The Americans spy series regains timeliness
When The Americans premièred on FX way back in 2013, the drama felt like a period piece, a Reagan-era Cold War throwback that, like Mad Men or Downton Abbey, was infused with nostalgia for a bygone era.
In 2017? Not so much. Amid headlines about Russian interference in the presidential election and accusations of ties between the Putin regime and the Trump campaign, the series starring Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys as a pair of Soviet spies living undercover in the suburbs of northern Virginia in the 1980s feels surprisingly current.
“Just like nobody predicted the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, I don’t think any reasonable person could have predicted this turnaround,” series creator and former CIA officer Joe Weisberg said in a phone interview with coshow runner Joel Fields last week as news of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak consumed the media.
The fifth season of The Americans premières Tuesday and finds Elizabeth (Russell) and Philip Jennings (Rhys) investigating an American plot to create famine in the Soviet Union. The couple struggles with how much to reveal to their teenage daughter, Paige (Holly Taylor), who recently learned her parents aren’t the mild-mannered travel agents they pretend to be.
In a turn for American pop culture, which for decades portrayed anyone with a Russian accent as a cartoonish bad guy, The Americans empathizes with the Jenningses, KGB agents who regularly kill innocents in the name of the motherland but also struggle with the same banal issues as other married couples. Boris and Natasha they are not.
Inspired by the arrest of Russian spies in New Jersey in 2010, Weisberg and Fields had hoped The Americans would encourage viewers to rethink “these people we once thought of as bitter enemies,” Weisberg says. “Much to our chagrin, they seem to have been turned right back into enemies again.”
The revived tensions with Russia have “certainly affected the way we think about the world,” Fields says, “but it hasn’t affected the way we write or create the show. That said, we also know that world events might impact the way the show is experienced by our audience.”
The unexpected timeliness has made for some awkward coincidences.
Last week, ads for The Americans — complete with Russian script — dominated the online home page of the New York Times, where multiple stories centred on the Sessions drama. (The ad buy was in place before the news broke, according to an FX spokesperson.)