Agents of change
As ‘The Americans’ returns for its final season, lead stars Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell talk about the spy thriller’s relevance in today’s troubled world
On a drizzly night in February, Keri Russell and Holly Taylor walked down a hilly block in Upper Manhattan that was doubling for Reagan-era Washington in a scene from FX’s spy thriller The Americans.
Russell, in character as Elizabeth Jennings, a KGB agent living undercover in the US in the waning days of the Cold War, was dispensing tough love to her daughter, Paige (Taylor), a college student sympathetic to the Soviet cause.
“You’re going to have to make a decision: to commit to this life or get out, because sometimes this is what we have to do,” said Russell as Elizabeth. “Are you willing to give up friends and relationships — your life, if you have to?”
The tension between the personal and the political is at the heart of The
Americans, which has returned for its final 10-episode season and centres on Elizabeth and her husband, Philip (Matthew Rhys), a pair of seemingly mild-mannered travel agents and suburban parents who carry out deadly covert missions on behalf of the motherland.
The series is both a gripping story of espionage and a portrait of a uniquely complicated marriage. Initially arranged by their KGB handlers, the Jennings’ relationship is loving but also strained by their spy duties, which include extramarital affairs, the assumption of numerous false identities and the occasional disposal of a dead body.
Though never a huge ratings hit, the Emmy-nominated series is an engrossing slow burn that has had critics swooning since its premiere in 2013.
As the latest marquee drama of TV’s new Golden Age comes to an end, speculation about what will become of its married anti-heroes is running high: Will Philip and Elizabeth get caught? Turn each other in? Or finally return to the Soviet Union?
With newly hostile relations between the US and Russia stoking fears of a revived Cold War — or worse — the period drama has also become surprisingly relevant, in today’s turbulent
LONG JOURNEY NEARS END
Showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields have known for some time how the Jennings’ story will end, but that hasn’t exactly made it easy for them to say goodbye. At the Brooklyn production offices a week before final wrap, moving boxes were piled up in the lobby. “Everybody is in a weird mood,” admitted series creator Weisberg, a former CIA agent. “We’re so enmeshed in the world. Everything feels real to us.”
The writers are approaching the conclusion of a journey that began in 2010 when 10 Russian agents were arrested in suburban New Jersey, inspiring Weisberg, then working on TNT’s Falling Skies,” to develop what would become The Americans.
He and Fields (Ugly Betty) were set up
“We have once before turned Russians into such venal enemies that we fought a long, hard, very painful war with, creating incredible collateral damage. And we’re doing it again.” JOE WEISBERG| Showrunner