TV Review: The Americans Season One (2013)

The Americans Season One (2013) created by Joe Weisberg

The Americans is the story of two KGB sleeper cell agents living the the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. They were assigned in the early 1960s to pose as a married couple named Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, even though they only met when assigned. The show starts in the early 1980s. Ronald Reagan has just been elected President and the Cold War is heating up. The Jennings are very busy with covert operations against the U.S. government. They also have two children who are unaware of the true past of their parents and of their spy activities. A new family moves into their neighborhood. The dad is an FBI counter-intelligence agent, introducing a tension and an opportunity for the KGB operatives.

The show focuses mostly on Philip and Elizabeth. She's a die-hard Soviet patriot with a ruthless streak in her; he's more integrated into American society, so much so that he asks her to defect in the first episode. She naturally does not want to abandon Mother Russia, so they don't. Marital tensions ensue, with flashbacks explaining how their "arranged marriage" started and what they were like earlier on.

The show also follows the neighbor, Stan Beeman. His previous assignment was infiltrating a white supremacist group in the American Midwest. He's living with his wife and son again and has a hard time relating to them. He works long hours at the new job, so he has plenty of marital tensions too. He and Philip become friends though Philip seems mostly to be working a new potential asset.

I found the premise of the show intriguing at the beginning. As the show went on, I began losing sympathy with the characters, since they all do despicable things and not always in the line of duty. While the show seems interested in Philip and Elizabeth figuring out how to make their marriage work, the characters actually do very little to try, other than changing their minds every other episode about whether they want to stay married. At one point they start living separately, which is traumatic for the children but their KGB superiors are completely indifferent, possibly because they are unaware of the situation, which struck me as odd. Philip and Elizabeth have a tumultuous relationship with their KGB handler which I also found unbelievable. At one point, the KGB in DC had a mole and they thought it was Philip so they kidnap the couple and try to torture information out of the Jennings. When they realize the couple aren't the leak, Elizabeth beats her handler's face to a bloody mess because she is so mad about the betrayal of trust. The handler forgives her and they keep on working together. I found that completely implausible. By the end of the season, the only character I had any sympathy for was their daughter (the son is too underdeveloped as a character).

The other unpleasant part of the show is how most every character uses sex to get leverage over other people. The depictions are needlessly graphic. In addition to being semi-pornographic, it also underlines a basic problem in the Jennings's and the Beeman's marriages--lack of fidelity is a betrayal, whether it is done to advance a "greater cause" or not. Fixing that problem would require a lot of hard work and also a career change, which would wreck the premise of the show. I am confident the way I'd like to see the show go is not the way it is going to go.

Not recommended.