5 Reasons You Should Be Watching The Americans on FX

Last week, FX – home to UnderScoopFire favorites such as Justified, Louie, The League and Archer – premiered a new drama series in the time slot abdicated by American Horror Story.

Set in the early 1980s, The Americans follows the everyday ordeals of a married couple trying to raise their children (while working as KGB spies, of course).

Here’s why you should give it a try:

1. Soviets as the good guys
Outside of The Motherland, how often do you get to see Soviets as the protagonists of the story? Phil and Elizabeth Jennings (played by Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell) have been trained for years to blend in among Americans. Sent on their mission in the late 1960s, they spent almost two decades building a cover as a quiet suburban family.

Phil is now seriously tempted to turn himself over to the FBI (in exchange for a cushy deal) while Elizabeth – a true believer in the cause – still worries about the future of their children. The Jennings’ are forced to juggle their family, their personal values and their commitment to Mother Russia while trying to avoid death or capture by American authorities. This all gives these characters some intriguing complexity.

2. Seeing Felicity kick ass 

Legend goes that JJ Abrams, while working on Felicity (where Keri Russell played the titular character) found himself musing about what Felicity actually does most of her days. Thus Alias was born, with Jennifer Garner playing Sydney Bristow as both the action hero and the cute college student.

We’ve come a full circle now:  in The Americans, Felicity plays a mother, a honeypot (Google it up, guys) and a badass martial artist. Russell’s Elizabeth is so intense and pragmatic she makes her husband look like a sentimental sap in comparison.

3. It’s the Eighties! Do a lot of coke and vote for Ronald Reagan!

I hope we can all agree that the 1980s were formative times for fashion, music and pop culture in general. It will be quite entertaining to watch the Jennings family react and adapt to the growing gaudiness and jingoism of Ronald Reagan’s America.

4. “640K ought to be enough for anybody.”

OK, so Bill Gates apparently never said that; but the quote does bring back memories of the time when TV screens were small, mobile phones were non-existent, and VHS recorders seemed like the wave of the future.

With The Americans being a spy series, that means we’ll get to see a lot of laughably bulky spy electronics of yesteryear – like tape recorders small enough to fit in a very, very large pocket.

5. All joking aside, it’s actually good

The Americans features an interesting subversion of traditional spy television shows by making its protagonists “them” instead of “us”. It also presents these characters as morally ambiguous people who fight for a totalitarian regime and yet have doubts about the damage they cause to others.

There are some great actors on the show – I haven’t even mentioned Noah Emmerich as FBI Agent Stan Beeman – and tense storytelling. The pilot, for example, opens with a spectacular scene of a kidnapping gone wrong while an epic rendition of Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk” plays in the background. Even if the rest of the pilot sucked – and I assure you, it didn’t – this scene alone would make it worth watching.

FX is coming off of the highest-rated month in its 18-year history. The Americans can be seen Wednesday nights at 10PM.

Danijel Štriga (@Glupinickname) is a sleeper agent from behind the Iron Curtain. When he’s not watching TV or playing computer games, he enjoys discussing movies and playing P&P RPGs.