Like many others, I've become a fan of the new breed of TV dramas that have become so ubiquitous on cable TV. Although I was slow to join the bandwagon on shows like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and Mad Men (and I'm not even halfway through the first season of Breaking Bad), once I got a taste I quickly became addicted. My latest addiction, and this one I've been on from the beginning, is the FX show The Americans, which chronicles the lives of two KGB sleeper agents in America in the early 1980s. Reagan is president, it's the height of the Cold War, and our two protagonists are deep undercover, posing as travel agents and raising a family in Suburban DC.
In many respects, the show is preposterous and requires some suspension of disbelief. As the story goes, KGB officers Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (played by Matthew Rhys and the very fetching Keri Russell) were set up in an arranged marriage by their handlers and have apparently been in the U.S. since the mid-1960s, building their cover as an average American couple. The occasional flashback scenes to their initial arrival are incongruous because the actors don't really look much different from their early '80s versions. When Philip and Elizabeth aren't at their travel agency or parenting their son and daughter (and they never seem to be doing much of either), they're directing other operatives, arranging secret information drops, bugging the house of Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, assassinating CIA agents, and doing all sorts of other spy things that involve not-so-elaborate disguises. All while maintaining their cover. Even with an FBI agent living in their housing complex.
Philip and Elizabeth are also having inordinate amounts of sex with a variety of American dupes (apparently being a spy involves having sex with multitudes of people in order to get information). One of Philip's alter egos is actually married to an FBI secretary. I haven't done a full tally of hours yet, but I'm pretty sure there isn't enough time in the day, let alone a week, to do everything they do. It's exhausting just watching them.
While the show clearly takes some liberties, it's not without some connection to reality. As in Mad Men, the period details are spot on. The creators of the show, one of them a former CIA agent, got the idea from the bust of a Russian sleeper cell in New Jersey in 2010. And there were Soviet "illegals" living in the U.S. in the late '70s and '80s, though this interview with an intelligence historian makes it clear that such sleeper agents would not likely have been engaging in spying themselves. Their whole purpose was to blend in, recruit Americans to do the dirty work, and be contacts for the real spies. Obviously, that would make for a less interesting TV show.
Perhaps the show's best feature is the way it captures the heightened tensions in the U.S.-Soviet relationship in the early 1980s. After a period of detente in the 1970s, the relationship between the world's two superpowers was as bad as it had been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. During the period that the show chronicles, psychological warfare conducted by the U.S. Military (including air and sea operations held very close to Russian territory) had the Soviets convinced that the U.S. was planning a surprise nuclear attack. In response, the Soviets and the KGB began a counter-operation, using sleeper agents in America and other countries, to gather as much information as they could on what the U.S. Military was up to.
Philip and Elizabeth appear to be at the very center of this effort. Need some submarine plans stolen? Call Philip and Elizabeth. Need a scientist defector kidnapped and repatriated to the Soviet Union? Don't worry, Philip and Elizabeth will take care of it. The whole KGB operation seems to rest on their shoulders. Don't their employees at the travel agency, not to mention their kids, ever wonder where the hell they are? Where's all the tedious minutiae of adult life?
Of course, details like these can be overlooked because the Americans is not so much a show about spycraft as it is about the personalities involved and their relationships. Just as The Sopranos wasn't really about the mafia and Mad Men isn't about advertising. While those shows are about lost little boys looking for something to fill an aching void in their lives, The Americans is about what gets sacrificed in the name of a cause. Like Tony Soprano and Don Draper, Philip and Elizabeth are anti-heroes, people we root for no matter how despicable they are. They're cold-blooded killers devoted to Mother Russia, yet somehow I find myself cheering for them to succeed.
What also makes the show interesting is the creeping doubts you see in Philip about what they are fighting for, and his growing realization that living in the land of plenty isn't so bad. In the very first episode of the show, we see Philip trying on a new pair of cowboy boots and liking what he sees. In the most recent episode, he gives in to his urges and buys a Corvette. Then, after being shamed by Elizabeth for the purchase, he asks if there isn't a small part of her that likes everything they've acquired. In one of the best moments of the current season, Philip sits in cowed silence as the defector he's helping to send back to the Soviet Union calls him a monster and begs to stay in America. Philip clearly has his doubts. Meanwhile, Elizabeth remains devoted to the cause. In an era where there are still too few strong female characters on TV, she's one tough mofo. (And totally hot, to boot. But I digress).
While I can't say the show evokes any Cold War nostalgia for me, I can't help but wonder if Vladimir Putin has been watching it and getting a little misty-eyed. Even if captures an era in which the Soviets were deeply paranoid, it also harkens back to a time when the Russians were a force to be reckoned with, and there was a deep belief in what they stood for (well, at least among KGB sleeper agents). Elizabeth is a true believer deeply committed to the struggle of the workers against the injustices of Capitalism. Despite her fears for her children (yes, Sting, apparently the Russians do love their children, too) and some growing unease with the amount of killing she has to do, she wants nothing more than to destroy the American imperialists.
As events unfold in Ukraine, it's clear that anti-U.S. and anti-Western rhetoric is among the tactics being used by Putin to fan the flames among ethnic Russians living in eastern part of the country. Maybe it's easier to play that card than it is to appeal to patriotism. It seems like it would be hard to feel patriotic toward a nation being run by oligarchs and kleptocrats. Maybe Putin thinks reviving Cold War paranoia is the way to return his country to the good old days when Russia was feared. I don't know. I'm not a foreign policy analyst, nor have I looked into Putin's soul lately.
Whatever Putin's doing, I think he could use a little help from Philip and Elizabeth. They'd take care of things, and no one would ever know.
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