The Americans Premiered Eight Years Ago Today

On January 30th, 2013, FX premiered the first episode of The Americans, an intense spy thriller which ran for six seasons and racked up 18 Emmy nominations, 4 Emmy wins, and even 2 Peabody Awards, a rarity for a scripted series. 

Set in 1981, the show starred Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell as Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, a married couple with two children running a travel agency in a suburb of Washington D.C, in the midst of the Cold War. However, they are hiding the secret that they are actually Mischa and Nadezdha, deep cover KGB spies who have been working the D.C. area for 15 years. Even their American-born children Paige (Holly Taylor) and Henry (Keidrich Sellati) are unaware of it.

In this clip from that very first episode, they've learned that their new next-door neighbor is FBI Agent Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), which is troubling since they currently have a Soviet defector/American asset bound and gagged in the trunk of their car. That leads to their first conversation about the possibility of defecting the U.S. themselves. The idea does not go over well with Elizabeth.

The Americans was created by Joe Weisberg, a former CIA officer,whose inspiration came from the Illegals Program, which saw ten real-life Russian sleeper agents arrested back in 2010. During his time in the CIA, he was struck by how much of a foreign agent's job is actually just living a normal life. According to Weisberg, the core of the show, despite all the dangerous international intrigue and suspense about how long they can keep their cover story intact, is the marriage of Elizabeth and Philip, and how they relate to each other as much as they relate to their work and their surroundings.

When the show began, we were not far removed from the 2012 presidential election, when people laughed at Mitt Romney for suggesting that Russia was our most dangerous enemy. By the time the show ended in 2018, things had changed dramatically after Russia's interference in the 2016 election in favor of the president who was disturbingly deferential to Vladimir Putin. This added relevance made the final seasons that much more intense, even though Weisberg and his writing team resisted the temptation to sneak in commentary about then-current events.

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Andy Hunsaker has a head full of sitcom gags and nerd-genre lore, and can be followed @AndyHunsaker if you're into that sort of thing.