great cultural criticism example

Anyone watch the cable drama "The Americans"? I've heard it's good, but now I'm convinced to give it a try after reading this great piece about it. I'm sharing the link because it's a superb piece of cultural criticism — a great model for how to take a piece of popular culture and connect it to social discourses, historical points of view, and many of the themes of our syllabus.

To wit:

And yet, there is something deeply disturbing about The Americans, a sense that it presents recent history through adversarial eyes to toughen us, to encourage us to absorb certain moralistic criticisms of capitalism as a means of acclimation to deprivation and toil. 

By presenting the Soviets as worthy adversaries pursuing a noble but futile cause, the show encodes their assessment of the United States as perceptive and prescient. But the “capitalism” the characters lambast is less a structure than a symptom: they see the US as a nation weakened from the inside by consumerist luxury.

In focusing its critique on decadent mass consumption rather than exploitative production, The Americans uses Soviet speakers to valorize the virtues of austerity. This is its ideological prescription: that Americans — well, some of them, anyway — must forego consumptive pleasures to strengthen the nation and its economy.