Last fall, near the overlapping releases of two Netflix series, The Beast In Me and The Diplomat, I pulled the trigger on doing something I’d been talking about for a long time: Rewatching The Americans. Because I consider the FX spy series to be the pinnacle of 2010s television—and because it was a show that I covered extensively when it aired—I had some trepidation about returning to its world. Turns out, I had no reason to worry: The plotting of this unique, late-Cold War romance and its ebbs and flows across six seasons remains unparalleled. I’m relieved (always a relative term when applied to a drama as tense as The Americans) to report that scenes like the one where Soviet sleeper agent Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys) performs impromptu dental surgery to relieve the pain of his partner in life and espionage, Elizabeth (Keri Russell), still pack an intimate punch.
Despite expressing so much in so few words across so much of the show, Rhys and Russell went unrecognized by the Emmys until season four—but from that point on, they became mainstays in the drama acting categories, with Rhys winning for the final season. Russell has been in the running for every season of The Diplomat to date; this year, for the first time since 2018, the real-life couple are both Emmy nominees, with Rhys up for his turns in The Beast In Me and the Apple TV horror-comedy Widow’s Bay. With its stars finally receiving the credit and attention they’d long deserved, and newer series Star City and The Agency picking up the threads the Jennings previously unspooled, it’s undeniable: We’re finally feeling The Americans’ influence, within the genre of cloak-and-dagger TV and without.
For nearly as long as there’s been TV, there have been spies on TV—the gadget-heavy, James Bond-inspired likes of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. of the 1960s giving way to Reagan-era action heroes of MacGyver and Airwolf and, eventually, the era of heavy surveillance on 24 and Homeland. Duty to country is baked into the premises of these shows, but there are plenty of reasons to stray—the heart, for instance, can be a powerful vulnerability. Elizabeth and Philip’s own fake-turned-real marriage—the true core of The Americans, as showrunners Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg have always been quick to emphasize—was harder to crack. Their ideological differences caused friction, but ultimately, they were on the same page: A commitment to their kids, each other, and then, as time between hockey practice and EST meetings allowed, bringing down the American empire from within. In and out of disguise, Philip and Elizabeth discussed their domestic life, be it low-stakes observations about their teenage son wearing disgusting-smelling cologne or Elizabeth having a rare, vulnerable moment while dressed as Philip’s sister—or rather, the sister of Philip’s alias Clark.
The Americans was never the most popular show on cable; Apple TV’s Star City and the most recent season of Paramount+’s The Agency are bonded by a Jennings-like ability to fly under the radar of the average TV viewer. Part of this, I think, is a matter of timing and an oversaturated streaming market. Neither has the feel of a summer show; the chilly atmosphere in each is better suited to the cooler months. Star City also had the semi-misfortune of debuting immediately after the patchy fifth season of its parent program, For All Mankind—though the spinoff is so different in tone that such proximity hardly seemed necessary. Set in the same alternate history where the USSR landed on the moon before the United States, Star City tells its story entirely from the cosmonauts’ perspective. Along with this shift comes Soviet characters who now speak English in British accents; dasvidaniya to the many Russian-speaking Americans alums like Costa Ronin, Lev Gorn, and Svetlana Efremova who picked up roles on For All Mankind, hello to Agnes O’Casey, who plays a younger version of Efremova’s character, high-ranking official Irina Morozova, on Star City.
But even with that creative decision, the atmosphere of paranoia and clandestine activity still make Star City a natural successor to The Americans. And that’s before you get to the arranged marriage between two cosmonauts and the softening that transpires within. When Sasha Polivanov (Solly McLeod) learns he has to marry Anastasia Belikova (Alice Englert), his immediate response is that his wife-to-be is an automaton. Sasha has puppy-dog energy and is liked by all; Stasia is standoffish. Sound familiar, Americans fans? But Sasha also still has plenty to prove, and Stasia must demonstrate she is an asset in her role as the first woman on the moon. She can’t be an example of Soviet womanhood if she’s single, and this public display is pure propaganda.
How this transpires over the first season and the lengths Sasha and Stasia go to save each other contain more than a few pages from Philip and Elizabeth’s playbook. Making their first public appearance as a couple during a visit to Paris, the cosmonauts ditch their official duties to dance the night away at a local nightclub. Sasha offers Stasia a temporary escape, even though they don’t realize they’re still under the KGB’s watchful eye. Stolen martinis, a disco ball, French pop, and sweaty intimacy (as well as McLeod and Englert’s chemistry) are a perfect icebreaker. Neither The Americans nor Star City was the first TV show to generate dramatic heat from an opposites-attract couple thrown into perilous situations, but that doesn’t prevent both from being prime examples of how to get viewers invested in that type of setup. Stasia and Sasha’s differing temperaments and how Sasha breaks down Stasia’s walls (and carefully guarded heart) had me rooting for them from the jump; I’m holding my breath to find out what happens to them in the wake of Stasia putting her career and body on the line to save Sasha at the end of season one.
The Agency is also dealing with Russia, or rather, mercenaries who work in and outside the former USSR. The Paramount+ series owes much of its depiction of intelligence bureaucracy and double-crossing to John le Carré, but there’s a trace of Philip Jennings in its story of a CIA operative (Michael Fassbender) falling head over heels on a work assignment while pretending to be someone else. Sudanese professor Dr. Samia Zahir (Jodie Turner-Smith) is in the dark until the show’s first season finale, in which Fassbender’s character—who mostly goes by his codename, Martian—reveals he’s not the academic Samia thinks he is. Disclosing his real identity is a risky move that fails when Samia refuses to betray her country. Trust is impossible to come by when an entire relationship is built on a lie—just ask poor Martha Hanson.
Showing his true self in the name of love is the start of a slippery slope that sees Martian getting into bed with British intelligence in a bid to secure Samia’s release after she’s taken into custody by Sudanese authorities in season two. This isn’t a byproduct of the “special relationship” between the U.S. and the U.K.—it’s an act of unsanctioned information sharing that puts Martian in violation of every conceivable code of conduct and amounts to no less than treason. But the smug MI6 operative who forces him into playing double agent in CIA’s London field office knows that the heart is more powerful than patriotic duty, and as long as he’s the one holding onto Martian’s secret, he’s going to squeeze our hero into increasingly difficult positions. Even when The Agency cranks up a gear when some within the CIA start to suspect Martian, the show retains its Fields-and-Weisberg-esque commitment to the tension that’s actually driving the story: Martian continues to work every single available angle to do his job and save the woman he loves.
Martian, Sasha, Stasia, Elizabeth, and Philip all learn that in an environment where the personal and professional are intertwined, there is no such thing as a work-life balance. Place that tangle of motivations and loyalties against the backdrop of international espionage, and you’ve got a surefire way to keep the intrigue and the stakes high. Following such a blueprint enabled The Americans to spend six seasons unpacking what happens when you catch real feelings in a fake relationship to great effect, and now Star City and The Agency are benefiting from its example. Because who needs gadgets to add excitement when the most compelling asset—and foil—is the heart?
The Americans never had the culture-penetrating success of a Breaking Bad, Mad Men, or Game Of Thrones. It notched some major Emmy wins for its final season—Fields and Weisberg also picked up a trophy that year, for their finale script—but it was always more of a critical darling than an awards juggernaut. I still find it galling that Rhys and Russell didn’t go home with his-and-hers trophies in 2018, considering how integral their onscreen partnership was to the show’s effectiveness. Yet, as its stars’ new series inspire more people to catch up with the show after the fact, and Star City and The Agency echo its use of covert operations to explore the human condition, the mark The Americans left on the television landscape is unmistakable.
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