NEW YORK: The Cold War is officially over, so the concept of husband-and-wife KGB operatives killing, lying and spying in Washington — under the nose of their FBI agent neighbour — may seem a bit far-fetched.

But the arrest this week of a suspected Russian agent posing as a New York banker lends new relevance to The Americans, the critically acclaimed thriller returning to US television screens on Wednesday.

Evgeny Buryakov, 39, was captured following more than two years of FBI surveillance as he allegedly fed economic intelligence to Moscow and sought to recruit US residents as sources.

One of the central questions in The Americans — which is set in the 1980s — is whether the FBI will ever cotton onto Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys.

“It’s obviously got a relevance today in that it parallels things that we hear in the news,” said Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University. “It has all the action and intrigue of being a spy series, but at the same time, it’s a series about a marriage, about a family.”

Russell, who is dating her co-star Rhys, said the tense, slow-building FX show is really all about the characters.

“Even in the context of this spy show, it’s really just a look at a marriage,” Russell says.

Season three opens in 1982 — the year that Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev died as the Cold War appeared to be heating up.

The series focuses on the KGB’s insistence that Elizabeth and Philip start grooming their 14-year-old daughter Paige to spy for Moscow and the arguments which that order provokes between the couple.

The relationship between the two — whose marriage was arranged at the start for the KGB’s purposes — is constantly tested by the demands of their job and the love affairs they maintain with a tangled web of informants.

To make matters worse, the family lives in the Washington suburbs next door to FBI Agent Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), whose own liaison with a KGB double-agent unravelled at the end of last season.

Russians mad about stereotypes

War in Syria and the crisis in Ukraine have recently plunged US-Russian ties back to the froideur of the Cold War, but Russia has for decades offered fertile ground to American television writers.

Next month, NBC is to premiere Allegiance, adapted from an Israeli series, about a CIA analyst poised to discover that his parents and sister were part of a Soviet sleeper cell.

Moscow has long been the go-to enemy in American popular culture, and Russians complain they are too frequently stereotyped as untrustworthy alcoholics involved in nefarious politics.

“Everything that contradicts these stereotypes is excluded from conversation,” said Dmitri Glinski, president of the Russian-speaking Community Council of Manhattan and the Bronx. “I do think that stereotyping, reinforced by the policies of the present Russian government and the state of US-Russian relations, hurts the Russian immigrant community in a very major way — and worst of all those who do not conform to stereotypes.”

But critics say the Cold War backdrop to The Americans is indispensable even if, at its core, it is a show about family.

“The super structure of the Cold War told through Russian spies on American soil is genius,” said Tom Nunan of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.

“It goes to two fundamental things about suburbia that I think really elevates the show to a completely different level, which is ‘do I really know who my neighbour is’ and more importantly, ‘do I really know who my spouse is’.”

While the show is a critical hit, twice winning the American Film Institute award for TV programme of the year, its estimated weekly viewership of one to two million falls far short of the numbers registered by top network shows.

“Patience is a real virtue when it comes to watching The Americans, a show that seems to move fast but is in fact excruciatingly deliberate,” wrote a Washington Post reviewer. “Some dissatisfied readers have told me they find the show too cold to the touch and bereft of any hope.”

But fans sometimes find themselves rooting for the anti-heroes — a concept firmly entrenched in the US television landscape since HBO introduced the world to Tony Soprano in the late 1990s. “Most of us feel we have enormous character defects and seeing them played out through these crazy concepts and crazy roles is reassuring in some way,” said Nunan. “If you see Superman conquering everyone, how relatable is that?”—AFP

Published in Dawn, January 29th, 2015

On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play