The Americans seems set to crack itself open
Season 5 premières Tuesday with story arcs kept secret amid recent audience surge
All along, certain viewers have found “The Americans” too grim to bear: too nail-bitey, too much stress on the throw pillows.
Understandable, comrade, but try filming it. The show’s intense late-fall and winter production schedule gives it a natural grimness that would be costly to replicate. Grey skies, dead leaves, bare trees and the occasional snow flurry cast a dour, Muscovite pall on the Reagan-era sunshine.
The show, 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 had been cleared of present-day signifiers for a scene in an upcoming episode of the show’s fifth season.
It’s a big day for Paige (Holly Taylor). Her parents, covert Russian spies Philip and Elizabeth (played by the show’s co-stars, Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell) have decided that it’s time for her to meet their mysteriously calm but always stern supervisor, Gabriel (Frank Langella).
Finally satisfied, the cast and crew returned to the block of nondescript warehouses a kilometre away that serve as the show’s stages and production hub. “The Americans,” which returns Tuesday night to FX Canada, is entering what is likely to be its most crucial season, setting up its final act. Never an impressive ratings hit, the show routinely tops critics’ lists; Emmy voters aren’t as enamoured.
Near the end of last season, just as the show began catching on (about 1.8 million U.S. 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 to figure out how it all ends.
Weisberg, who says he thinks about Soviet and Russian history and current events “all the time” (his 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 said. “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.
Besides the fact that Paige now struggles with the secret that her parents aren’t merely the workaholic proprietors of a travel agency, the most pressing issue is the family’s overly friendly, across-thestreet 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.
And so “The Americans” has become a volcano that’s way overdue for disastrous eruption. Like that copy of “Leaves of Grass” in Walter White’s bathroom (Breaking Bad’s unforgettable pivot point), this, too, feels like the season in which “The Americans” will have to crack itself open.
A few years ago, when they were desperate to get people to watch the show, Fields and Weisberg could be quite chatty about where they thought the story was headed, along what sort of timeline.
Now? 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 six and seven,” Rhys said, 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.”
“Do you know?” Russell asked me. “Did they tell you anything? No? Oh well.”
She had changed from her ‘80s garb into a faded blue jumpsuit, topped off with a huge Mongolian wolf-fur hat that Rhys brought to her in 2014 after he made a horseback trek in Mongolia.
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.
This season opens with Phil ‘n’ Liz posing as an airline pilot and flight attendant who are married and based in D.C., and whose adopted Vietnamese teenage son (another spy) befriends the dejected son of a recent Soviet émigré who may or may not be helping the United States contaminate the U.S.S.R’s wheat supply. When first offered the part, Russell kept saying no, “Until I saw how interesting the marriage was,” she said. Even story twists she initially didn’t like turned out well, so she quit worrying about the Jennings’ ultimate fate.