My favorite new show is The Americans, Wednesday nights at 10 on FX. The Americans are Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, a middle-aged, middle-class, middle-American couple living in the Virginia suburbs outside Washington, D.C. They have a thirteen-year-old girl Paige who is just discovering clothes and boys and a ten-year-old boy Henry who plays hockey. They go to the mall and to school plays. They drive a four-year old Oldsmobile sedan. They would be the most boring couple on episodic television since Ozzie and Harriet but for one fact - they are also Soviet spies.
The series opens in 1981. Ronald Reagan has just been inaugurated president and the Soviet government wants to know about his plans to rebuild America's military strength and to take a generally more assertive posture against the Communist bloc. The Jennings are agents of a highly-classified division of the KGB called Directorate S. Directorate S trains deep-cover illegals to infiltrate U.S. society and establish themselves as sleeper agents. Of course, the viewer knows something that the Jennings don't - the Soviet Union has not ten years of life left. Perhaps it is appropriate that, in their cover lives, Philip and Elizabeth work for another doomed institution - a travel agency.
Of the two, Elizabeth is definitely the more committed. She can seduce, she can kill, she can assume any role or play any emotion in the furtherance of her mission. But in private she seems emotionally dead, motivated only by service to the Soviet state. She's had two children with Philip but she doesn't seem to love him and, at times, appears to hold him in contempt. Through a series of flashbacks we are acquainted with the events and forces that have shaped Elizabeth. She was born Nadezhda which, somewhat ironically, means hope. Her father was killed at Stalingrad when she was two years old. In one scene her mother refuses a gift of food from a local party official, explaining that he would have expected something in return. Her mother warns her that she must never rely on anyone but herself. In training she was raped by one of her instructors. Her "husband" was chosen for her by the KGB and she was instructed to have children to support her cover identity.
Philip is equally proficient and deadly at the craft of espionage but he also genuinely loves Elizabeth and his children and thoroughly enjoys living the life of an American husband and father. As of the fourth episode we still know almost nothing of Philip's back story but he seems far better adjusted than his wife. For him espionage seems to be just a job, little different from his work booking hotels and flights for his clients. He doesn't take the Cold War personally the way Elizabeth does. As a result, he often thinks more clearly and more realistically. The most recent episode involved the shooting of Ronald Reagan by Hinckley and Philip is the only Russian who realizes that fears of a Haig-lead coup d'etat are overwrought.
Although Elizabeth appears to be without psychological or emotional weaknesses, such appearances are deceiving. In Game of Thrones Cersei Lannister advises her would-be daughter-in-law not to love anyone because each love is a weakness that can be exploited. Nevertheless, she says, a mother will always love her children and that is unavoidable. So it is with Elizabeth. Nothing comes before her devotion to the Motherland except her children. When it appears the FBI might be closing in, Elizabeth fears neither death nor imprisonment, only that her children might come to despise her for deceiving them all their lives.
Philip lacks Elizabeth's fanaticism as well as the animosity towards America that it inspires. So he seeks to protect his family from the threat of discovery by coming in from the cold. He proposes to Elizabeth that they give themselves up to the FBI and surrender the defector they've got tied up in the trunk of their car in exchange for a lucrative bounty and a new life somewhere in America. Philip is seconds away from carrying out his plan when he finds out that the defector is the instructor who raped Elizabeth during training. He kills the defector without hesitation and the two of them dispose of the body. Philip's decision to exact justice for his wife's attack instead of pursuing his dream of the good life in America moves Elizabeth and begins to inspire in her a loyalty and affection towards him and she ends up lying to her KGB superior, attesting to Philip's reliability, revealing nothing about his attempted defection.
The idea of building a series around two protagonists who are KGB agents predictably set off alarm bells with Newsbusters and other conservative web sites. Suspicions were naturally raised that left-wingers in Hollywood would depict Reagan and the United States as dangerously aggressive, upsetting the detente so carefully constructed during the seventies.
But despite the setting, the show isn't really about politics. It's about family and loyalty. Philip and Elizabeth are the kind of complex antiheroes that are the staple of FX dramas like Rescue Me, Sons of Anarchy, and Justified. We root for the Jennings not because we want them to win the Cold War, we want them to find a way out and have a normal family and a normal life.
And that is what ultimately makes The Americans an anti-Communist production. Marx and Lenin predicted that class-solidarity would replace bourgeois institutions like the family. The Bolsheviks made a martyr out of Pavel Morozov, a boy who, according to legend, ratted out his father to the secret police and was subsequently murdered by relatives. The lesson is that loyalty to the state comes before family. The Jennings demonstrate that totalitarian ideologies that seek to supplant the family are ultimately destined to fail.
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