‘The Americans’ begins its season Page D2
All along, certain viewers have found “The Americans” too grim to bear.
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. Gray 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 mid1980s, is filmed in Brooklyn, where, on a painfully frigid 20-degree Thursday in December, a residential street has been cleared of present-day signifiers for a scene in an upcoming episode of the show’s fifth season. Cars parked along the block have been replaced by a fleet of Iacocca-style beaters, and, once the camera starts rolling, a plain brown wrapper carrying the Jennings family — covert Russian spies Philip and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 supervisor, Gabriel (Frank Langella).
“The Americans,” which returns at 10 tonight on Fox, is entering what might be its most crucial season, setting up its final act. FX has 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.
This show is resolutely about three things: the Cold War, the ’80s and a troubled marriage.
“In season one, 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.” Story arcs are top secret. “I only know what’s happening to about now, and we’re on episode six and seven,” 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.
Russell and Rhys say they used to talk much more about Philip and Elizabeth, often teasing each other about their characters’ faults, which could lead to real arguments about their essential points of view.
“You mean how Phil is infinitely more human?” Rhys asks, smirkingly. “We do argue about them, yes, often starting out with a little mocking debate — she’ll say, ‘Phil’s so weak’ and I’ll say, ‘Liz is so cold,’ and it leads sometimes to a serious discussion about who’s the stronger or more dynamic.”