TV Shows Like The Americans
If you like The Americans, here are 9 similar TV shows — each with its current AI renewal verdict, so you can see which are still going and which have been cancelled.
FX · Crime · The Americans is ended
The Americans works because it refuses to let you off the hook. Elizabeth and Philip Jennings are the enemy, technically speaking, and yet the show spends six seasons making their marriage, their exhaustion, and their ideological doubts feel completely real. The Cold War backdrop is meticulous, the 1980s period detail is sharp without being costume-party obvious, and the FBI agent next door, Stan Beeman, is never just a plot device. The tension isn't "will they get caught" so much as "who are these people, really, and what does loyalty even mean."
The best shows like The Americans
1. The Night Agent
The Night Agent shares The Americans' fascination with conspiracy buried inside the institutions that are supposed to protect people, with the White House itself becoming a place of paranoia rather than safety. The FBI agent at its center is pulled into a web that keeps expanding, and the show maintains the feeling that no one's allegiances are entirely what they appear. It moves at a quicker pace than The Americans, but the political atmosphere and the sense of constant exposure will feel familiar.
Stream on Netflix, Netflix Standard with Ads
Likely Cancelled35%
2. 21 Jump Street
The core of 21 Jump Street is the same core that drives The Americans: young officers who have to inhabit a world they don't belong to, for as long as it takes. The show is lighter in tone and more procedural in structure, but the undercover dynamic, the constant performance of a false self, is genuinely there. For viewers who liked watching Philip and Elizabeth manage dual lives, watching these cops navigate high school and young-adult crime has a similar pull.
Stream on Amazon Prime Video, fuboTV, Peacock Premium, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Ended0%
3. Citadel
Citadel takes the spy-identity question further than most shows dare, centering on agents who literally cannot remember who they were, which gives the tradecraft a strange, disorienting quality that fans of The Americans' psychological complexity may find interesting. The action is bigger and the tone more stylized, but the theme of loyalty to people and institutions from a past you can't fully trust runs through it. It's less grounded but genuinely committed to the idea that a spy's identity is always constructed, never fixed.
Stream on Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
On the Bubble48%
4. The Night Manager
The Night Manager is probably the most natural next step for anyone coming off The Americans, a meticulous undercover story where the protagonist has to become a convincing version of someone else, and where the moral cost of that performance is taken seriously. The show is adapted from a John le Carré novel, and it carries that tradition's skepticism about Western institutions and the intelligence community's relationship with power. The pacing is deliberate, the tension is psychological, and the central performance is built on concealment in the same way The Americans always was.
Stream on Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
On the Bubble52%
5. New York Undercover
New York Undercover keeps its focus tight on two detectives doing the day-to-day work of infiltrating gang activity in the city, and that ground-level undercover texture is what connects it to The Americans' world. The show is more straightforward as a crime procedural, without the geopolitical stakes, but it understands the particular pressure of building trust with people you're going to betray. Viewers who liked the operational detail of The Americans will find something recognizable here.
Stream on Hulu
Ended0%
More on shows like The Americans
Fans of the show tend to want a few specific things when they go looking for something next. They want characters operating under a false identity or inside a system that could destroy them at any moment. They want the procedural mechanics of intelligence work, the tradecraft and paranoia, not just shootouts. And they tend to appreciate shows that treat their characters as adults with complicated inner lives rather than pawns in a plot machine. A little political texture doesn't hurt either.
The five recommendations here cover a decent range. The Night Manager is the closest in spirit, a slow-burn undercover story with genuine moral weight and a protagonist who has to become something dangerous to do what he thinks is right. The Night Agent moves faster and leans more into thriller territory, but it captures that White House adjacency and the feeling that the conspiracy runs deeper than anyone expected. Citadel is the most stylized of the bunch, a spy thriller built around memory loss and a secret organization, more action-forward than the others but with a similar interest in identity and buried loyalties. 21 Jump Street and New York Undercover both work the undercover angle from a law enforcement side, the former with young cops embedded among teenagers, the latter with two detectives embedded in New York's gang landscape. Neither has the Cold War weight of The Americans, but both understand what it costs to live as someone you're not.
None of these replicate The Americans exactly, and honestly nothing does. But each one pulls on at least one of the threads that made the show so gripping, whether that's the pressure of a false identity, the ambiguity of working inside a corrupt or compromised system, or simply the question of what you owe the people standing right next to you.
More shows like The Americans
Frequently asked
- What is the most popular show like The Americans?
- The Night Agent is the most popular show similar to The Americans in the IsItRenewed catalogue.
- Are shows like The Americans still on the air?
- Of the 9 shows similar to The Americans listed here, 0 currently carry a renewed verdict — the rest are cancelled, ended, or awaiting a decision.
- How does IsItRenewed pick shows like The Americans?
- The recommendations come from TMDB's similar-titles data, and each is shown with its current AI renewal verdict so you know which are still going.