Hans plays with Lotte, Lotte plays with Jane
Jane plays with Willi, Willi is happy again
Suki plays with Leo, Sacha plays with Britt
Adolf builds a bonfire, Enrico plays with it…
—Peter Gabriel, “Games without Frontiers”
Phil and Elizabeth Jennings are not what they seem. Suburbanites, travel agents, good neighbors, parents of two, this happy couple is hiding a secret. Their marriage is a sham. Phil is sleeping around; so is Elizabeth. They’re drifting apart.
Oh, and did I mention that they’re Russian spies?
Welcome to the world of The Americans.
The year is 1981—the start of the Reagan era, the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Phil and Elizabeth live in the D.C. area, in deep cover behind enemy lines. They were trained in Russia, but they’ve lived in America so long that they never mention their old names or speak a word of Russian, not even when they’re alone, speaking to each other in hushed tones in the laundry room. They’re so embedded in the American lifestyle that they may as well be Americans. In fact, as the show opens, Phil (Matthew Rhys) is considering defecting to the U.S. But Elizabeth (Keri Russell) disagrees; she’s a true believer, loyal to the motherland and to communism.
An additional source of conflict comes in the form of new neighbors: Stan and Sandra Beeman, who’ve just moved in across the street. When the Jennings welcome the new family with a tray of homemade brownies, they discover that Stan is an FBI agent—working in counterintelligence.
“Counterintelligence, that’s against spies, isn’t it?”
What follows is an intricate game of spycraft, leaping back and forth between the Jennings’ home, the FBI office where Stan works, the Russian embassy (a base for diplomacy and espionage in equal measure), and the dark alleys, remote dropsites, and stark safehouses where spies both American and Russian conduct their shady business. Shaken by Reagan’s escalation of tensions with the Soviets, Phil and Elizabeth are forced by their handlers to take ever greater risks in their pursuit of secrets about the president’s new missile defense program. Meanwhile, Stan has an asset of his own in the Russian rezidentura, a mole who brings him ever closer to uncovering his neighbors’ secret identities. The Americans is among the most densely plotted shows I’ve ever seen, with more betrayals, reversals, and fakeouts in the show’s first season (which is free on Amazon Prime) than some series’ see in their entire run. And the second season—currently airing on FX—is even better.
But like The Sopranos before it, the show’s greatest strength is in deftly combining these riveting genre plots with domestic drama and incisive social commentary. It’s often said that The Americans is a show about marriage dressed up as a spy drama—which is almost right, but not quite. Showrunner Joe Weisberg handles the spies-in-suburbia premise seriously, just as David Chase did The Sopranos’ mobster-in-therapy setup. As a result, it’s often hard to tell whether the spy stuff on The Americans is meant to foreground the family stuff and the 1980s Americana stuff, or the other way around.
Ultimately, it’s both, the personal and the political blending together until one seems to be an aspect of the other. The spy game Elizabeth, Phil, and Stan are enmeshed in is one played with human lives and personal allegiances, and its tools are intimacy, identity, subjectivity, manipulation, and, very often, sex. If that resonates with the games sometimes played by people who’ve been in long-term relationships, it’s not because one is an elaborate allegory for the other—it’s because, for these three people, the spy game and the marriage game are the same game.
The Jennings’ marriage is an odd one indeed. Their relationship is basically cover, as are their children, born in America with no knowledge of their parents’ true allegiances. But they’ve been playing at a fake marriage for so long that they may be starting to believe it’s real—and in fact, one of the tantalizing questions The Americans poses is the extent to which a false identity can become real. At what point does a performance become so enveloping that even the pretender is fooled? The theme is embodied visually in the many wigs the Jennings wear when they’re out on operations, but Phil and Elizabeth change identities in deeper ways as well. Each, for instance, has relationships outside of marriage—Phil has Martha, an asset he’s developed at the FBI who seems to be falling in love with him, and Elizabeth has Gregory, an American who shares her passion for the anti-American cause in ways Phil can’t.
Even Stan (Noah Emmerich), ostensibly a clock-punching American G-man who goes back to his family after the day is done, gets emotionally enmeshed in the spy game in ways that complicate his relationships at home. Fresh off a long and dangerous undercover assignment, he took an office job in counterintelligence so that he could reconnect with his family. But that’s not the way it’s working out. Though little is said about Stan’s time undercover, you get the sense that he’s been under so long he’s forgotten who he is and how to live a normal life. And Nina, that asset he’s developing in the Soviet embassy, is awfully pretty…
I can’t leave you without mentioning The Americans’ excellent use of 80s pop music in the soundtrack—especially Peter Gabriel’s “Games without Frontiers,” which makes an appearance in season one. The song’s lyrics portray a reality in which the geopolitical has become personal, the games nation states play manifesting themselves microcosmically in the games people play, Hans with Lotti, Lotti with Jane, Jane with Willi, and so on.
That’s the world of The Americans, and it is a world at once both strange and familiar: a world where politics is personal, and where the personal takes on the world-historical significance of the political. A world where those we know the best—our children, our parents, our neighbors, our friends—are also the ones we know the least. Where the deepest intimacy of marriage is still no match for the pockets of unreachable subjectivity that we keep hidden from each other. Where we can’t trust anyone—least of all ourselves.
It’s a knockout!
If looks could kill, they probably will
In games without frontiers,
War without tears.
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