COMMIE CHAMELEON: Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys star in the itchy new spy series, “The Americans,” starting this week on FX. (
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In FX’s “The Americans,” it’s 1981 in leafy Bethesda, Md., and the nice all-American neighbors (Keri Russell, Matthew Rhys) are Russian superspies.
It sounds like a sitcom: “Commie, I’m Home!” And giggles may result if you pay attention to the most dramatic moments.
Comrades Elizabeth (Russell) and Phillip (Rhys) speak perfect, American-accented English, having trained for this mission for years before moving to the US permanently in 1965. (A nice touch, observed in flashback: Elizabeth has never seen an air conditioner before, and the pair realize they have a lot of work to do.)
They have children, who don’t know their parents are Russians, though Mom is always offering pro-USSR takes on the children’s homework.
“The moon isn’t everything,” she tells her boy with a touch of sour grapes. “Just getting into space is a remarkable accomplishment.” Bethesda parents seeing things from a Soviet point of view? Absolutely perfect cover.
So if Rhys and Russell are Boris and Natasha, who is Bullwinkle? Cue Noah Emmerich, the lumbering doofus whose seedy-Opie face has livened up the background of many a film. Out of sheer television coincidence, new next-door neighbor Stan (Emmerich) is the FBI’s hottest man in counterintelligence.
Stan already knows that a 1977 Oldsmobile was used in the abduction of a turncoat KGB man last night. When he innocently asks Phillip for jumper cables, Phillip doesn’t say, “Wait here, I’ll be back in a moment.” Instead he leads Stan into the garage and casually pops open the trunk of a ‘77 Olds, which contains exactly one bound-and-gagged KGB officer.
Does the KGB man, hearing a second voice, thrash around and make noise? Does Stan get over to the trunk before it closes to take a peek? Does Phillip realize he’s the clumsiest spy on earth? No. The scene just ends, stupidity dressed up as suspense.
By the way, the KGB official seems to spend a couple of days in that trunk: Wouldn’t there be bodily-emissions smells?
So you may need to put aside any prejudice you may have that “Cold War thriller” means intelligence going into the script instead of merely as a profession of the characters. This isn’t “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” more like an agreeably silly cat-and-mouser with dead-on music cues.
An early chase scored to Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk” is painstaking and gripping, and the mood is set immediately in the pilot with Quarterflash’s “Harden My Heart” in a singles bar where Elizabeth proves able to seduce a State Department dork in case he might, in passion’s throes, be enticed to say, “This weekend I am giving $100,000 cash to a KGB detector,” which, of course, he does.
Created by an ex-CIA officer, “The Americans” at the moment seems to fall uneasily between the methodical and the campy.
Maybe the thing to do is to go for pure, glorious shlock value: a little “Red Dawn” on the Potamac?