Movies In History: The Americans.

The television drama The Americans is to spy thrillers what The Wild Bunch is to westerns. . . tense, morally problematic, violent and great.

For those not familiar with it, and they are apparently few, The Americans was a FX Network television series that ran from 2013 to 2018.  It's available on Amazon Prime now so that a viewer can watch the entire series, although a viewer should beware. . .it's one that a person will almost certainly binge watch.

The series follows two Soviet sleeper agents, "Philip and Elizabeth Jennings", inserted into the United States in the late 1960s, during the 1980s.  At this time the couple is well established as Washington D. C. suburbanites, posing as the husband and wife owner of a D. C. travel agency.  They have two children, Henry and Paige, with Paige being the older child of the two.  When the series starts off, neither of the children have any idea that their parents are Soviet spies, or that they're their parents are Russians.  In the first episode Stan Beeman, an FBI agent in counterintelligence, moves in by happenstance across the street.  All four characters appear in all 75 episodes of the series as their tale plays out.

Now, almost any review of this series, nearly all of which, if not all of which, are positive contain massive plot spoilers.  I'm going to do that as well, but only after a sharp line below so you can tell where the plot spoilers start.  As our focus is generally on the historical nature, and its accuracy, of a cinematic or television portrayal, we'll start with that first.

The Jennings, their pseudonym for their cover, are of course the main focus, along with the story of Stan Beeman, who works in counterintelligence and who unknowingly moves in across the street from somebody he's actually looking for.  But how accurate is this portrayal of sleeper agents?

Well, that's somewhat difficult to know because. . .well they are spies. And I don't myself know a lot about late Cold War Soviet spies. What I can say is that the series is extremely violent and fairly graphic in other ways and that it accordingly exaggerates.

The sleeper agents in this series are shown to get involved in situations that often result in bloody killings. And as part of their covers they routinely engage in sexual relationships with unknowing Americans who become attached to what they think is a single interested party.  Moreover, at the start of the series the Elizabeth character is shown to be not only a dedicated Communist but to have pretty much completely suspended her morality in service of the cause.  How accurate it that?

Well, it's all clearly exaggerated, in part because most "sleeper agents" were just that, dormant.  But based on what we do know about Soviet spies, or perhaps what I should say is what I know, its exaggerated but not completely fictionalized.

My knowledge of Soviet spies mostly comes from a series of books that deal with them in the pre World War Two era, the World War Two era, and the immediate post World War Two era.  And in that era the Soviets were in fact really good at both getting spies into foreign countries and giving them pretty good cover. Some did run businesses, sometimes with great success in fact.  Their personal conduct in fact was often shockingly libertine.   And they could be lethal, although not at the rivers of blood level that's depicted in the series.  So, in terms of their general depiction, its exaggerated, but now wholly made up.

And we do know that the Russians in fact inserted couples into the United States, their cover thereby being better than singles who might be suspect. And we also know that at least in the case of post Soviet Russia, the children of sleeper agents might in fact be wholly ignorant of their parents' secret role. 

So, the series makes drama by taking liberties, but it doesn't create the spycraft and its nature out of whole cloth.

The ending of the series is tense and incredibly enigmatic.  We're left with a massive amount hanging in the air, but artfully.  Everyone has debated the fate of the characters, seemingly, including the actors who appeared on the show who can be found in interviews to speculate on the fate of various characters, most particularly Paige, a character who was extensively developed during the series.

Usually we deal with a few things such as historiography and material history.  Generally, the show did these very well. Starting off in the Reagan era, which is in fact central to the plot, the drama did a good job of recreating the late Cold War situation and taking it forward.  In terms of material details, it also did very well getting the look and background of the early 1980s right.

A word of warning.  Just the other day we published a note on the old Hays Production Code and this show definitely violates it in spades.   While its in context, there's a massive amount of sexual conduct and nudity in this show, enough to really be problematic.  It doesn't wreck the show, in my opinion, for a conscientious viewer, but it does cross a certain line.