The leads in FX’s new drama, The Americans, which premiered last Thursday, don’t seem a terribly compelling subject for a series. Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings live and work in the idyllic Washington, D.C. suburbs, with cushy jobs, nice cars in the driveway, and two precious children at home. It’s the 1980s, and there’s an atmosphere of pleasantry and comfort that pervades the community. The catch? Elizabeth and Phillip are actually Russian spies.
Our acclaimed dramas are gravitating more and more toward making antiheroes out of classic American tropes–Don Draper, the womanizing ad man, or Walter White, the murderous chemistry teacher. The Americans flips that concept on its head by presenting what should be two straightforward villains and humanizing them, painting them and their anti-American plots perhaps more sympathetically than most show runners would be brave enough to.
It’s an inventive premise that highlights the logistics of going about life in such a scenario. The Jennings, while being married with children, are not a true couple. Put together by the KGB and shipped to America under the guise of conducting counterintelligence right in the nation’s capital, the two are so deeply under cover that the line between their true selves and their new selves is continually hazy and ever in danger of being erased altogether. They have spent nine years as a counterfeit couple, enough time so that the lie starts to feel real. Do the two actually have feelings for each other? Is America that bad of a place after all?
Inevitably, the pilot falls prey to the action-movie potential of its plot. There are chases, knife fights, and impossibly precise martial arts-style fistfights that don’t quite fit in with the rest of the goings-on. The procedural CIA spy-talk that you would expect is there as well, though a little more raggedy and less professional than what you might be used to. It’s hard to tell whether this will be a problem that persists and bogs down the main action of the plot, or whether it will turn into a non-issue as the season progresses.
Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys as the leads are fine, if unspectacular. Rhys gets the juicier role as the seemingly mild-mannered husband who starts to feel allegiance to his new country and family. Noah Emmerich, as the Jennings’ suspicious neighbor, is a highlight.
The Americans, with its original premise, interesting characters, and quirky 80s atmosphere certainly has enough to warrant a few more episodes, but it’s uncertain whether it can match the heights of the current titans of cable drama. If it can avoid the archetypal espionage plot points and keep putting a new spin on them, The Americans could quite possibly have years of tension-filled, zigzagging success. The saying goes that the hardest episode of a TV series to pull off is its first – The Americans pulled it off, now the show just has to deliver on that promise.
The Americans airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on FX.