The Wednesday Playlist: Spies Abroad, Directv's Rogue, Meet Abc's Parents

The Wednesday Playlist: Spies Abroad, DirecTV's Rogue, Meet ABC's Parents Seattle Post-Intelligencer Copyright 2013 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Published 8:22 am, Wednesday, April 3, 2013 BBC America's Spies of Warsaw, a two-part miniseries adaptation (concluding Tuesday, April 10) of his 2008 novel, loses none of its twisty allure and passionate urgency in the translation from page to screen (9/8c). Tension comes with the territory of late-'30s Poland, a country harboring refugees and dissidents in a murky culture of political intrigue, as everyone nervously waits for the jackboot to drop as rumors spread of Nazi aggression. "Surprising how few secrets there are in our secret world," muses an enigmatic German doctor-in-exile as he trades information - if he can be trusted - with the story's protagonist, Jean-Francois Mercier (the dashing David Tennant, late of Doctor Who), a war hero who has come to Warsaw as the French embassy's military attaché. (Best not to dwell on his Scottish brogue; the polyglot blur of accents adds to the film's exotic appeal.) Mercier oversees a complex network of operatives who trade in seduction and blackmail, risking their lives to further his agenda of acquiring and analyzing news about Germany's preparations for war. [...] there's a sense of fatalistic inevitability that haunts FX's first-rate thriller The Americans (10/9c), as we witness the desperate plotting of deeply embedded agents from the Russian "evil empire" as they try to stay a step ahead of the feds representing the Reagan administration. The tension operates on several levels: the chill in the Jennings household that causes Phillip to separate from "wife" Elizabeth (Keri Russell), moving out to the dismay of their kids; the vindictiveness of their FBI neighbor Stan Beeman's boss Agent Gaad (a very effective Richard Thomas), who decides to retaliate against the Russians on their soil, a mission that deep-down-decent Stan (Noah Emmerich, never better) tries to distance himself from until a shocking turn of events forces him to reconsider. Thandie Newton, beautiful but brittle, brings an almost comically tough edge to the hero's role of Grace Travis, an undercover detective working in Oakland, Calif., whose infiltration of the Laszlo mob family is interrupted by the drive-by killing of her young son, a tragedy that illuminates her failings as a wife and mother. If just being wacky is enough to make your night, then you might feel right at home with ABC's How to Live With Your Parents (For the Rest of Your Life), which presents the endearingly flustered Sarah Chalke (of Scrubs and second Becky-on-Roseanne fame) as Polly, the "normal one" in a fractured family of outrageously vulgar clowns who barely resemble human beings. There's a family connection on CBS' CSI (10/9c) as Ted Danson's daughter Kate plays a lawyer in a story involving the discovery of what might be a serial killer's lair.