they must split up to handle two high-risk missions, and find a way to come back together as both romantic and professional partners before it’s too late.

Season 2: Episode 1, “Comrades” The worst nightmare of Philip and Elizabeth gets realized by proxy when another couple in the Soviet deep cover program is murdered, along with their children. Their death lingers over the rest of the season not only through the unsolved mystery of the murder, but also through the sense that this could very easily be the way things end for our antiheroes and the people they love most.

Season 2: Episode 6, “Behind the Red Door” After Philip fake-marries an FBI secretary in his persona as Clark, Elizabeth asks him to dress up and show her the man that his other wife gets to see—and gets more than she bargained for.

Season 3: Episode 2, “Baggage” One of Philip’s recruits, a naive young woman, is murdered and disposed of in a horrific way thanks mostly to him. It’s tragic on its own terms, but also another reminder of the life that might await his young, idealistic daughter if the KGB gets their way.

Season 3: Episode 4, “Dimebag” Things get complicated for Philip around teenage girls, both in terms of his daughter Paige (Holly Taylor)—whom the Soviets want to recruit as a second-generation agent—and Kimberly, the daughter of a CIA agent whom he befriends, and maybe has to seduce. The loss of innocence he may have to perpetrate becomes a symbol of exactly what he fears for his daughter, as well as the harsher truth that the often horrifying life he has chosen for himself is not something he would ever want inflicted on his children.

Season 3: Episode 9, “Do Mail Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?” In one of the strongest scenes of the series, Elizabeth sits down with a old woman she’s forced to poison to death. Things get realer than we’ve ever seen Elizabeth get in the final moments before the woman takes her secrets to the grave.

Season 3: Episode 10, “Stingers” Everything changes, although the fallout from one of the show’s biggest bomb drops is both quieter and more devastating than expected.

Season 3: Episode 11, “One Day in the Life of Anton Baklanov” As the FBI continues to investigate the possibility of a mole in their ranks, Philip sits down to teach a woman he’s been lying to for the entirety of the show how to pass a polygraph test. Asking a person you’ve profoundly deceived to trust you to teach them how to lie is a pretty emotionally complicated thing to do, but it’s also a perfect encapsulation of the strange mesh of truth, lies, and intimacy that drives so much of the show.

Season 3: Episode 13, “March 8, 1983″ Elizabeth teaches her daughter Paige her most honest and terrible lesson yet: “Everyone lies.”

Why You Should Binge:

The Americans has been a darling of critics since its debut, but the response from viewers has been much cooler. Despite the superb acting and writing, it can sometimes be a difficult show to fall in love with; there’s a cold reserve to the aesthetics and often the characters of the show, even as it batters them again and again to reveal their bleeding emotional cores. Binge-watching can help you plow through the rough patches and truly appreciate the show’s greatness.

Best Scene—The Tooth Scene

After one of her teeth gets damaged in a fight with two FBI agents, Elizabeth fears that going to the dentist might tip off the authorities. Instead, Philip has to extract the tooth himself with a pair of pliers in their garage. It’s a long, silent scene that looks like torture but feels almost sexual in its intimacy. It’s a testament to both the bond of trust built between these two characters and the skill of the actors that they don’t need a single word to pull it off.

The Takeaway:

Despite the show’s ’80s period trappings, KGB antihero protagonists, and life-and-death stakes, The Americans is ultimately a story about a marriage and a family—and how difficult it can be to keep both of those things together when the demands of work (and constant dishonesty) start to tear them apart.

If You Liked The Americans You’ll Love:

The Sandbaggers, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and Alias are all solid picks for your post-Americans fix.