EXPOSING SECRETS OF THE AMERICANS’
Critics’ darling due for revelations in its most crucial season yet
The Americans Season 5 debuts Tuesday, FX Canada
The Americans, set in and around Washington, D.C. (and, increasingly, Moscow), during the mid-1980s, is filmed in Brooklyn, where, on a painfully frigid Thursday in December, a residential street has been cleared of presentday signifiers for a scene in an upcoming episode of the show’s fifth season. Once the camera starts rolling, a plain brown wrapper carrying the Jennings family — covert Russian spies Philip and Elizabeth (played by the show’s co-stars, Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell), and their increasingly anxious 16-year-old daughter, Paige (Holly Taylor) — rolls up to a nondescript apartment building and parks.
It’s a big day for Paige. Her parents have decided that it’s time for her to meet their mysteriously calm but always stern supervisor, Gabriel (Frank Langella).
“Paige is meant to be quite shocked,” says Rhys, who is also directing this episode. “I was hoping the extreme cold would help with that . ... This is the kind of show where there are no throwaway scenes. I would try to give a note (to Russell and Taylor), and the two of them were like ‘F--- it, it’s too cold.’ I’m cold, too, but we have to get it right.” Finally satisfied, the cast and crew return to the block of nondescript warehouses a mile away that serve as the show’s stages and production hub.
The Americans, which returns Tuesday night, is entering what is likely to be its most crucial season, setting up its final act. Near the end of last season, just as the show began catching on (about 1.8 million viewers followed the fourth season each week), FX announced a finish line for 2018, which gives the show’s creators, Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg, this season and next season to figure out how it all ends.
The creators’ common aim is restraint, tightening the show ’s wires just to the snapping point — but rarely past it. Weisberg, whose stint at the CIA in the early 1990s means that each Americans script must be submitted to the agency’s publications review board for approval, isn’t interested in drawing modern parallels. This show is resolutely about three things: the Cold War, the ’80s and, most of all, a troubled marriage.
“In Season 1, there were fights and guns and explosions and I thought, OK, that’s fun, but what I love more is that I haven’t held a gun in two seasons,” Rhys says. “It’s almost all about the relationships, and if you can maintain a show that has that kind of tension based on those things — it’s hard to do and so much better.”
On orders from the KGB, Gabriel (and his colleague Claudia, played by Margo Martindale), routinely send Philip and Elizabeth on risky undercover schemes and acts of breaking and entering that bring the story to the brink of panic.
The most pressing issue is the family’s overly friendly, acrossthe-street neighbour in Falls Church, Va., an FBI agent named Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), who is more determined than ever to root out the spies in his midst.
“Nothing scares those two,” Claudia tells Gabriel in the Season 5 opener.
“Everything scares those two,” Gabriel replies.
And so The Americans has become a volcano that’s way overdue for disastrous eruption. This feels like the season in which The Americans will have to crack itself open.
Story arcs are top secret and kept in a master binder everyone’s heard about and no one gets to see, not even Russell and Rhys.
“I only know what’s happening to about now, and we’re on episode 6 and 7,” Rhys says, taking a lunch break. “I think they’re wise to the fact that I have a mouth like a drunken sailor and that I would shoot it off to anyone.”
Not long after the show first garnered high praise, the celebrity-news media started covering Russell, who turns 41 in March, and Rhys, 42, as an item. Their son, Sam, was born last May. Sam is Rhys’s first child and Russell’s third.
Once she understood that Elizabeth was more than just a coldhearted communist on a lifelong mission, Russell says she decided to ride it out and see where it goes.
“I still always wonder if I can say this or not, but there has to be a possibility of a turn, right?” Russell said at a panel discussion in October. (Yes, of course. Defection! Safety! God bless America!) “And I look over at Joe (Weisberg), and he gives me a look and just says nope. ... So now I really have no idea — and I’m OK with it.”