The Singular Face of Paige Jennings

by cucumber martini

Luckily for those who knew me at the time, I wasn’t an angsty teen who constantly demanded love, attention, and the “truth” from my parents. Don’t get me wrong; I was 100% satanic. But all I wanted was the freedom to drink and buy Abercrombie t-shirts. Never once did I try to insert myself into the lives of the adults I knew.

Because of my own untroubled teen past, I can’t understand why otherwise amazing shows, with near-perfect character ensembles, somehow always manage to have an awkward/angsty teenager who almost ruins it all. I’m not sure what tv producers were like as kids or what their kids were like that makes them always feel the need to create these specifically awful teens.

Paige Jennings: The Worst TV Teen of All Time?

I recently binged The Americans, an FX series that aired between 2013-2017.

The Americans follows the lives of two KGB spies, played by Keri Russell and Mathew Rhys, sent to the United States by the Soviet Union to aid their country’s war efforts. While running these risky missions, Russell and Rhys are raising two children the KGB hopes will one day become spies themselves (and full U.S. Citizens (score!). The couple, aka Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, runs a travel agency and appears to have the perfect 1980s suburban NOVA family life. The show is fun, funny, salacious, sad, and features espionage all during the Cold War—solid shit.

Paige Jennings is the family’s eldest and sole daughter, played by actress Holly Taylor. As Paige gets older, she becomes more suspicious of her parents. She stares around the house like a deer in headlights whenever her parents give her a hurried excuse to leave. She exhales slowly and paces around as she tries to uncover the truth. 

Paige goes through some major shit on the show, and her being whiney and anxiety-ridden is to be expected. It’s how Taylor portrays this anxiety, as a privileged tween who has never faced hardship, that is so very painful. She uses the same look to convey a multitude of feelings: love, surprise, sadness, general resting face…. Her eyes widen, her body stiffens, and she exhales. Whether she is welcoming her father home or witnessing her mother kill someone—she has the same face. She is the embodiment of a Sim, with the same range (or lack thereof) of motion and expression. 

Public Opinion

Naturally, I had to see if the internet shared my feelings. I perused articles listing the most annoying teens in tv history. Dana Brody topped every list. The reviews of Paige Jennings were shockingly mixed.

Some praised the actress who plays Paige as “the great Holly Taylor”. Others lauded Paige as being the anti-Dana Brody: reasonable and pretty chill considering her parents are Soviet spies, articulating what the audience is thinking.

A few more reasonable sources, such as HuffPost and Reddit, correctly asserted Paige is an annoying motherfucker. 

In one particularly concerning article, one of the creators of The Americans discusses how they got letters from fans begging them to kill Paige. The producer didn’t understand why, and claimed, “she is supposed to mirror what the audience is thinking.” (Yikes.)

Some Reddit commentators have tried to convince viewers they’re getting it wrong. “It is the character you don’t like, not the brilliant actress who plays her, Holly Taylor.”

Well, I’m here to tell you, that it is because of Holly Taylor that you hate Paige Jennings. Holly Taylor acts like she took an acting class from Joey Tribiani who instructed her to express emotion by acting like she sharded and to look around to see if anyone noticed. 

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Photo Evidence (Contains Spoilers!)

Below are a series of images that show Paige’s signature look that both the producers and Holly Taylor found appropriate for every situation. It is this singular face that Taylor never deviates from, that we dedicate this article to. 

Paige after school:

Paige is pictured here hearing about her neighbor’s day:

Here she is again, hearing her dad get home from work:

And here’s Paige receiving a hug after her pastor is thought to be kidnapped, perhaps at the hands of her spy parents:

This is the face Paige makes in response to a friend asking how she’s doing:

And this is the face she makes when she sees the Pastor is back at church and realizes her parents didn’t kidnap him:

She makes the same face listening to something completely mundane:

Paige, after her Dad tells her she is pretty:

Pretty Paige, still listening to dad:

Here she is holding her pastor’s baby:

After begging her parents to reveal their identities, Paige is mysteriously depressed when she learns that they are, in fact, spies.

This part was the craziest to me as Paige stayed in that same position in jeans for days. She looks like a Sim who error-ed and went to bed without changing into PJs—devoid of any realistic movement, she’s a plastic, emotionless bot. 

Day three of Paige not moving since finding out her parents are spies:

Finally back upright again, Paige finds herself bored of tv (could she be watching herself?):

Paige is pictured here learning something new about her mom:

The same face, only this is Paige watching her mom kill someone:

Paige as a college student, happily doing adult things: 

And finally, Paige listening to her parents’ plan to abandon her little brother in America: