Now in its third season, the FX series The Americans is about two KGB spies posing as Americans. This suspenseful series continues to astound audiences and critics, but, like many shows, is deprived of any recognition from award shows. For example, this article could discuss the themes the show brings up and how the two main characters, Philip and Elizabeth, develop.
As a baby boomer who lived through the Cold War and entered true adulthood complete with a real job, a mortgage, and children in the early 1980’s, “The Americans” draws me like an ant to an open sugar bowl. The double lives, led by main characters, Elizabeth and Peter Jennings, as deep cover KGB agents embedded in a Washington DC suburb on one hand and as middle class suburbanites on the other, makes for deeply disturbing and yet compelling drama.
The point of view of the two Russians with deeply indoctrinated beliefs in the communist system is new and foreign to me. While Phillip is seeing the positive side of the U.S., he still doesn’t let go of his core loyalty to his Russian ideals, regardless of his new awareness of the weaknesses of those ideals. Elizabeth is more strongly dedicated to their mission and unwavering in her distrust of the American system and the threat it poses to her beloved homeland, a hatred and fear instilled in her from birth.
My strongest take-away from the first three seasons of “The Americans” is a refreshing realization that citizens from other countries, including Soviet Russia, love their own country and its culture as much as we Americans love ours. And I am quite happy to live in a country where that fact can be explored as deeply as it is in this brilliant series.
– JanJolly8 years ago