I’m going to try and write a response to each episode of
FX’s upcoming show “The Americans” starring Keri Russell. I want to challenge myself to put my
dime-store analysis of the episodes to work.
I have begun to really enjoy quite a bit of what FX puts on, including
“It’s Always Sunny,” “Archer,” “Sons of Anarchy,” and “Justified.” The former
two are the comedies, but Sons of Anarchy and Justified are the two that are
Tuesday Night dramatic showcases. They
are nuanced, layered, and long-form in their storytelling. I am hoping that “The Americans” is similar
to that.
The show itself is set in the 1980s, and Keri Russell* plays the matriarch of a sleeper spy
family in the United States. It will be a Cold War espionage drama, featuring
sleeper Soviets and nostalgia from my formative years in the 1980s. Needless to
say, I’m excited. From the outset, it
appears as though Russell and her counterpart, Matthew Rhys, play (both
literally and in the storylines) a married couple with children, and that they
didn’t know one another before volunteering for the KGB and being assigned this
task. In that, it is likely a literal
marriage of necessity, and there are bound to be confusing roles and feelings.
If they play husband and wife long enough, will they begin
to feel like husband and wife? Did they
have a loved one they left behind? Is it
like “The Truman Show” where they were in relationships they abandoned? Are the children wise to their mission and heritage? Are the children American/where do their
loyalties lie?
The 1980s is the decade when the Soviet Union collapsed, so
there is a seeming shelf life to the show.
As characters grow up (there are children cast in the show) it will be
difficult to pretend like it’s all still the same year or the same few years in
the show’s timeline. I would imagine
that, if this is a wild hit, they could extend the timeline past the fall of
the USSR with a simple “We thought the KGB went away, but Vladimir Putin kept
it going in SECRET!” storyline, which, by the way, have at it writers of the
Americans who have no idea this blog exists! I release all storyline rights to
that idea. I just want points on the
back end (Points on the Back End is the name of an adult film I’ve been trying
to produce.)
I am hoping there are good elements of drama and suspense,
that the writers turn the viewing audience on its head by rooting for the
success of the main characters (after all, they are subversives working against
the United States), and that there will be passing and/or direct reference to
real life events in the 1980s that affected geopolitics.
*-Fun Fact: JJ Abrams
originally got the idea for Alias by imagining Keri Russell as a spy while he
was bored on the set of “Felicity.” I’m hoping for more suspenseful and deeply
written drama, and not action/spy/007 every week.
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